What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Getting traffic to your shop is not easy.
If it were easy, everyone would be a success!
So the last thing you want is to waste time, effort or money on something that’s not giving you a return – and not even realize it!
That’s why we measure and monitor things like Conversation Rate, Cost per Acquisition and Profit. In fact, we want to optimize our marketing and our shop for these kinds of revenue-based numbers by doing Conversion Rate Optimization.
Optimization is the process of making something less wasteful while also providing better results.
Instead of buying more and more ads, we optimize our shop to convert more of our visitors.
More revenue for the same ad spend.
Instead of pinning 100s of times a day, we optimize our pins to appeal to our target audience and get more clicks per pin.
The same traffic from Pinterest with much less effort.
I follow all the experts. Is my shop already optimized?
There’s a lot of great advice out there.
There’s also a lot of “just OK” advice that works for some people, but doesn’t work for a whole lot of others.
Some of it is “best practice”.
Some is “throw it at a wall and see what sticks” practice.
Step one is to follow advice you trust, about building sustainable, targeted traffic and a shop that encourages people to buy.
Follow those best practices.
Step two is to make it work the best for you. This is where optimization comes in!
Optimization is about testing – again & again – and figuring out what works for YOU: your shop, your product, your audience.
Some “best practices” will fall by the wayside.
Some of those random tips will turn out to be gold.
And your shop will be even better!
But there’s a catch…
Why you need to do Traffic Optimization first
The idea of Conversion Rate optimization is amazing… make a few tweaks to a product description, a menu, photos or page layout and see the money roll in? Sign me up!
But what if your visitors just aren’t interested?
What if your marketing techniques are unsustainable and expensive?
What if you have so little traffic you can’t pinpoint the results of your efforts even if they’re working?
Is there any point having an optimized shop if your traffic has major issues?
Before you can optimize your shop’s conversion rate, you need to be getting a certain amount of raw traffic to make your conversion optimization process worthwhile. Until you hit this threshold, you can’t trust averages like Conversion Rate or Average Transaction Value.
You certainly can’t optimize for them!
There’s also no point trying to optimize your shop if you’re getting the wrong kinds of visitors: people who are never, ever going to buy. Your changes will look like a flop, even if they’re actually working, because they’re only working for a small portion of your visitors (your target audience).
Any improvements might be undetectable.
What can go wrong with your traffic?
Not interested
If the wrong people are visiting your shop, all the conversion optimization in the world won’t make them buy from you.
You’ll get the wrong people by ranking for irrelevant keywords (sometimes accidentally!), mis-targeted ads or even just banking on the wrong customer persona.
Not ready
Before people buy, they research and compare their options. In the online world, people research more than ever!
Different products tend to have different research phases – some are longer than others. People often put a lot more thought into their wedding decor than an affordable pair of trendy earrings.
If you catch your visitors when they’re just figuring out the lay of the land, then no – they won’t buy. There’s no point optimizing for conversions when they’re not ready to convert.
Not consistent
You can’t optimize your shop for a particular type of visitor if you keep targeting different people in different stages of the buying funnel.
Not enough of it
Imagine you have a 2% conversion rate. That means you’ll make one sale for every 50 visits… on average.
That one sale isn’t guaranteed. Just like how you aren’t guaranteed to get exactly one Heads and one Tails if you flip a coin twice.
You might only get that “average result” after 500, 1000 or 5000 visits.
If you’re only getting 50 visits per day, then you simply can’t judge whether any change you make improves your “conversion rate”. At least not for a long time…
Traffic vs Conversion Rate Optimization
| Traffic optimization | Conversion Rate optimization |
|---|---|
| Higher quality visitors | Higher quality shop |
| Assumes your shop is ready to handle the intentions of your visitors: give relevant info, accept purchases, let them contact you etc. | Assumes your visitors are ready to do whatever you’re optimizing your shop to do (buy, sign up etc.) |
| Get more visits | Get more money from those visits |
| Attract visitors who are genuinely interested in your products. | Reduce friction to buying the products in your shop. |
| Attract visitors who are ready to buy today. | Let your site build urgency and give visitors reasons to buy today. |
| Use sustainable, consistent traffic-building methods and behaviours. | Use consistent, high volume traffic to accurately compare shop variations. |
| Reduce costs by attracting the same number of quality visitors for less ad spend and marketing effort. | Reduce costs by making the same $ revenue for less ad spend and marketing effort. |
| Increase revenue by increasing the number of quality visitors, at the same conversion rate. | Increase revenue by increasing conversion rate or average order value, with the same number of visitors. |
How does Traffic Optimization work?
Optimization relies on accurate testing. That means you need a certain minimum number of visitors to get reliable results.
Even if you have enough visitors “on paper”, tests could still be misleading if your visitor quality is low. If only 25% of your visitors fall within your real target audience, you’re effectively testing a quarter of your apparent traffic numbers! Any improvements will be four times harder to see and to get “significant” test results.
Traffic optimization addresses these problems first.
A Traffic Optimization plan will:
- Make your marketing more streamlined and sustainable.
- Build traffic volume from the highest quality sources.
- Measure and improve how relevant your shop is to your visitors.
- Improve how they engage with your shop.
Optimize the marketing channels and tactics you use
Decide on your Priority Marketing Sources that:
- Are sustainable, efficient, enjoyable and affordable
- Reach a high quality audience
- Reach a large enough audience compared to the effort involved
Get more visitors overall
One of your main traffic optimization goals is to increase your raw traffic volume, so that you’re getting enough visits (sessions) to conduct reliable conversion rate optimization.
Regardless of whether you actually do any conversion rate optimization, this approach should give you better results anyway. Higher raw numbers of relevant and engaged visitors will equal more sales, even if your shop is not “conversion optimized”!!
Get more relevant shop visitors
Decide on specific types of visitors who probably are or are not interested in your shop, based on the type of person they are and their buying intent (or lack of).
Eg. A shop that only ships within the United States would only be relevant to visitors where Country = United States of America.
In this part of the plan, you monitor how many of your visitors fall into your definitions of “relevant” and try to increase that percentage. You can also monitor whether some marketing sources send you more relevant traffic than others.
Get more engaged shop visitors
Engagement is based on a selection of behavior metrics that indicate interest in your shop, such as bounce rate or number of pages viewed. If you have ecommerce metrics available, then include Conversion Rate and Average Transaction Value!
In a traffic optimization plan, we monitor it to validate that the visitors we’ve defined as “relevant” are actually more interested in your shop than your average visitors.
As you move on to Conversion Rate optimization, you’ll watch the same metrics to test the results of changes to your shop.