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Are you struggling to understand why your website visitors are not becoming buyers? Are you losing potential customers without even knowing what’s holding them back? Is your conversion rate dropping?
The answer lies in conversion analysis. By analyzing your website's data, you can gain valuable insights into your users' behavior and identify areas for improvement. But where do you start, and how do you go about it?
In this article, we'll show you ways to use conversion analysis on your website step-by-step. So you don't let potential revenue slip through your fingers.
Let’s discover the power of conversion analysis and take your website to the next level.
What is conversion analysis?
Put simply; conversion analysis is measuring and analyzing user data from your website and app to see which users will convert and which won’t. It is a key performance indicator (KPI) that helps businesses identify areas of improvement and make data-driven decisions to improve overall business growth.
The desired actions, also known as conversions, can be anything depending on the nature of your business and its goals.
The following conversions are typically tracked:
- Making a purchase
- Filling a form
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Clicking a specific button
- Sharing content on social media
- Creating an account
The purpose of conversion analysis is to identify the factors that impact the conversion rate and to optimize it for better performance. These factors can be anything from site web speed, web content, content marketing, or links. The product team and marketers can identify the most effective channels, messaging, and offers that drive conversion by analyzing conversion data.
What’s the importance of conversion analysis?
Conversion analysis helps teams with the following;
- Identifying the strategies that are working.
- Identifying the techniques that are not working and need improvement.
- Identify the techniques that are not working and need to be completely discarded.
This data-based analysis will help you to stop relying on your instincts and personal guesses and base your decisions on the facts derived from customer data. Conversion analysis impacts the various stages of the conversion funnel.
For example, if a business's conversion funnel includes a product page, shopping cart page, and checkout page, conversion analysis can reveal which stage has the lowest conversion rate. If the shopping cart page has a low conversion rate, the business can analyze why this is happening and make improvements, such as simplifying the checkout process or adding trust signals.
By continually analyzing and optimizing each conversion funnel stage, businesses can boost conversions and ultimately drive more revenue.
How to run conversion analysis on your website
The overall conversion analysis process is the same whether you perform it on an eCommerce site, blog, or B2B product website.
Let’s review the steps of conducting a conversion analysis on your website.
1. Define business goals
A successful conversion analysis starts with the right business goals. Goals are essential to measure the process's efficiency and help you navigate what direction you need to take depending on the set goal. A few examples include the following:
- Increased website traffic - A business may want to optimize its website to increase traffic.
- Increase sales revenue - A business can be interested in increasing the sales generated from a website.
- Decrease bounce rate - A business might be interested in decreasing the number of users leaving the site without taking action.
- Increase engagement - A business may want to increase the time spent on the site or the number of pages viewed by the visitors.
2. Define Conversion events
A conversion event can mean any specific action on a website or app that represents a successful outcome for the business. Events are critical because if you set your analytics tool to track the conversion events that do not reflect your business goals, the entire effort would be wasted as the data would be bogus. Below are some tips for defining conversion events:
- Before defining conversion events, develop a clear understanding of your business goals. What actions do you want users to take on your website or app that would contribute to achieving those goals?
- After identifying your business goals, map out the user journey on your website or app. It involves specifying the different touchpoints and actions users take to achieve those goals.
- Based on the buyer's journey, identify potential conversion events that represent successful outcomes for your business.
- Set up tracking using a web analytics tool like Usermaven that offers advanced event tracking.
3. Get your data from Usermaven
An analytics tool that allows you to leverage your data and complement marketing efforts without requiring technical expertise and data engineering. Therefore, choosing the right tool that meets your business’s needs is important. Usermaven is one such tool that offers website analytics and conversion analysis.
3.1 Auto-capture event tracking with Usermaven
Usermaven offers an event auto-capture feature without code. You can set up event tracking and goal conversions in a quick 5-minute setup, and every button clicks, form submission, and page visit can be automatically tracked.
If any changes are made to the website design, retroactive data tracking can be used to analyze insights from previous data. And if your website is updated, auto event capturing does not require you to modify the tracking code for each event.
Usermaven automatically captures various actions performed on the website. Still, you can also set up custom events or pinned events for certain CTAs.
3.2 Try out different events and CTAs
You’ve defined your conversion events, it's now time to track those. While Usermaven auto-captures recurring events, it is still recommended to analyze all events and test out different CTAs to see which one gets the most hits.
It is very possible that some CTAs you are not even considering as conversion events might appear more appealing to your website visitors. A/B test different CTAs on your service and, especially, your blog pages.
With its easy-to-navigate and visual dashboard, it is very easy for data teams to actually “see” where their data sources are coming from. Visualization of data in graphs, tabular forms, and percentage really take away the stress from the data teams.
4. Visualize your conversion analysis report
We’ve defined our business goals, identified our conversion factors, and collected the data of website visitors to see which CTAs are working. What now? How do we deal with all of this data?
An essential element of conversion analysis is visualization. Visualizations help you better communicate results to stakeholders, and they help everyone on the team understand the impact of their efforts. Lastly, data visualizations lead to efficient decision-making.
5. Test, improve, repeat
The final stage of conversion analysis is testing its findings. It's time to implement the improvements to your website and conversion funnel. Various conversion rate optimization techniques, such as A/B testing, are used to test the changes and determine the most effective optimization strategy for increasing conversions.
Moreover, iterative testing involves creating multiple variations of a website component (test element) and determining its effectiveness in driving conversions against a control group. So instead of shooting in the dark, you test your hypothesis and validate assumptions to avoid wasting resources.
Conversion analysis process is continuous, and it's crucial to continuously monitor and refine your strategies to ensure you are achieving your conversion goals. Regularly review your data, test new strategies, and adjust as needed to improve your website's performance. By continually testing different variations of website elements, such as calls-to-action, landing page conversions, and ad copy, businesses can gain valuable insights, positively impacting the bottom line.
What are the benefits of conversion analysis?
Let’s look at how conversion analysis benefits a business
A better understanding of customers
One primary benefit of conversion analysis is getting to know your customers better; as meeting their needs is paramount.
Conversion analysis allows you to paint a complete picture of how individuals interact with your website so you can avoid the guesswork. You can find out the pages they visit, how long they stay on the site, where they drop off in the funnel, what product they purchase, and what feature they use most frequently.
By discovering customers’ preferences, you can improve their customer experience. By identifying where customers are dropping off in the funnel or encountering issues, businesses can adjust the user experience to make it more seamless and effective. You can visualize the drop-off rate and conversion rate of your funnels with Usermaven.
Decreased acquisition costs
One of the goals of conversion analysis is to optimize your website experience so that visitors can find what they are looking for easily and convert frictionlessly. It guides investment decisions by identifying high-converting channels and optimization efforts. With an improved customer experience (CX), you can turn more visitors into customers with the same effort, decreasing acquisition costs.
Conversion analysis can help identify which landing pages are performing well and which are not. By optimizing poorly performing pages and bounce rates, businesses can improve their conversion rates and reduce the cost per acquisition. Businesses can make changes to reduce bounce rates after identifying why visitors leave, which ultimately leads to lower acquisition costs.
You can track user sessions to find out what features provide value by being used by the visitors most. Reading these session recordings can help you identify impactful features, so either you can eliminate the ones not working or make adjustments to them to deliver value to customers.
Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer-centric conversion optimization helps identify areas of the customer journey where customers are dropping off or experiencing difficulties. Businesses can make targeted improvements to increase conversion likelihood and overall customer satisfaction.
You can analyze different customer segments and related conversion rates and better target your marketing efforts to drive them toward the end of the conversion funnel. You can also tailor your customer experience across segments by offering special discounts or trials to churn away customers. Such efforts lead to increased customer loyalty and retention.
Improved product experience (PX)
When optimizing conversion, you also end up polishing your product experience. It presents your business as customer-oriented, building trust and brand reputation. Creating loyalty and returning customers takes more than a good product. Your product experience covers many aspects related to how a customer finds value in using your product.
By helping your customer achieve their intended goal with your product in a personalized manner, you make them choose your business amongst various options and stick with you longer as you continue to deliver what they need.
Conversion analysis is one of the most effective ways for businesses to analyze where they stand in the market. Companies can see how their marketing, content, and outreach efforts are performing and how to optimize them if necessary. Conversion analysis paired with market forecasting can massively impact your business.
FAQs for Conversion Analysis
What is the difference between conversion and conversion rate?
Although related, conversion and conversion rate are two different metrics used in digital marketing. Conversions are the specific actions or desired goals that you want your website or app visitors to perform on your website or app, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter.
While conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete the conversions, i.e., desired actions or goals, you can measure it by dividing the number of conversions by the number of total users and multiplying it by 100.
In short, conversion is the action, while the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take that action.
What's considered a good conversion rate?
A good conversion rate varies depending on the industry, product, or service offered and the conversion type being measured. Generally, a 2 - 5 % conversion rate is considered good across different industries such as eCommerce, B2B, finance, etc. And 10% or above is an excellent conversion rate across different industries.
However, some industries have typically low conversion rates, such as eCommerce, while others have higher conversion rates, like finance. To see if your business has a good conversion rate, compare yourself with the average conversion rates of your industry to get a clear picture rather than the average conversion rate across all industries.
How do you analyze conversion rates?
Go through the following steps to analyze your conversion rate.
- Define your goal: Identify the specific action you want your visitors to take on your website.
- Set up tracking: Use an analytics platform such as Usermaven to track the visitors that complete the desired conversion.
- Calculate the conversion rate: Divide the number of goal completions by the total number of website visitors during the same period.
- Analyze the conversion data: Identify any trends and patterns in your conversion data over time or across different segments of your visitors.
- Identify areas for improvement: Draw actionable insights from analyzing the conversion data. It may involve changes to your website's design, layout, content, or user experience.
- Test and iterate: Optimize your website based on the insights obtained in the previous step. Implement the changes and track their impact on your conversion rate. Continue to iterate to refine your website and improve your conversion rate.
