Guaranteed Conversion: Analytics Lies That Cost You Money

If you aren’t satisfied with your current conversion data, you’re not alone. How would you feel about guaranteed conversion improvements? Well, the secret probably rests on the analytics lies you believe. Planning strategy based on these lies is costing you real dollars. Read on to learn how to get guaranteed conversion by analyzing the right things before building your strategy.

Understanding the conversion process

A big part of achieving guaranteed conversion is understanding the conversion process. As shown in the image above, conversion doesn’t happen because some money fairy dropped a sale in your lap. It happens when you successfully attract prospective buyers (consumers who have the need, authority, money, and desire to buy your product) to your website, and then ease them through the various pages using language and offers that entice them to move to the next stage of the process. As shown in the image, you lose prospective buyers at each stage of the process, leaving you with two options: attract more buyers or improve the process to keep visitors on your site.

We’re focused on a digital e-commerce conversion process, but the same thing happens in your physical store. Hence, while the same general strategies work to deliver guaranteed conversion rate improvements in your physical store, we lack the data necessary to effectively evaluate how well you’re doing. That’s why we focus on virtual spaces.

On other pages of this website, we discuss the first option in great detail. Head on over to the pages on marketing strategy to bolster your ability to attract the right visitors to your website.

The right analytics for guaranteed conversion

Too often, managers focus on the wrong metrics. Vanity metrics, including:

• Impressions
• Fans/ Followers
• Visits
• Pageviews
• App downloads
• Likes
• Email subscriber numbers

In contrast, actionable metrics provide the information you need to make informed decisions that result in higher conversion rates. If you focus on improving the wrong metrics, you’re wasting time and money while overlooking efforts focused on improving actionable metrics that deliver guaranteed conversion.

Here are some actionable metrics related to the conversion process that should be the focus of your marketing strategy:

• Funnel efficiency metrics
  • Conversion rate
  • Cart abandonment rate
  • Bounce rate versus exit rate
• Profitability metrics
  • Customer acquisition costs
  • Cost per lead
  • Return on ad spend
• User experience metrics
  • Average session duration versus time on page
  • Rage clicks, when a visitor clicks on a button or link repeatedly in a short time span
  • Page load time
• Long-term value metrics
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Lead-to-close ration
  • Churn rate

Now, let’s delve deeper into how some of these metrics impact your website’s performance, especially conversion rate.

Consumer behavior and load speed

Consumers are impatient and don’t want to wait around for your page to load. According to the infographic, 40% of visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, causing a high cart abandonment rate when it happens in the conversion process. BTW, that impatience is growing, meaning your pages must load even faster.

Google Analytics offers a tool to assess your load speed across different browsers to evaluate whether your pages take too long to load. Go to Behavior > Site Speed to see how pages load. According to sources, a 1-second delay in load time results in a 7% decline in conversion. That’s pretty serious.

But it’s not enough to evaluate performance; you need a plan to improve performance. And, the first place to start is with images, as they are big and take a long time to load. Here’s some advice from the experts:

• Use .jpg rather than png. PNG scales better, but it can take longer to load, so it’s a tradeoff. Don’t use .tif or .bmp and use .gif sparingly
• Use a plugin to compress images. I SMUSH my images, although this doesn’t work well with large images
• Reduce the size of images before uploading them, as the sizing takes some time
• Think about hosting your images on Amazon Web Services or another external site that can deliver them faster
• Specify image dimensions in your src tags. That way, the browser loads text while the images are still loading. Without dimensions, the browser must reload text around the images once they load

You have other options in addition to managing your images correctly. Probably the single biggest impact on load speed comes from your hosting choice. Better hosting = faster load times. So, balance hosting performance with cost and choose the best hosting you can afford.

Other options for improving site speed:

• Caching – which keeps the page from reloading every time by keeping a copy in the cache
• Use gzip compression to reduce size by up to 70%. Here’s a site containing the necessary code to add to your .htaccess file to implement gzip compression
• Avoid redirects
• Minify — many caching plugins also offer options to minify contents
• Remove plugins you don’t actively use
• Reduce your use of social sharing buttons
• Choose themes wisely. Many themes are inefficiently coded and, thus, slow down your site. Also, buying bad themes makes it difficult to achieve the look and feel you’re going for
• Clean your database with tools like WP-Optimize

Digital consumer behavior and funnel performance

The image above comes from Google Analytics, which depicts a typical conversion funnel. You can achieve guaranteed conversion by improving the performance along this funnel. Here are some strategies:

• Look for big drop-offs in visits between pages. A big drop in traffic indicates you should improve the page, such as creating a stronger offer, making the offer clearer, making a more compelling case for accepting the offer, or improving the page’s organization. Try A/B testing (which is easy to accomplish within Google Analytics) to see what changes produce the highest conversion rates. More on this later.
• Check how many steps it takes to convert. Try removing 1 or more steps to improve conversion. For instance, when Amazon went to one-click buying, it improved conversion dramatically. Another company saw a 33% increase in conversions [cite]
• Determine which sites send traffic that converts, not just visitors. We look at multi-channel attribution modeling as a tool to assign a value to various sites that contribute to conversion. Focus on building engagement and sharing on the platforms that perform best. You can also study the specific content that outperforms others when it comes to conversion and focus energies on creating more of this traffic.

Performance of landing pages

Landing pages are the vehicle for moving visitors through the conversion process. A good landing page contains the following:

• A single call-to-action, buttons outperform links by a wide margin
• Compelling headline
• A clear, unique selling proposition targeted at a specific persona, so your landing page is personalized
• High-quality visuals that support your claim. It helps if they resonate with your persona, such as depictions of people who look like them.
• Reviews or other endorsements to provide social proof
• Copy that focuses on the benefits for a specific persona
• Logical transition to the next step in the process
• Clean, scannable design
• Never promise anything you can’t deliver and be transparent. If there are extra fees, include them in the landing page, something Airbnb learned the hard way.

How to use metrics to produce guaranteed conversion

Obviously, nothing can produce guaranteed conversions. However, by using actionable metrics, like those mentioned above, and following this process, you come as close to achieving guaranteed conversions as possible.

1. Where does traffic drop off?

First, discover where visitors are when they leave. A high bounce rate suggests either the page loads too slowly or the visitor wasn’t taken the the right page initially (such as going to the home page when the visitor expected a landing page). Leaving during the checkout process is especially damaging to conversion. Pay careful attention to exits from anywhere in the funnel.

Check out conversion rates based on device or visitor demographics. You may not be delivering a great experience on one device or not catering to the unique needs of a specific type of visitor. Creating multiple landing pages designed for different devices or different visitors will offer guaranteed conversions.

2. Are you tracking micro-conversions?

The conversion process looks more like the image above than a linear process. The secret to guaranteed conversions is to track micro-conversions, such as newsletter sign-ups, playing a video to completion, and downloading a product guide, then funneling these into a lead nurturing program using email messages or retargeting ads to entice them to move to the next step. Since email (which produces the highest ROI of any digital marketing tactic) and retargeting ads (which represent a 30-50% higher conversion rate than other digital advertising options), jumping on these micro-conversions is a sound business strategy for almost guaranteed conversions.

3. Use AI to do some of the heavy lifting

Because guaranteed conversions rely on effectively analyzing the key metrics identified earlier in building a strategy, it’s important to do the right kind of analysis. Relying solely on descriptive data is no longer sufficient to optimize performance. You must move beyond this data to build predictive insights that allow you to anticipate how your strategy will resonate in the future based on past performance. AI tools are especially helpful in building these insights, reducing the time needed to build a predictive model from months for A/B testing to a few hours. AI tools can also track metrics such as rage clicks and hesitation time that are hard to assess in real time.

You can use AI tools to set an alert when a metric changes unexpectedly, based on the prediction model you built. This allows you to quickly assess the reason for the anomaly and make changes that help your key metrics fall back to expected levels (if the alert reflected a decline) or change your strategy to take advantage of an opportunity (if it represents a positive alert).

Finally, setting up a dashboard that displays key metrics from various platforms in one place using appropriate data visualizations makes it easier to assess your performance at a glance to offer guaranteed conversions.

4. Use hypothesis testing

A/B testing is the gold standard when it comes to producing guaranteed conversions. However, you can’t test everything or you’ll never finish testing. Instead, choose to test those elements most likely to impact your conversion rate, such as headlines, images, calls-to-action, button color, and offer. Develop a hypothesis about what you think is driving conversion rate optimization as the backbone of your testing.

A hypothesis is an educated guess, often based on past experiences, that yields a yes or no answer. It’s not a hunch or a shot in the dark.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve discussed the key metrics you should monitor on a daily basis if you want guaranteed conversions. We then discussed how some of these metrics work to optimize your conversion rate based on our knowledge of consumer behavior, which allows you to make strategic changes and develop hypotheses that yield better conversion rates. Finally, we laid out a four-step process for identifying where your conversion process went wrong and how to improve your rate using a logical flow. To summarize the conversion rate optimization loop, you must:

• Observe metrics to find the friction points
• Hypothesize solutions to improve performance, such as a change in the hero image will improve conversion rate by 2%.
• Test your hypothesis with standard A/B tools
• Analyze to determine where the hypothesis is true or false
• Repeat the process, since conversion rate optimization isn’t a one-time task, but an ongoing one.

And, as always, let me know how this went by posting in the comments below.

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