Have you ever thought why most of your website’s visitors leave your website without buying anything? Why you are not getting the sales you expected despite of having top rankings in search engines? Well, you are not alone.
Low conversion rate is the most common and most difficult problem which almost every online marketer has to face. According to various studies, the average conversion rate for most of the ecommerce websites is 2-3 percent i.e. Only 2 to 3 out of 100 visitors converts into customers. But thanks to high SEO competition and ever increasing PPC costs more and more internet marketers are now focusing on conversion rate optimization to enhance the overall conversion rate of their campaigns and to keep them profitable.
Here in this article we’ll cover some tips on how you can use Google Website Optimizer to improve the conversion rate of your website. Google website optimizer is Google’s free web testing and optimization tool that helps you to test different versions and designs of your page. Learn more about GWO (Google Website Optimizer). Now let’s look in to the tips below.
1. Segmenting visitors according to their source
Traffic from all sources is different and behaves differently. For e.g. – traffic you get from search engines will act differently than the traffic you get from social media sites. So the best thing to do is to segment traffic by various categories like traffic by source/ country/keyword/time etc and test different version of pages according to these segments.
The best and easy way to segment traffic is by using BTbuckets. To learn more about it and how you can integrate BTbuckets with Google website optimizer.
2. Setting up Your funnel
You can’t improve anything without knowing the problem. Before doing any tests you need to find out the pages which are creating the problem, you need to find out the pages where most of your visitors leave your checkout process so that you can improve them.
You can create as many funnels as you want. But at least you should have following funnels – Funnel from homepage to your cart page, funnels for a complete checkout process including and excluding cart pages, funnel for checkout process including and excluding payment options.
3. Test both at micro and macro levels
Do not do all your tests focusing on the checkout process. You should test your pages on both micro and macro levels. Many times a test which is very successfully on micro level completely fails on macro level. For e.g. – It might be possible that your recent tests have improved the conversion rate of checkout process but the traffic from cart page to checkout page is still not performing well. So keep on testing with different page combinations like from product pages to complete of checkout process, homepage to checkout process etc.
Similarly, you should test every page of your website at micro level like how many visitors go from home page to product page, how many visitors who reached product page have clicked at “Add to cart button”. By doing tests at micro levels you can focus on things at basic level.
4. Testing anything means testing nothing
Do not test random things just for sake of testing. Every website is different and you need to start testing with areas having major problems. For e.g. – If most of your visitors are leaving your homepage without visiting any product page then you should test the navigation and design of your website. Similarly if most of your visitors are leaving from product pages then you need to test your product pages first.
5. Take care of timing
Make sure that you launch right tests at right time. For e.g. – Testing your woolen products website in summers doesn’t make any sense because conversion rate in summers will be obviously low. Take care of external factors which are out of your control and launch your tests according to it.
So these are the 5 things you should take care of while using Google website optimizer. Conversion rate optimization is not an overnight process and finding a perfect combination requires lot of tests to be conducted and patience. Do you use Google website optimizer for your website? Have you seen any improvements in your conversion rate? Feel free to share them with us in comments below.
Guest author David Smith works for Conversion Optimization Company Invesp.com and enjoys writing on SEO, landing pages, conversion rate optimization and affiliate marketing. You can also write guest posts here.