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Last week I saw Will presenting on technical issues associated with SEO. One of the key issues he presented on was site speed. Specifically, the cost of ignoring site speed as a performance and revenue indicator. Will’s own experiences of Distilled’s performance issues (mostly resolved by implementing Cloudflare) were a stark reminder of the importance of building at least a basic knowledge of CDN (content delivery network) implementation.

Why bother with site speed?

Because it costs money not to. A nicely summarised roundup by SmartInsights reported on research showing a dramatic decline in conversion as page load times increases to 4 seconds:

We already know there’s a strong business benefit to improving site speed, it’s possible to see figures as high as 1% conversion rate loss for every second in site speed squandered. I presented at a large retailer network company head office on Thursday, comparing the time to render taken by a search result page at Google, Amazon’s home page and their flagship retail site:

Assuming a directly proportional relationship between page load and conversion rate, the potential gain for this site is obvious.

How does a CDN work?

Put simply, a CDN caches all of the objects on your site (for instance; images, JS files and CSS files) and serves them from a location that is usually closer to the request location. This should mean that visitors see a faster page load. By hosting all of your static files on a CDN, it’s fair to assume there’ll be a perceived increase in page load, especially in locations far from your own hosting (assuming the CDN has good coverage there).

I wanted to learn about CDN implementation, so I opened an account with MaxCDN. SEOgadget’s static files are now being served from “cdn2.seogadget.co.uk”.

The end to end set-up process should have taken around 10 minutes. There was a little complication owing to SEOgadget being an SSL site, but I’m pleased to note that MAXcdn will work with your own SSL certificate, provided that you have a wildcard certification that will certify any subdomain (for example: *.seogadget.co.uk).

How to configure WordPress with a CDN

Firstly, open an account with your CDN provider of choice. In MAXcdn, create a new “pull zone”:

You can name the zone anything you like, in our case, “SEOg”. Set the “origin server URL” name to match your domain name and enter your intended custom CDN domain (the location from which your static files will be. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything with DNS just yet:

After you’ve created your new pull zone, you’ll see this message:

Take a note of the two domains, your custom domain (cdn.yourdomain.co.uk and the pull zone location generated by MAXcdn – seog.seogadget.netdna-cdn.com). Now head to your DNS control panel:

(This assumes you’re using CPanel to manage your domain a, cname and MX records via your web host. We use TSOhost’s nameservers and SEOgadget has been hosted with them for a long time. If you’re not using CPanel, you’ll have to follow slightly different steps to get to the DNS zone editor at your registrar - it’s very easy though, so don’t be put off if this is new):

Select “Advanced DNS Zone Editor” and the domain you’d like to edit, here:

Protip: Yoast uses more than one CDN address serving JS and CSS separately. This (I think) has the benefit of asynchronous downloading of those files.

Configure MAXcdn with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is our caching plugin of choice. It’s easy to use, fast and reliable. What’s most powerful about the plugin is compatibility with several well known CDN service providers. Here’s how to set it up with MAXcdn very quickly:

Firstly, select “NETDNA / MaxCDN”. Don’t enable just yet, just click “Save all settings”. Next, head to the CDN configuration from the options along the top of the settings page.

You’ll see a space for your CNAME, so complete that and fetch the API key from MaxCDN here:

As soon as you’re done, click “Save all settings” and select “Test NetDNA” to make sure all is well. The outcome should look like this:

This makes a great weekend project – give it a go!

I quite enjoyed getting SEOgadget set up with a proper CDN. The process is not without its pitfalls – especially if you happen to use SSL to serve your content. Still, with a little perserverence and background reading, it becomes relatively simple (and extremely interesting). The main limitation I faced were problems related to multiple subdomain names (cdn.*, cdn2.*, etc) because of the SSL certificate. We have a wildcard certificate that wasn’t validating easily in the MaxCDN interface. To save time and hassle I elected to creating a separate certificate which was fine for one subdomain but not for multiple addresses.

The performance panel provided is initially very interesting. We’re now serving the US far more locally, (so I might expect our latency to be vastly improved in the US) but, we’re serving the UK and all of Europe from Amsterdam. I suspect that overall performance won’t be improved much in the UK. My initial tests certainly make me feel the improvement locally is marginal, but still improved.

I used Pingdom tools to evaluate overall object loads and got some initially interesting results from New York, with one exception to the observation that we appear quite a lot quicker:

Initial data is almost irrelevant though, so I’ll be watching Google Analytics (site speed report, segmented by country) for a reduction in page loads from our main traffic generating sources over the next few weeks. I’m hoping for an improvement across the board, and certainly no increases in the UK:

I’ve set up a basic alert in Google Analytics to inform me when there’s a week on week decrease in page load – it’s not terribly granular, so we’ll see what happens:

A few useful sources

I’d like to recomend you take a look at these (extremely useful) blog posts:

http://rackerhacker.com/2010/02/13/wordpress-w3-total-cache-maxcdn/

http://devilsworkshop.org/maxcdn-setup-on-wordpress-using-w3-total-cache-plugin-wpmu-tutorial/

http://yoast.com/articles/cdn-wordpress-maxcdn/

http://support.netdna.com/knowledgebase/installing-custom-ssl/

Image credit: Yi Shiang

Setting Up a WordPress CDN (Content Delivery Networks) for Beginners is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

People love to be asked their opinion. Chance are, if you’ve been to a restaurant recently, you’ve been given a receipt asking you to rate your experience via survey. Or if you’ve stayed at a hotel, you’ve received an email survey to rate your stay. Surveys are a great way to determine user satisfaction with your products, services, and websites. The following are some great ways to use online surveys and a look at the survey tools available.

Great Ways to Use Survey Tools

If you are an online marketer or SEO, then you should consider the following uses for online surveys.

Prospective Client Surveys

Before getting started with a new client, you might want to get to know them first by providing a simple online survey form for them to fill out. Some great questions you could ask include the following.

• What websites do you own? (main domain, blog, additional sub-domains)
• What social media profiles do you use? (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+)
• What local search profiles have you claimed? (Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp)
• Have you worked with another online marketing or SEO agency? If yes, what services did you use? What were the results?
• Will you be working with more than one online marketing or SEO agency simultaneously?
• What are the top 10 pages you would like your online marketing strategy to be focused upon?
• Do you have any special online tools that could be used to attract links? (online calculators, widgets, industry-specific database)
• What are your online marketing goals?
• Do you use Google Analytics? If yes, can we have access?

Basically, ask them about anything you think you will need for your campaign so you know what you are working with early on.

Client Satisfaction Surveys

Client satisfaction surveys can be very useful not only to find out if you are on the right track with your client’s online marketing campaign, but also to find out if you can expand your services with them. So instead of just asking if they are happy with their results so far, if they are receiving enough communication about their campaign, and so forth, you can also ask them if they are interested in additional services they are not taking advantage of.

To keep your survey fresh from month to month, you can also ask about specific new trends. For example, this month would be a great time to ask your clients if they would be interested in mounting a campaign on Pinterest and optimizing their site with images so it will be Pinterest friendly.

Website Usability

If part of your online marketing involves creating or optimizing websites for conversion, some basic website usability testing might be required. Invite people to try out the website, then send them a survey about their likes and dislikes of the website’s functionality. You might learn about a particular pain point that others experience which you might not have even thought about.

Link Bait

Whether you are creating link bait for a client or for your own website, survey tools can help. One of the top trends in blogging is crowdsourced posts – posts where you get various people in a specific niche or industry to answer one or more questions, then compile the answers into a blog post. Not only do you get a lot of great information, but you get the promotional power of everyone you include in the list sharing it with their audience.

5 Top Survey Tools

The following are some great survey tools that will allow you to get the answers you need. The best part – they all offer free basic membership!

Google Docs Forms

Google Docs offers their own survey tool with their Forms application. Simply log in to your Google Account, go to Google Docs, and create a new Form. You can choose text based answers, multiple choice, list answers, and more, making answers required when necessary. You can also choose from almost 100 pre-designed themes. You can embed forms onto your website using iframe code, share the link to the form, or email the form directly from Google Docs. Return to the form within Google Docs to see survey results!

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a widely recognized survey provider. They allow you to create surveys from scratch or choose from over 60 templates for different categories and industries including the following for customer feedback.

• Website Feedback
• Business to Business
• Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Service
• Software Evaluation

Their account options range from free for 10 questions & 100 responses per survey to $65 (US) per month for unlimited questions & responses, customizable survey forms, and more features.

KISSinsights

KISSinsights allows you to add customer feedback directly to your website with easy, targeted questions that will pop up on your site. It is the perfect way to do quick usability testing with your website’s visitors! Plans range from free for surveys with up to 30 responses to $49 (US) per month for customizable surveys with an unlimited number of responses.

Zoomerang

Zoomerang is on eof the best survey tools for feedback. Surveys can be sent via email, Facebook, Twitter, or your own website. Zoomerang offers a variety of different types of surveys including the following.

• Customer Satisfaction
• Business
• Marketing
• Market Research
• Meeting & Event Planning
• Social Media (Twitter & Facebook)
• Mobile SMS

Plans range from free for an unlimited number of surveys with up to ten questions and responses to $599 per year for unlimited surveys, questions, and responses, customization, data export, and more.

Smart Survey

Smart-Survey offers affordable software which you can use for customer satisfaction, specific industries, employee opinions, training feedback, and more. They allow you to cancel at any time, or simply downgrade your account and upgrade when you need it without losing your survey data. Plans range from free for an unlimited number of surveys with up to 50 responses per month to £29.99 (UK) per month for unlimited surveys with up to 1,000 responses per month, custom themes, and more.

Do you use survey tools to learn more about prospective clients, customer satisfaction, or website usability? Have you had success with crowdsourced posts? Please share your tools & tips in the comments!

Image credit: The Bees

5 Freemium Survey Tools for User Testing, Customer Satisfaction, and More is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Scarcity is a glorious form of persuasion and when exploited can yield incredible benefits to your conversion rate. Here’s a Merriam Webster’s definition of scarcity…

“The quality or state of being scarce; especially: want of provisions for the support of life”

That’s extremely useful…but in a nutshell if you reduce the quantity supplied of a product or its availability you create a scarce product. This perceived scarcity then allows you to sell more.

Here are some clever and awesome scarcity techniques to increase sales.

1. The classic limited stock

Displaying low amounts of stock available creates a sense of scarcity. Revealing a number between 1-3 in stock usually converts better. Here’s an example of a hotel booking company that implements this classic style.

“Act Fast! Only 3 rooms left at this price!”

2. Interactive limited stock?

Revealing low stock levels is a simple and great win but the visuals could be much better. If we look at Argos these guys make scarcity much more interactive.

You can check the stock in your area and reserve it. If you enter a postcode and click on the check stock button you’ll receive this pop up.

Notice how it’s in stock on home delivery, out of stock in one area but only 1 left to collect in another branch close to my location. These guys are integrating framing with scarcity in clever way. Also pay attention to the fact that these guys give you the option to check stock in another area on the pop up. When you make scarcity interactive in particular and show something being generated it makes it more trustworthy to your users.

3. Real time scarcity

Booking.com utilise a clever scarcity technique which is to show the number of stock, the number of people viewing the page and when the last purchase was just made.

Notice the 2 messages that pop up at the bottom corner. Combining the stock level with the last purchase and how many people are ogling up my hotel is awesome but the execution could be much better.

Those messages can be argued to look like a windows error message, a site error message or even some type of spyware on a quick glance. When you make scarcity real time it becomes more believable and is much more powerful than some of the classical methods.

4. Auctioning and scarcity

Bidding fee auctions utilise the principle of scarcity whereby a user bids incrementally against other bids and against time. When time runs out the final bidder wins and pays for the product at a fraction of the retail price and the auction company generate a skyrocketed profit margin on the product. A really good online example is Madbid.

Each product has a timer countdown and pits users against each other. The concept of scarcity is used in an extremely powerful state on this site.  Imagine this technique being used on retail site for clearance items?

5. Treasure hunts and scarcity

Everyone loves a good old treasure hunt. But how do you relate this to scarcity and sales?

Create competitions that require intelligence or solving a something such as a riddle or mystery. For example solve the riddle to receive the hidden code – which can be used to obtain a unique limited edition item. A recent example of this is Jimmy Choos.

Here’s what they did…

“Shoe lovers in London have been glued to their mobile devices and computer screens in a race to win a pair of free Jimmy Choos.” (Reuters 2012)

Jimmy Choos created an internet style treasure hunt. A picture of the bag is left at a random location on the site with clues provided on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Once a user has figured out the clue it’s a mad dash to the location to claim their prize.

Awesome right? For those that miss out there’s a real desire to get it the next time. The integration of social, competitions and scarcity are seen in one campaign. The result a 33% uplift in sales! See the case study!

The Hoxton Hotel $1 sale is an awesome case study using similar principles check out Sam Crocker’s post!

Final thoughts

Scarcity is a powerful sales tool and can create a “Black Friday” effect. We implemented a simple scarcity technique for a retail site and got a 30% uplift in conversion rate which is proof it does indeed work but it needs to be executed properly. Its success depends on your audience and how it gets executed. It’s only when you pit people against each other and create competition for a product that you skyrocket your sales.

I’d love to know your thoughts as always drop me a comment below or catch me on twitter.

Image Cred: tinamathis

5 Forms of Scarcity to Skyrocket Your Sales is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

It was a few months ago when I was invited to speak at the excellent Conversion Conference London. We do have a strong conversion rate optimisation knowledge base, but the title for this particular session was in fact labelled: ”SEO and SEM vs. CRO – Tactics for Optimising Both Search & Conversion”. Around the same time I accepted to speak on the panel for the conference in December, SlingshotSEO had published their click through rate study (first, via SEOmoz) while MiraMetrix were working on an interesting eye tracking survey for Dr Pete to publish later on SEOmoz.

The Problem with CTR Studies

While click through rate studies are helpful, useful and interesting, they are do have limitations. Even the best studies don’t take universal search results into account and while the data tends to aggregate many hundreds if not thousands of search queries, the query intent is not recorded. Click through will vary based on variables beyond ranking position. All of this got me thinking – could we measure how the intention of a searcher (for example, informational query intent vs transactional) might affect the click through rate in a search results page? At the time, no tools existed to help me to find a conclusion.

SERP Turkey

Probably not much more than two weeks ago (and around a week before the conference!), Tom Anthony launched his handy new A/B split testing tool; SERP Turkey. Suddenly, it became possible to A/B test variations of search results while recording the number of clicks each variation achieved. While the early version of the tool has obvious limitations, it is incredibly useful and easy to use. I’d like to thank Tom – he actually coded a change to the tool as a feature request to enable me to copy entire tests (thus saving me a great deal of time!). Thank you, Tom.

A Simple Test To Measure the CTR in a Search Result Variation

Ready for conversion conference, Fabian and I set about designing a simple test. We wanted to see if we could measure differences in click through when searchers were  given two different scenarios. An “informational” search scenario for the query “pool tables” and a “transactional” search scenario for the same query. In each scenario we served variations of search results to our searchers where the position 2 ranking had differently worded snippets.

Searchers were sourced via Mechanical Turk (approval over 95% + Master Categoriser status). There are obvious caveats to using mTurk, though Tom’s “Great White Shark” test did show that the integrity of the Turker’s choices were of good standard. Here were our scenarios, of which each variation received around 120 searches where the time spent examining the search results was over 5 seconds.

Scenario 1: You’re researching Pool Tables. Click the result that would be most relevant to you.

Scenario 2: Imagine you’re about to buy a Pool Table. Click the result that would be most relevant to you.

The Test Search Pages

There were 3 variations of our search result pages. As SERP Turkey doesn’t do rich snippets, the third variation was actually a hack – and the time it took to get this one set up meant we only tested in in the transactional scenario. The only change in each variation was the wording or presentation of the second result. No other changes were made.

Informational Variation

Transactional Variation

Transational Variation w/Rich Snippet

 What Were the Results?

Our hypothesis was that in a research scenario, a searcher may prefer the snippet with broader, informational terms: “experts”, “beginner”, “advanced”, “comprehensive”, “information”, “plenty”, “learning” and “schools”. In a transactional scenario, the searcher may respond to the more transactionally worded snippet: “buy”, “free delivery”, “sale”, “prices”, “buy today”. Here is a typical results page from one of the scenarios.

Result: informational intent

In the informational scenario, our more “informationally” worded variation won. The transactional variation received 11.34% CTR, while the informational version received 16.36%. You can see that an extra line of text snuck through QA, which was a little annoying – however I’m not convinced this skewed the results in the way we might expect – as later testing in the transactional testing might prove.

Result: transactional intent

In the transactional scenario, the more “transactionally” worded snippet won. Our transactional variation received 19.35% of the clicks while the transactional snippet received 11.35% CTR. Interesting – if the lengthier snippet was skewing CTR, surely this test might highlight the issue?

Final result: CTR when we introduce a rich snippet

As I mentioned earlier, we only introduced a third variation (the inclusion of a rich snippet) in the transactional scenario. The final result was perhaps unsurprising. The transactional variation received 21.52% CTR, vs the informational snippet at 14.93%. Our rich snippet, transactionally worded variation won at 26.32% CTR.

The Obvious Caveats

Firstly, I’ll get the obvious caveats out of the way. This is one query – though I feel ultimately the click through will always vary based on the individual query and the intent of the user at that exact time. Our variations were far from eloquently written and were instead designed to place emphasis on the types of terms that imply purchase or information. Aside from the fact that the searchers were mTurk based, I’d also like more traffic to play with. I suspect that, because we chose the highest rated Turkers, the test is only up to around 120 usable results for each test. It’ll keep running until there are 500 which at this rate will be sometime in January 2012! We identified an anomaly where position 4 was beating or equalling position 1′s CTR in 2 tests. We think this may be because of the density of the word “pool tables” in the snippet and title, but we need to test for that.

As this was one query, the only possible conclusion I’d take away from this as a reader is, that CTR will vary depending on intent and that you should learn how to test your own variations to find a winner. With that said, I think it’s very exciting to have tools like SERP Turkey to make these kinds of test far, far easier.

The Excitement, for Me at Least

The thing that excites me is this. We can fight for better click through without moving the position we rank in, simply by experimenting with different wordings in our meta descriptions. That’s good to know. It’s good to know that a variation of a snippet may be able to persuade searchers to click a second place result more than they may a first place result. Win!

Improve the Way Your Site Looks in Search Results

Improving the way our sites appear to searchers in search results pages is an activity that we really should be engaging in more of. Later in my conversion conference presentation, I showed how using two 160(ish) character sentences in a page’s meta description (this one, to be completely clear) can result in Google displaying a more relevant snippet to the user. That was an idea I first discovered on Dave’s blog. For the sake of brevity (I am being hurried along to pack and fly to Australia as I write!) I’ll ask you to flick through the presentation below to examine exactly how I decided to word that snippet based on analytics keyword referrer data.

Image credit: Thinngy42.

How Intention May Influence Search Result Click Through [Conversion Conference] is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

When it comes to improving website conversion, not every CEO, product manager, in-house SEO or sales director fully understands CRO, at least, not where to start, or what to do first. It’s a big initial challenge for us when we first engage with a new CRO client. Today I’d like to share a “10,000 ft view” post on how newcomers to the CRO process should perceive the activity, and how they should be aware of their own attitude towards conversion.

Understand your customers

Let’s start with an analogy (in fact, this is my favourite analogy at the moment). Imagine you work at high street retail store and you’re charged with improving the sales revenue made at the till. What would you do first to increase sales?

Look at these options, and try to pick the best fit answer.

1)      Think about the type of products people might want to purchase, and display more of them in the shop window
2)      Paint the door a different colour
3)      Improve the layout of the shop window to appeal to more people
4)      Change your logo
5)      Decrease your prices

Thinking about your own online business, which would you choose? If you picked any of them, you’ve started out wrong. In terms of your website, “Paint the door a different colour” might be changing the navigation bar colour, for example. What problem might that solve for your customers? It’s unlikely that it will solve any, unless you have evidence to the contrary.

How much do you really know about your customers?

Most CEOs and site owners think they know a lot about their websites and the people that use them. Really, many of them have become successful because they have a “feel” for what works. What “works” might be based on observation, such as “we displayed a banner on the homepage and sold a particular product very well that month”. Some people call this experience, and they’re right, to a point.

The problem is that these types of experience are often built on gut feel, or the principle that because two events correlate, they must have a causal relationship. What if seasonality or other external factors played a role in that increase in sales? And anyway, haven’t you forgotten about the people that did not buy the product?

To really know what to do to improve your conversion, you have to work out why people aren’t buying. Then, fix those problems! I agree with Stephen – there’s no trick, and some big wins can be achieved using a relatively simple process.

The very core of CRO

Studying the usability of your website is an important initial step when trying to discover areas to improve your conversion. Let’s imagine you were on a site which had an assortment of errors and poor navigation, how long would you stay on the site? Most users are impatient and will look elsewhere. Tools such as usertesting.com and whatusersdo.com are useful in detecting usability problems and testers can be segmented to match your site i.e. by gender or age.

Far more fundamnetally, Conversion rate optimisation is about understanding the objections your customers face and finding ways to overcome them. In fact, if you can only focus on one activity, it should be learning about your customers. Survey Monkey and Kissinsights are amazingly useful tools when implemented at a page or on-exit level.  Let’s imagine the surveys reveal that your visitors find the decision to purchase as too risky then utilise risk reduction strategies. If your visitors find that your product is too complicated to learn, then utilise techniques in your design that reduce the learning curve.

In some cases the barriers to conversion may not be obvious and you may need to apply professional selling techniques and infuse your information architecture (IA) with persuasive design and messaging in order to enhance your conversion. Learning persuasive design and content writing techniques (try starting here) could make a significant difference to the way you perceive your site as a sales tool, but that’s the point.

It’s not guesswork, it’s about the evidence

Don’t guess! Don’t let your ego get in the way. It’s ok not to know the answers! Build an evidence base. Gather the qualititative and quantitative data and think carefully about how you might solve the problems you identify. One very successful example of this was an on-exit survey we ran that revealed potential customers were finding the same product elsewhere – despite our clients having the better price, they were not offering a free delivery option, where our competing site was. Setting a free delivery threshold to encourage users to complete their purchases reduced checkout abandonment by 70%! Until we’d gathered a meaningful evidence base, the business owner was largely unaware of the depth of impact this seemingly small objection had. Average order value increased, the number of sales improved therfore, so did conversion.

Assumptions and guesswork will at best get you nowhere. Stop guessing – or imagining that you truly understand what’s happening on your site without constructing the evidence base first. We call this the IB/IS approach – identify barriers, identify solutions. As soon as you have a series of objections and barriers to conversion to overcome, test them. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Understanding Conversion Rate Optimisation is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Did you read that post title correctly? Marmite? Yes that’s right. Conversion rates seriously have a marmite effect about them. You can end up loving or hating conversion rate metrics, and it really depends on how you apply them to a real situation. One of the biggest issues I find with new CRO clients, is that they’re not always applying appropriate metrics to their decisions. In today’s post, I’ll be discussing how conversion rates can be an absolutely horrible metric leading to sub optimal decisions, and how to turn that situation around to make the right calls.

Used inappropriately, “conversion rate” can be a horrible metric.

Conversion rates can be really misleading when used in isolation, aggregation or without a proper understanding of their context and ecosystem. It’s all about actionable outcomes, and a “conversion rate” alone doesn’t always tell us a great deal. So, what do we mean by “ecosystem”, “isolation”, “aggregation” and “understanding”?

1. Isolation

Using conversion rates in isolation is useless, it won’t tell you anything meaningful apart from the fact your conversion rate is at X% a certain point in time. Having a metric such as revenue next to it is much more insightful. Think of it this way, if ‘A’ has a high conversion rate of 10% and ‘B’ has a slightly lower conversion rate at 9%. Would we do more of ‘A’? The short answer is no, we haven’t taken into account any other vairables, such as cost. For example ‘A’ could be relying on costly promotions and offers which cannot be maintained in the long run.

2. Aggregation

Using conversion rates in aggregate is useless. “Overall” conversion is not an insightful or meaningful metric. If you segment by different sources for example SEO, PPC, mobile etc. each source will have a different conversion rate. So failing to appreciate this and relying on aggregate conversion rates leads to sub optimal decisions. Using an aggregate / site conversion rate to tell you what’s wrong with your site is like waiting for your cat to bark.

3. Understanding – higher conversion rate does not always mean higher performance.

Let’s imagine that our boss asks us for a progress report on two marketing campaigns we deployed at the same time period. We deployed strategy ‘A’ and strategy ‘B’ which delivered different conversion rates.

Strategy A = 10% conversion rate

Strategy B = 25% conversion rate

When strategy ‘A’ was deployed we achieved a 10% conversion rate and when strategy ‘B’ was deployed we achieved a 25% conversion rate. If conversion rates were the ultimate metric then basic common sense would dictate strategy ‘B’ is better since it has a higher conversion rate. Should we go with strategy ‘B’? No, take a look at this example why…

Strategy A: 5000 unique visitors and 500 conversions = 10% conversion rate

Strategy B: 1000 unique visitors and 250 conversions = 25% conversion rate

On analysis of the conversion rate formula, strategy ‘A’ has double the conversions and is better for the company and had we gone with strategy ‘B’ we might be making a massive mistake. Therefore a higher conversion rate does not necessarily mean higher performance. This is a simple example, but it really does happen!

4. Ecosystem

Conversion rates can be unreliable if the traffic to your site changes, because of seasonality, content popularity or a news event. Let’s go with the example that your content goes hot – you’ve written a series of blog posts that are absolutely awesome and reveal the secret ingredient behind the colonel’s KFC chicken, secrets behind David Blaine’s Magic tricks and the true meaning of life.

Your blog posts reel in the visitors by the thousands. That’s great! You’re more famous, your content is obviously more engaging, but your conversion rate will go down assuming the number of goals remains constant. To improve your conversion rate you would have acquire more leads but in actual fact those visitors may have only come to read your blog and may not want the product you offer right now.

Used correctly, the true value of conversion rates are exposed.

A conversion rate’s true value is exposed when we utilise it with other metrics and segment it by different sources, visitor type etc. By doing this we get a more meaningful metric that leads to an actionable outcome.

1. Indicator of performance

Conversion rates provide an indication of how well you are capturing your visitors. It is important to know how many people are converting. Most websites conversion goals tend to be sign ups, sales, downloads etc. By tracking these we can monitor the ratio of people that did convert as opposed to those that didn’t.

It can provide you with areas of concern i.e. it can tell you where your marketing efforts are most successful when segmented. If you measure it along with other business metrics such as revenue, profit per visitor, cost per conversion etc. you gain deeper insights.

2. Spur action

To some extent, low conversion rates can even spur action by senior execs. For example it can lead to improvements to the persuasive architecture of the site. The content on the site is improved which is then tested in a split test. Conversion rates can therefore spur change for the better.

3. Utilising other metrics

Conversion rates do have to be segmented in order to expose its true value. Metrics such as abandonment rates and completion rates are much more insightful in determining areas for improvement.

Let’s look at this example…

Imagine we run a pet nutrition company and we advise people on how our products improve their pet’s nutritional intake. We’re really interested in the number of sign-ups to our site. Task completion shows you why people came to the site and how easy it was for them to complete a task but also what was achievable in terms of conversion rate.

The chart shows that 35% of people sign up to our service. So if our conversion rate is at 1% then what happened to the other 99%? Is that 99% lost sign up conversions? No, in fact it’s 1% out of 100% out of the 35%. The 35% shows you what’s achievable in terms of sign up conversions.

We also have to ask ourselves, out of all these other segments what’s more likely to convert into sign ups? So for example, of those people that come to do research, can we entice them to sign up to our services? This type of analysis is fundamental to the success of improving site conversion and understanding what’s achievable, as people applying for a job on the site might not want to sign up to your service and you may be wasting your efforts.

Think “how should I be using conversion rate effectively?”

Conversion rates are an excellent metric when used properly. Using it in isolation and in aggregation can lead to sub optimal decisions. Combining conversion rates with metrics such as revenue, completion rates, outcomes and unique visits reveal a deeper pool of insight which, in the long run can be more beneficial when you’re planning to truly make a difference to your bottom line.

Image credits:
pinkangelbabe

Conversion Rates and the Marmite Effect is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.