How to Get Started With Conversion Rate Optimization

These days marketers are so pressed for time that many of them don’t know where to start. So many of us are just going through our days struggling to keep our online conversion rates above water. It’s not good enough to just be satisfied with how our websites are currently performing there’s more potential lying within your website if you optimize for conversion, you’ve just got to know where to start.

Here are three guiding principals to start your journey to higher conversion rates.

Start small – Change one thing
You don’t need to change your entire website to see improvement. Start small try changing one thing on a landing page you’re driving paid search traffic or a lead generation page. One change can make a big difference when you test it with actual clicks. Often times marketers are bad judges of our own websites because we see them everyday we get bored. This usually leads to a charge to redesign the entire site under the banner of keeping up with the times. Resist the urge to do a complete overhaul and start with one small change at a time.

Spend more time on strategy
Conversion rate optimization and testing can be very exciting and its easy to get carried away with ideas. If you stick to small changes first rather than jumping in with big changes when you’re first getting started you’ll feel like you’re making progress which will allow you to step back think things through. It’s human nature to want to see results right away and often we jump right to ideas and tactics but the key to a successful conversion rate optimization plan is to think through an overall strategy before we jump right to testing. Each test should build on each other.

Design so you learn something
It’s easy to just come up with ideas to test, but to get real value out of your conversion rate optimization efforts you need to design each test so you will learn something about your visitors. Even tests that don’t move your conversion rate all that much or under perform your control page conversion rate should uncover new knowledge about your visitors that you can use in future tests and designs. The guiding principal is that in conversion optimization there is no failure only progress toward higher conversions.