Fine-Tuning Your Campaigns for
Optimal Results
Conversion rate optimization is the process of taking a look at your current conversion rate to understand your cost per acquisition. Once you understand this metric, you can begin optimizing your website, ad campaigns, and more.
A conversion is basically a goal. Fundamentally, there are two goals in marketing: leads and sales. Many different online events can result in conversions. The conversion rate is calculated by assessing each event and determining where conversions are occurring. From there, we look at optimizing each channel to drive more conversions.
Too many marketing agencies ignore conversion rate optimization (or CRO). At Twelve Three Media, we make CRO a core part of our service to clients.
Drawing upon in-depth analytics and reporting information, our experts are able to obtain in-depth information on the performance of your marketing and ads. We can then use this information to identify a dollar value for what it takes to get a customer to convert.
What Is a
Conversion?
A conversion is any action by a consumer that furthers one of your business goals. The accomplishment of any KPI can be considered a conversion, with common examples including:
- Phone calls
- Form fills
- Online chats
- Social media activity (e.g., clicks, follows, likes, etc.)
- Downloads (e.g., whitepapers, videos, etc.)
- Video views
- Email subscriptions
- And more
Conversions often tie directly to the bottom line of the business, consisting of either an exchange of money or information. However, any action that works toward one of your objectives could be identified as a conversion. Ultimately, it is important for you to be clear about what your goals are and when activity by the consumer meets those goals.
What Is
Conversion Rate?
Your conversion rate is the number of people who take a desired action compared to the overall size of the audience. A simple example would be taking the number of visitors to a landing page on your website from an ad and dividing the total web traffic by the number of users who completed a form on the page:
Ex: 100 Website Visitors ➗ 30 Form Completions = 30% Conversion Rate
Calculating the conversion rate is essential for evaluating the success of marketing and advertising campaigns. At Twelve Three Media, we have developed a three-point process to ensure that all of the work we do for clients is strategic, masterfully executed, and supported by data.
Every win begins with a tactical blueprint. Before any wireframes, social posts, or ad buys, we tailor a unique strategy for market dominance.
Our ability to identify and zero-in on your ideal customer is more sophisticated than ever. We don’t gamble. We target.
Data is more than just raw, measurable information. As digital marketing professionals, it is our lifeblood. Data guides our decisions, proves our value, and validates your investment.
The close attention we pay to the conversion rate represents the all-important final step of validating results. We don’t just launch campaigns and hope for the best. Our team digs into the data to ensure you are reaching your business goals and getting what you pay for.
What Is a
Good Conversion Rate?
The answer to this question varies depending on a host of different factors, from audience characteristics to geographical area to marketing channel to where and what type of ad is run. We help our clients get an understanding of what results can be achieved based on their ad spend, media mix, and more.
Some marketing agencies might tell you a conversion rate of 5% is good for a given strategy. Our agency, however, might be able to achieve conversion rates of 20-30%. The answer ultimately depends on your goals, your budget, your audience, and your market.
How Does
Conversion Rate Optimization Work?
Now that we know what conversions are and how conversion rate is calculated, it is important to understand how we optimize campaigns to achieve the optimal results. Let’s return to the example of a digital ad that gets a 30% conversion rate among users who land on your website:
Ex: 100 Website Visitors ➗ 30 Form Completions = 30% Conversion Rate
On reviewing the ad copy, we determine that the language surrounding the form is ambiguous. By clarifying the ad, we are able to drive users with higher intent to your website. This, in turn, results in a higher conversion rate of, say, 50%:
Ex: 100 Website Visitors ➗ 50 Form Completions = 50% Conversion Rate
As you can see, conversion rate optimization isn’t just some buzzword. It’s a way to check the results of your marketing and advertising strategies, mathematically calculate the value and the cost of conversions, and identify ways to improve performance.
What Are the Elements of
Successful CRO?
Just about any metric can be identified as a KPI, and any actions you see supporting a KPI could be deemed a conversion. We’ve seen other agencies set up pageviews as a conversion metric in Google Analytics.
The problem with this over-classification is that it heavily skews your reporting. People who come to your website and leave are pageviews, but they didn’t convert; they didn’t buy anything, they didn’t give you any information, and they didn’t behave in a way that suggests they are even interested in continuing the buyer’s journey. Agencies can call these numbers what they like, but they aren’t conversions.
Setting expectations is essential for conversion rate optimization. We prioritize honest communication and sharing in our clients’ success. Our team also has the technical expertise to set up tracking events properly and provide reports that offer meaningful insights on your conversions.
Areas you should focus on when optimizing your conversion rates include:
The Performance of Your Website
Depending on the nature of your business, there are two major types of goals your website needs to meet:
- Purchases: For companies with an e-commerce website, the number of purchases will be a major component of the site’s success
AND/OR - Leads: For businesses that provide professional services, leads will be the primary metric to determine the success of the website.
We examine all aspects of your website to optimize the conversion rate. This may include the website design and user experience, text and imagery on your landing pages, the number of fields in a form, and more.
By using tools such as Hotjar, we are able to record user sessions and review them for potential user experience issues.
Ad Campaigns
Businesses can run any number of different ads online and in the real world. From pay-per-click ads to advertising on social media sites, the audiences you can reach are limited only by your imagination and your budget.
In a competitive industry or marketplace, it is easy for advertising budgets to balloon out of control. Unfortunately, spending a lot of money does not always equal market saturation, penetration, or even success.
Successful CRO means assessing all aspects of the ad and making course corrections to drive more conversions. This may include adjusting the language and/or imagery to better connect with potential customers, ensuring that the destination of the ad is intuitive and user-friendly, confirming the timing and placement of the ad, etc.
The crucial metric in digital advertising is ROAS, or return on ad spend. Our goal is to optimize ROAS to get the most conversions from your ads while keeping your budget manageable.
Why Choose Twelve Three Media to Handle Your
Conversion Rate Optimization?
Reliable data, experienced specialists, and a proven process are the cornerstones of any successful conversion rate optimization project. In a crowded marketplace filled with hype, Twelve Three Media stands out from our competitors through:
Custom Strategies Tailored to Your Needs
Your unique business, audience, and goals inform every decision we make. Not only do we take the time to discuss your challenges and concerns, we proactively audit your website traffic and conversion data to identify problems and offer solutions you may have never considered.
Detailed Analysis by Expert Specialists
There’s no shortage of online tools that run automated audits. However, no automated audit can replace the knowledge, skill, and insight of an experienced conversion rate optimization expert. Our CRO specialists examine your strategy and results from every angle and offer pragmatic, cost-efficient solutions to your greatest challenges.
A Full Range of Marketing Services
We don’t just diagnose your conversion problems, we help solve them. As a full-service marketing and advertising agency, we take a 360-view of your digital footprint to pinpoint conversion rate issues at every level and correct them.
Powerful Tools
Twelve Three Media makes expert use of a wide range of software and programs to aid in conversion rate optimization. Google Optimize allows us to A/B test changes to your website and determine what changes lead to more conversions. We also use Hotjar to generate a heatmap that allows us to see how users interact with your website and identify opportunities and areas for improvement.
A heatmap generates a visualization of how users are interacting with your website over a certain time period.
A Proven History of Success
We live and breathe digital marketing, and it shows in our results. We’ve helped companies of all sizes improve their marketing effectiveness through our strategic conversion rate optimization services. Our experts have even developed a Google API designed to optimize conversions from Google Local Services Ads.
Read More: The One Metric You Don’t Know About That’s Hurting Your Local Services Ads
Turn Your
Traffic Into Sales
Contact Our CRO Specialists Today!
Some clients have a very clear understanding of their business objectives, what marketing goals support these KPIs, and how to quantify the cost of driving leads and sales. Others, however, come to us with little to no knowledge of conversion rate optimization.
At Twelve Three Media, we appreciate your business and we want you to succeed. That is why we place such a heavy emphasis on optimizing the conversion rate for each and every one of your marketing and advertising strategies.
We take the time to understand your business and help identify your specific goals. If you entrust us with your financial information, we can accurately calculate the cost to acquire a customer or lead. From there, we are able to determine your conversion rate and start proving the value of our services.
CRO is the next step where we refine our processes and deliverables to get more and better results. Often, we are able to drive more conversions via small changes that have little to no impact on your ad spending.
Put Our Expertise to Work for YouFrequently Asked Questions About Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Marketing agencies that emphasize CRO are taking proactive steps to prove their worth to clients. Instead of resting on their laurels when a campaign meets expectations (or throwing up their hands when campaigns underperform), conversion rate optimization specialists dig into data to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to drive more conversions. The more emphasis that is placed on CRO, the better the results should be and the more likely clients of the agency will see a positive impact on their bottom line.
Conversion rate optimization is beneficial for customers as well. There is a huge emphasis in digital marketing on frictionless experiences. Users want to be able to move from ads to a website to making contact with the business as seamlessly as possible. Agencies that put CRO top of mind understand the importance of frictionless experiences and design and refine campaigns to meet audience expectations.
Minimizing friction could be as simple as reducing the number of fields in an online form, giving customers the opportunity to request a callback in lieu of requiring them to make the initial call, adjusting the language to clearly communicate a commitment to privacy and data security, and more. Many of these changes don’t cost a dime, but they can result in a massive increase in conversions.
One of the major benefits of conversion rate optimization is the immediacy of results. When changes to your website, ad campaign, etc. are made thoughtfully and strategically, increased conversions can start happening almost instantaneously.
The key, of course, is to make appropriate use of the available tools and leverage the insights so they fit the audience’s needs and expectations. Knowledge, data, and expertise are required to determine what changes will optimize conversions and the best way to implement them.
Broadly speaking, the best way to optimize your conversion rate is to understand the audience. You need to know what motivates your customer and use this intelligence to strengthen your campaigns.
Some of the strongest motivators when it comes to marketing and ads include:
- Deals: Whether you offer coupons, discounts, flash sales, etc., people will always respond to ways they can save money. The key is to emphasize the perceived value.
- Security: Any time you request information from the consumer, you need to make them feel safe in sharing their personal details with you. You also need to clearly communicate what the user gets in exchange, and it needs to be valuable.
- Limited time and scarcity: Is there any greater source of pressure than a ticking clock? Urgency can go a long way toward driving conversions.
- Social proof: “Keeping up with the Johnsons” is a key motivator for many products and services. Don’t just tell customers you offer a premium product or service; show them what they get by including positive reviews, ratings, and video testimonials.
- Premium offerings: Think of the Sports Illustrated football phone. If you really want people to buy or sign up, bundle something customers have to have with a product or service essential to the success of your business.
Virtually every aspect of marketing and advertising has an equation that can be adjusted. When you make positive changes in the variables, the conversion rate should improve.
Also called split testing, A/B testing is the process of launching two permutations of a marketing or advertising campaign and seeing which one drives more conversions. It is literally a comparison of “A” to “B,” with the letters perhaps referring to a webpage, an ad, etc.
If you are looking to optimize your conversion rate, A/B testing is a powerful tool. Data from the different versions can reveal positive changes that can lead to more conversions not only on the project at hand but additional marketing and ads going forward.
By using sophisticated tools we can test different varients of a contact form, as an example, and see which has a higher conversion rate.
Return On Ad Spend is one of the most important KPIs in digital advertising. In effect, it is a calculation of the cost of acquisition on an ad campaign.
First, you need to know how much you spent on ads. Next, you need to compare your spend to the money generated through advertising. This is the return on ad spend, which is a measure of cost effectiveness.
In addition to driving more conversions, conversion rate optimization can help you keep costs down. Although business owners and marketers can attempt to do this in-house, it is often worthwhile to partner with a marketing agency that can help you make sense of the financial aspects of your advertising and quantify the number of conversions compared to your expenditures.
