Sergei Krylov

Sergei Krylov | 2009-07-13

Conversion is all about getting right people to meet right products/services.

Thus, there are no other ways to boost conversion except make those people find products that they need on your site. Contrary, if web marketing efforts are managed poorly enough to bring people who do not need your product, or product is not good, nothing under the sun will save the conversion rate.

Those are fundamental factors that determine conversion rate levels and they are orders of magnitude more important than website optimization and conversion fine tuning. I can probably write the whole book on it. It is up to online marketing strategy, advertising expenditure and lots of work to establish this conversion fundamentals.

But imagine that you've spend a lot and worked hard to make right people to meet right products that they need on your site. The conversion process is almost done. But at this point conversion process is not yet complete and – most importantly! – vulnerable to few otherwise minor factors that may prevent converting those visitors into buyer, killing hard-earned conversion rate and revenues. These factors, if neglected, may put at risk entire investment into online marketing campaigns, SEO, PPC, social marketing, brand awareness building and many more.

Although this factors are not of strategic, fundamental importance, they still very important. They are subject of conversion process optimization and tuning. In fact, this is what we mean when we talk about website optimization.

Here they are – two major groups of those factors (most specific factors that various optimization publications mention actually fall into one of theses two groups):

Copy. Even if you know for sure that your site offers best products/services that your visitors can ever find, remember that they cannot read your thoughts. Visitors of the site should be presented with all information relevant to their purchase decision easily and instantly. If there is no enough information for buyer to make a purchase decision, this may cause that buyer to search this information somewhere else, offering your competitors a good chance to trap that buyer and increase conversion rates of their own site (at your expense, of course).

Consumer confidence. There are many things that can induce fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of your visitor even if he/she wants to purchase your product, including transaction risks, such as credit card fraud, no prior business record with your site, product quality concerns, etc. For example, nothing is better in provoking doubts than poor design of the web site and no contact info.

The important thing to realize about visitors conversion is that every customer acts in the sole interests buying product that he/she needs, while your interest is selling your product/service. You cannot quite see the world by the eyes of your customer, and cannot realize in detail what matters for specific customer, not to say that there are many of them each with its own slightly different motives, criteria, believes, etc. The only way to deal with this situation is using web analytics as intelligence tool to determine what matters for your customers to convert happily.

And finally, do not place too much, if any, hope that fancy web analytics tools will or even can think instead of you. Hoping that multivariate testing can automatically determine factors that increase conversion rate is like hoping that randomly generated sets of colored pixels will eventually produce Picasso painting. Тo test with web analytics, there should only be a few carefully pre-selected and well thought out variants based on deep understanding of your customers - random try and see is a way to nowhere, and a way for you and your team to spend a lot of time with zero productivity.

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Sergei Krylov, web analytics expert/consultant

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