With most any website, your key goal is to get visitors to convert on a page/offer/content piece and become a valuable contact with whom you can begin to nurture and build a strong, ongoing relationship.
If you’re at a point where you’re struggling to find ways to improve conversions on your website, one key area to look at is your site’s attribution reports to see what pages are helping convert visitors to leads and which page(s) visitors had viewed before they converted.
Not only will this help you discover the star achievers that are generating contacts, you’ll also find the duds that, with a little more marketing love, may improve their conversion capabilities. Along the way, you’ll also discover a few things that you may want to apply to your other inbound marketing tactics.
If you’re a HubSpot user, you can create easy attribution reports to analyze page conversion performance. You can easily set these up to view data by date range (e.g., all time, last month, this year), by the type of page (e.g., web page, blog page, landing page), and/or the type of conversion (e.g., lead versus customer). Each of these reports provides you with a number and a percent of contacts conversion number—the higher the number, the better the page is at converting visitors and/or leads.
If you’re using Google Analytics, you can also access and review attribution reports, but it can be a little more time-intensive as the data are more deep and granular.
With your attribution reports created, you can begin identifying patterns and trends among the star performers. Look for commonalities such as:
After you identify the commonalities between your top performing pages, it’s time to review the duds to see what similarities they may have as well. This information will be equally valuable and can help determine what things may be trends and what are anomalies.
Take the commonalities you’ve discovered from your best and least converting pages, summarize them, and then contemplate how you’ll want to apply what you’ve learned to your broader inbound marketing efforts—both for new initiatives and retroactively.
In your page conversion analysis, if you’re seeing Tip Sheets are providing more conversions than eBooks, it’s probably an indication that this format is preferred. Going forward, it will most likely be to your advantage to develop content in this format to gain more conversions. Similarly, if certain blog article topics are performing well (e.g., technical/how-to topics versus business processes) then you should consider how to optimize those topics in your overall efforts.
Re-examine your lead nurturing campaign and tweak the content of the emails in your nurturing workflows to add in more relevant, better-converting content. Doing so will certainly improve the performance of your workflows, increasing lead and/or customer conversions.
Look at the CTAs on your lowest performing pages, since they’re the ones not converting, either because they don’t jive with the page content (in terms of the offer itself or the funnel stage) or the landing page the CTA goes to just isn’t working as well as it should.
How do you know the difference? If the CTA is pointing to a landing page with a high conversion rate, it’s likely that the CTA itself is the issue and needs attention in terms of design, placement, or content. This is a great opportunity to do some testing of different designs and formats.
However, if CTA clicks are doing fine but the conversion rate on the landing page is low, it’s likely that the landing page itself needs some additional love in terms of the type of offer/targeted funnel stage, layout, or verbiage.
You’re busy, so you’re not going to be able to tackle making changes all at once. Prioritize what changes you want to make and plan out how you want to make improvements in a way that works for your operating environment. You could take the approach of targeting your lowest converting pages first and then measure the results to determine what works. Or maybe you’d prefer to select a single element to implement (e.g., CTAs) and apply that change across the board to see how it impacts performance. Regardless of how you decide to approach, make sure to document what you want to do and remember to go back and measure how effective the changes were.
Improving your conversion rates starts with pulling some data and taking a bit of time to do some analysis that can help you understand how successful your website is. Without doing so, your efforts won’t be anything more than guesswork.
Topics: Conversion Rate Optimization, Content Marketing, Marketing Automation
