Website Conversion Tracking, Landing Page Optimisation, and Testing

Let's start talking

Conversion optimisation is one of the most important things you can do to help boost your website and make more sales. It’s simple in theory and straightforward to implement. Anybody can do it, all you have to do is sacrifice a little time and effort to make it work.

Assessing your website and putting together a conversion optimisation plan is the first thing that you need to do. When you have this plan ready, you can implement it and begin the next part of the process: tracking, testing, and performing on-page optimisations.

By performing tracking and testing, you really begin to see what is and isn’t working on your website and then perform further optimisations, fixes, and roll out new page designs.

On this page, we are going to go over conversion tracking: what it is, how you do it, how you can make sure everything is tracking correctly, and how to choose and implement tests to see raw data and real-time results.

But First, A Little About Me

I am a digital marketing consultant and website designer based in Norfolk. My clients come from all over the world and I have been working in the digital marketing industry for around a decade. Throughout this time, I have worked on hundreds of projects that range from small website development gigs to producing SEO plans for large companies, and more.

My clients come from across a variety of industries. From small start-ups to household names, I have helped companies to get noticed on the web and earn more money through SEO audits, responsive website design, and content writing.

The purpose of this page is to introduce you to conversion tracking and testing, and briefly explain how you can do this for yourself. If you are willing to put in the effort, there is no reason why you cannot implement a robust conversion optimisation plan, track and test it, and see measurable results.

If you need any help, guidance, or would like to ask any questions, feel free to contact me. I am always here to help you achieve the best results possible with your available resources.

How I Can Help

My team and I are here to help you out with any problems you are facing or any questions you may have. Whether you have never even considered SEO in the past or have had a stab at it yourself, we want to help you get on track.

Between us, we have several years’ of practical experience working with small and large businesses in areas such as SEO, website design, content production, and digital marketing, amongst other things. I am confident that our processes, tools, and, methods are among some of the best in the digital marketing industry.

Working closely with you, my team and I can take a look at your website and apply a methodical process to figure out what the problems are and how severe they are, where they are coming from, and what can be done to resolve them. By applying our tried and tested approach, we will rebuild your site from the bottom-up if needs be so that you can see real and measurable improvements.

If you are interested in this or anything else, contact me to find out how my team and I can be of assistance.

What is Conversion Rate Tracking?

Conversion—any meaningful interaction between a visitor to your website and a desired goal, such as selling a product or gaining an additional subscriber to your mailing list.

When you begin to optimise your website in a bid to increase your conversion rates, it can be difficult to measure your success. Without being able to measure success, how can you know what does and does not work?

The key part to tracking conversions is defining key conversion goals and milestones as part of your conversion optimisation plan. With these goals, even if they are just rough ones, you can look at pieces of data in front of you and make educated guesses or informed decisions.

By tracking conversions and your overall conversion rate, you can find out where your website’s traffic is heading to from your homepage or other pages on your site. With this information, you can really focus your sales pitches, calls to action, or other elements.

Whilst tracking your conversions won’t lead to magic overnight results, it is highly useful for:

  • Finding flaws in your website and fixing them;
  • Making digital marketing decisions;
  • Identifying areas of the site to focus your sales efforts;
  • Seeing what parts of your site are performing well; and
  • Locating pages that are causing users to disengage,

amongst other things.

Conversion rate tracking forms a vital part of not only your overall website conversion efforts, but also SEO, digital marketing, and decision-making.

An important note on tracking: When you do get around to performing tests, ensure that your tools are tracking correctly both before and after tests are carried out. Changing your site’s pages, design, and other elements can disrupt tracking and you may need to re-configure your tools after changes are made.

Useful Tools to Help Track Conversions

With the right tools behind you, tracking conversions is a complete breeze. There are so many different pieces of kit out there that can do the bulk of the job for you, and best of all is that the majority are free. When tracking conversions, it is important that you are looking at who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, what they are doing on your website, and, ultimately, which pages are giving you the best conversions.

1. Google Analytics

The most popular tool, and for good reason, is Google Analytics. It is a completely free service that provides data visualization for segmentation and subset analysis. In addition, it generates custom reports and can be used for tracking all types of data and interactions. It is by far one of the most popular tools and is used by most websites. It is very much the industry standard.

2. KissMetrics

Although it is not free, KissMetrics is ideal for small-to-medium sized business. It is intuitive and easy to use with an in-built conversions process. Using this, you can break down your site and pinpoint where visitors are coming from and where adjustments are necessary in-order to increase your conversion rate.

3. CrazyEgg

Another free tool, CrazyEgg is an analytics tool that also tracks movement. Using CrazyEgg, you can see where customers are spending most of their time on your site with heatmaps. Additionally, all clicks are tracked and displayed using their Confetti feature. Whilst this is a premium feature, it’s cost-effective—starting at $29 U.S. Dollars—and can provide answers to vital questions such as:

  • Are visitors scrolling down pages before leaving?
  • Is any information been highlighted and copied?
  • Are CTAs and sales copy even been seen?

All CrazyEgg plans are free for the first 30 days.

Other Tools and Resources

In my opinion, you only really need Google Analytics to perform basic conversion optimisation. It is the best tool to use if you are new to the concept of conversion rates and have never looked at conversion optimisation before. Other tools such as KissMetrics and CrazyEgg become useful further down the line when you need deeper analytics.

What Should I Be Testing?

This is by far the most common question I am asked when it comes to conversion tracking and testing. To put it as briefly as possible, it depends on your website.

There are hundreds if not thousands of different elements and factors that can have an impact on conversion rates and the tests that you should be performing depend highly on your individual website. By putting together a website conversion optimisation plan and doing some initial tracking, you will easily see a few areas that require looking at and further testing.

When you perform initial tracking and start carrying out your first tests, everything will begin to snowball. Soon, you will find yourself with many pages, elements, and other things to test.

This is known as A/B testing and three of the most commonly tested elements are:

1. Landing Page Copy

Your landing page’s copy is going to be the first thing potential customers see and it is important to get it right.

  • Is it too long?
  • Do you misspell words?
  • Is it littered with bad grammar?
  • Is it easy to read, or are there lots of big words?
  • Is it superfluous?

Changing up your landing page copy to something that’s straightforward, easy to read, uses a plain font, and doesn’t try to be too clever will make the best impression.

2. Calls to Action (e.g. “Join our mailing list now!”)

Most successful sites have some form of call-to-action nestled towards the bottom of their landing page or in another key area such as the sidebar. Conversion tracking will reveal whether people are seeing and interacting with your CTA or ignoring it altogether.

  • Is your CTA too small?
  • Is it out of place?
  • Does it encourage your visitor to do something, or does it just say, “Click Here!”?
  • Is it designed in a way that complements your site?

With a CTA, you should be tracking the clickthrough rate—how many people are clicking your CTA—and the conversion rate—how many of those people end up making a sale—to truly understand whether it is suitable.

For CTAs, you can experiment with different colors, wording, fonts, whether the CTA is fixed on the page or slides in, its size, and where it is located, amongst other things.

3. Social Share Buttons

Social share buttons are great, but they can still be used incorrectly. Not littering your site with social share buttons, placing them in the right places, and excluding them from certain pages is a good start.

For example, it’s better to nestle your social share buttons in your landing page’s footer or at the top of the page, whereas on your blog it is more appropriate to place them in the sidebar next to a post. On your sales page, it’s often good to remove them completely. Why? Because when visitors are on your sales page, you don’t want them to be distracted by anything else.

Find What Works for You

Conversion rate optimisation and testing is a long-term process, it’s not something that can be done overnight. A huge part of this process is assessing your website, putting together a plan and finding out what works (and what doesn’t work) for your own site.

You may need to test five, six, seven or more different calls to action before you find the right one for you, for example.

Performing Post-Test Analysis and Deciding on Next Steps

When your initial tests have concluded, it is important to disseminate and examine the data. This will help you with decision-making such as whether to change up your site’s elements, whether certain pages need a complete overhaul, or whether further testing needs to be performed.

A Successful Test: Putting Everything Together

If your A/B testing was successful, the first thing that you need to do is begin the steps to implement the successful changes you made onto your live website. From a successful A/B test, you can also identify additional opportunities to make further improvements by performing new iterations of the test.

Don’t throw away your data when you have finished with this, however. It is important to properly document your test and keep all the data so that when you are looking to perform future A/B tests, you have valuable reference points and information that can bolster them.

An Unsuccessful Test: What Now?

A/B testing can ‘fail’ or yield insignificant results for several different reasons.

Aside from obvious problems such as the improper setting up of tools or bad execution, a lack of significant results can mean that the elements you were testing weren’t problematic in the first place. If you have tried three different CTAs and all three had the same CTR, the CTA probably wasn’t having an impact on your conversion rates in the first place.

Look at the data you got from the A/B testing process anyway to see if there are any changes you can make despite the failure, or if the testing highlighted other things that could be tested.

Deciding on Your Next Steps

If you have found a lot of problems during your tracking and A/B testing, it may be wise to completely overhaul key pages. If small conversions to your key pages such as your landing page, product pages, and sales pages are making a huge difference, a page re-design could deliver results that small optimisations will never deliver.

Re-designing individual pages is also something you can do, but we always recommend exploring your options and outsourcing it for best results, particularly if you don’t have any substantive experience with website design and development.

If your tracking and testing is showing marginal improvements and not all your changes are delivering measurable results, it is likely that a complete re-design won’t be worth it. If your page is already well-designed and suitable, simply optimising key elements should be enough to deliver the results you are searching for.

When Should I Consult a Professional?

This is a decision only you can make.

Whilst it is always recommended to outsource conversion optimisation and other SEO elements to experienced digital marketing professionals, this isn’t always necessary. It depends entirely on your own needs and resources. After all, anybody can perform conversion optimisation.

When you take time to do your research, learn about the tools you will need and put a robust plan in place, conversion optimisation and testing is something that anybody can do regardless of experience or technical ability. You don’t require any specialist skills.

Consulting a professional like myself and my team, though, will always result in the best possible results. I have spent several years working with clients operating in all industries all across the world to carry out web design and SEO, including conversion rate optimisation assessment, planning, testing, and implementation.

When you are running your own business, your time is valuable and is often better-spent on managing your company’s day-to-day operations.

There is no right or wrong time to utilise professional services such as mine. If you want to give it a go for yourself then go ahead… in fact, I encourage this! It’s always a great idea to take time and learn about the things that are key to your website’s success.

Do you need help with your business?

If you would like to talk about getting your marketing where it should be, get in touch now.