Ways to gather valuable insights to improve CRO
Understanding your audience behaviour is the first step in improving your CRO. Here we highlight the best ways to gather data to get invaluable insights.
You may think your shiny new website is perfect but the reality is, your website never reaches its maximum potential until it’s rigorously experimented with. And this goes for pretty much every industry out there.
And so whether you want people to buy a product, click ‘add to cart’, sign up for a service, provide their email, or click through a link, conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is key.
But to improve your CRO, you need to understand the behaviour of the people visiting your site and for that, you need data. With that in mind, here are some ways you can gather valuable insights to improve your CRO.
A/B testing
A/B is where you compare the current version of a web page, section or component with a new version and then measure the results. Things can be changed include the layout of the page, the imagery used, the heading sizes, the font etc. But you don’t want to change too many things at once as it can become confusing to highlight which bit of the page helped it convert. It’s worth noting that you should always have a metric in mind that you want to measure or a specific goal to achieve before you do your test. This may be getting people to buy a product or it could be something like signing up for a newsletter. Only then can you really decide which version performed better.
By strategically changing small details you can refine your website pages until you’ve developed the highest converting one.
Heatmaps
A heatmap is a visual guide in which you can see the exact amount of clicks on a page. Heatmaps are pretty straightforward: the brighter the spots are on your webpage, the more people that clicked. The darker the area, the fewer clicks in that place. Depending on what is being tracked, there are different ways in which heatmaps can be used.
Mouse movement
A mouse movement heatmap shows the patterns people take to read and navigate around a web page. Using thermal imaging, it records where visitors are hovering, clicking, scrolling, and pausing through your website. You can use mouse movement heatmaps to identify popular parts of the page that grab the most attention but on the flip side, identify any frustrations or pain points. For example, does something appear clickable but it isn’t?
This type of heatmap may also be useful in highlighting any confusing parts of your website, for example in ecommerce websites when users are adding products to a cart and they try to figure out whether the site offers free delivery.
Scroll maps
Scroll maps help to show where users scroll down and eventually bounce off of the page. If you have longer, more complex web pages that offer up a lot of content, it can be useful to know how far down the page people get before leaving. You can use this information to restructure or change the content on your pages. For example, is your CTA too low down for people to scroll and find? Have you got interesting or valuable content at the bottom of the page that people are missing?
Click maps
Click maps show where users have clicked the most on a certain page. They help website owners track on-page user engagement, such as clicks on buttons, links and images. If a certain part of your web page isn’t getting any action, you may want to change that and optimise the page better.
Through heat mapping you can gather insight into things like how long your users stay on the page, places that get little or no interaction and where your most popular CTAs are located. This knowledge can then be used to create the perfect customer journey with a view to boost CRO.
Specialist CRO help
While the above may seem straightforward in theory, it can be difficult to put it into practice. As CRO specialists, we have the tools, knowledge and experience to help businesses improve their conversion rates and grow their businesses. If you’re not getting the leads you want, let us help. Contact the team today.
