How to Optimize Your E-commerce Website Conversion Rate
When your website visits aren’t converting to sales, it's beyond frustrating. The key to improving your sales conversations is making strategic decisions based on the data found in your website analytics rather than relying on gut instinct.
In this episode of The E-commerce Revolution podcast, Ramin Ramhormozi and Craig Connelly discuss conversion rate optimization (CRO) and how to turn your website’s traffic and keyword data into a CRO strategy that drives sales.
Craig Connelly has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing optimization and data auditing working with businesses in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Craig is a self-described "data-analysis nerd" and lives and breathes this topic.
Ramin and Craig talk about the importance of advertising, website speed, device compatibility, and knowing your target audience. They also discuss how utilizing Google Analytics plays a significant role in the success of an e-commerce business.
What is conversion rate optimization?
Ramin: So let's explain to the audience what conversion optimization is and what it means.
Craig: Most people have a website and think that putting a website up and getting a designer to design it and make it look pretty, then whacking up a few ads that add a bit of traffic, the world's going to be perfect.
And it's very far from that because a lot of these sites don't convert, and there are all sorts of reasons for that. And I don't think anybody knows when they first do a landing page or if they build a website if it's going to convert or not. So that's what I do. I get involved and find out why they're not converting.
We try different testing mechanisms and different ads and all different stuff to get it converting and fix the basics of the sites, such as the speed. It's a pretty involved little area, but I've got some tips listed here. A lot of it is very simple. You don't have to be intelligent. But you need a little bit of time to look at the data.
Ramin: So where do you start? When you take on a conversion optimization project, whether you're doing it for yourself or you're doing it for a client, where's the first place you start?
Craig: Google analytics. I spend a lot of time in Google analytics. I use some paid tools, but that is the place for me.
Get The Basics Right in Your CRO Strategy
Ramin: What are you exactly looking for if we're talking about one of the category pages or collection pages on an e-commerce site?
Craig: I'm mainly looking at drop-off rates and just getting a bit of a feel and trying to work out what that page is ranking for.
Ramin: So when you're in Google analytics, and you start to see the data, and you see the bounce rate - when you start to apply some of these conversion optimization methods, are you doing several at the same time, or are you making small incremental changes?
Craig: I'm doing several at the same time, but normally - so that I can make it clear what happens:
The first thing we do is get the basics. So more often than not, a lot of these sites that I get involved in are running very, very slow. I did one yesterday where Shopify was running slow because there are about 20 YouTube videos on the front page. But speed never seems to be an issue with Shopify, but a lot of the other sites that I get involved with are custom built, and the speed is a big issue.
So we always start with that to answer your question. So once the foundation has been placed, we are doing things and then measuring it, so doing one thing and measuring it. We might be doing four things at once in different areas and measuring them all.
Ramin: Okay. Then do you annotate the dates - this was when we made this change, this is when we made this change - so you can go back and look at the data during that time period?
Craig: Yeah. So I always, always keep a record of what we're doing. You can get tripped up by just going crazy and testing, having different landing pages and all sorts of things, and it just starts getting out of hand.
So now I keep it simple, but the basics to do with the drop-off rates on a page and what the page is ranking for are so important. And you can get that data through Google search console. So Google search console and Google analytics are the areas I spend the most time in. And there's just incredible learning within Google search console now.
I think what a lot of people don't realize is that around 50% of the searches on Google every day are brand new. The Google search keyword tool is great, but there's just so much gold in the search console in the keyword area.
Ramin: Wow, 50%. I had no idea.
Craig: Well, I think it's up to 30%. I don't know if they can give an accurate thing, but I know that it's roundabout that number. The evidence is if you go into Google search console and look at the keywords that Google is showing that they are associating with your website (not necessarily that you're ranked for), and then look in the keyword tool and the Google ad campaign area, those words sometimes say "zero traffic." But there could be 3000 searches a month for them.
Diagnosing Your E-commerce Conversion Rate Problems
Ramin: Can you see where the problems are on a site right away?
Craig: Not necessarily, no. I'll tell you a little story. I did a course recently, which was $5,000, on conversion optimization. And the main thing I learned from that $5,000 course is that they have no idea what's going to convert or not convert. And they had a campaign that was generating $20,000 a day. They gave that campaign to somebody else, same ads, same landing page, everything identical, and it flopped with paid traffic.
Ramin: So why is that? Because with testing, you don't know what's going to work and what's not going to work.
Craig: No idea. About three weeks ago, a fellow who was a professional copywriter set up his own business selling heart defibrillators.
And he wrote the copy for the page, and he said, all right, let the traffic go. So we let the traffic go. We've spent nearly 5K on traffic. He got one sale. You never know. You've got to keep mucking around and trying and testing things.
Ramin: So, let's say Joe DIY runs his site, his own e-commerce business. Maybe he is not in a position to hire an agency. Where would you point him to first?
Craig: I would tell him to go out and go and speak to 10 of his target audience and get them to physically use the site in front of him.
We recently did a housing company. And we had a lot of drop-offs right on some of these pages for displaying the houses. And it wasn't until we got actual users using the mobile phones, and I can show you exactly what they did: Big smiles. Look at these beautiful houses. It was all smiles, and then they did this (frowns).
It was a simple thing. They couldn't slide the photos. It was as simple as that.
In actual fact, the photographs did slide. It's just the actual plugin or whatever it was. They just weren't fast enough. So you would slide, and nothing would happen. And that page just had a huge drop-off. So people would come on there, look at it, start doing this, and then they wouldn't work.
Focusing Your CRO Strategy for Desktop or Mobile Traffic
Ramin: What's the rule of thumb regarding how much time somebody will spend on your site before they get frustrated and leave?
Craig: One of the first things that I would do is look at your ratios of desktop versus mobile. If you've got high desktop traffic and want to focus on that, fine, but mobile is super important. And most people design websites for desktops.
You can go and look at your conversions and see mobile versus desktop. I often see it where mobile is 60 or 70% of the traffic and has fewer conversions—so major issues.
Website Themes Affect Your Conversion Rate Optimization
Ramin: You mentioned Shopify from a speed standpoint is good. If somebody has got to pick between WordPress & WooCommerce versus Shopify, what do they need to know when it comes to conversion optimization?
Craig: Typically, most of the businesses I am involved with aren't on there changing products every five minutes. Their products are quite standard. So if that is the case and they're using WooCommerce, and they're using these hideous slow themes from WordPress, we rebuild a site and code.
So if you need to make a change on the main pages, you do it in the code, not through an editor. And that gets us up at 90% speed most of the time.
You can get it very, very fast, but as soon as you revert to the theme, you're back to 20% or something with mobile.
Ramin: When it comes to conversion optimization, how often are you getting in there and changing things because you felt that the theme wasn't doing a good enough job of converting that audience?
Craig: Very rare. Most of the problems have been around these page builder things. It might not even be the theme. It could be the page builder part of the theme.
I know these companies are working very hard to make it faster. It makes it so much harder when you've got these real chunky bolt themes that are slow to load. It makes it harder for your users.
An Expert Tip on Conversion Rate Optimization for Ads
Ramin: We're talking about doing conversion optimization on websites, but optimization also plays a role in advertising. Where's the first place somebody goes to see if they have a problem with their ads and if they should optimize.
Craig: Well, hopefully, they have everything set up: analytics talking to ads and their analytics is set up for e-commerce. So hopefully, everything is connected.
The ad platforms should be the same as analytics. It never matches exactly, but it's always, always close. If you had three ads running and two ads generating income, and the third one's not so good.
Well, the one that's generating income, rehash that. Make another version of it with a different headline and keep testing those and improving on the ads. But that's what most people don't do.
So that's a simple thing to do. And then you can see the data and say, okay, I just changed that ad there last week. Let's have a look. Well, this one's working way better than that one.
Here's my tip: In Google search console, in the performance tab, you will see all the keywords that you're in the top 104. And I would say 60% of those keywords are not in the Google keyword tool. So these are new terms that you are not familiar with, and you can see the impression so you can see how many times people are searching for them.
So what you do is you go through that, and you also see where you're ranking in whatever country you are in. Pluck out the keywords that are relevant to you. Now, if you want to get things going quicker, look for keywords with the intention to buy, which are better, but they don't always present themselves.
Ramin: And, to explain: intention to buy means words like action-oriented words, right?
Craig: So something like, "best cotton t-shirt" or something. And then, from there, start weaving these keywords into your site onto the product pages. If you've got a product with five different options of size or something like that, keep weaving it into each description and do this over a period of three or four months and sit back and wait. You'll be amazed.
An Australian business did this. In their biggest audit using Google search console, they identified five keywords that they had no idea even existed because they were local terms used in this particular part of Australia. So that was a massive opportunity for them: to tap into this market by using these terms on their site, woven into some of the About pages and the home page, etc.
So you have to do it in a way that reads beautifully and makes sense. You're not trying to jam these keywords randomly because Google won't appreciate that. But this would be one of the best tips I can give is to use Google search console, and our Google search console needs to be set up for at least six months before this data starts to come through.
Ramin: That's amazing because new words are coming into existence or new keywords are coming into existence all the time. You're saying that Google isn't necessarily keeping up with what is being tracked inside the search console.
Craig: That's right. The next part is to find out what is ranking in Google for these terms.
Ramin: So now you have an opportunity to get what we'll call slightly free traffic here, potentially driving this traffic into your site. This provides you with a great opportunity to apply some conversion optimization techniques to these pages that are suddenly getting traffic.
So now you're looking at these pages and looking in Google analytics and looking at the bounce rates of these pages, you know, identifying how you continue to grow more out of what you just got? You just were able to pull in; now you want to lift. And that's where conversion optimization comes in.
Facebook Ads and Behavior Flow in Your CRO Strategy
Craig: Look at behavior flow. Behavior flow takes a little bit of time to get your head around. It's a bit overwhelming at first, but you need a bit of time. That's all it is. It's not complicated. You need to sit down quietly by yourself and go through it.
And there are heaps of YouTube videos teaching, but the challenge is having that time to look at it. I think most business owners don't have the time. So they pay someone like me to do it.
The other thing I was going to mention is Facebook ads. This is the other thing that you can test. Just do some tests based on the audience because Facebook seems bad for conversions. And a lot of people left Facebook and went on to Google shopping.
And it seems like the trend is starting to come back again now. It was like Facebook last year must have had a shortage of ads or something because it was quite difficult. The conversion costs were a lot higher than in previous years.
And now it's making a bit of a comeback. So that one's been working quite well. Try different audience segments. You might try people looking for girls, or people looking for clothing, or whatever you're into.
4 Free Tools for Conversion Rate Optimization
Ramin: Outside of Google analytics and search console, what tools do you use for conversion optimization?
Craig: I use SE Ranking. I mainly use it to look at the competitors to see what they're into and check the strength of their sites. But I spend most of my time in Google Analytics and Google search console.
I think that with those two platforms alone, you could spend a year learning them properly.
I use WriterZen for writing content. Pretty much what they do is they go out and take the top 20 websites ranking for the term you want to rank for and give you all the information you need to know about what is required to rank and what you need to put in your content and that sort of stuff.
And the other best free tool out there is people. And I think the best advice is: don't listen to the close people around you because they are not your target audience. Go out and find the target audience.
I've just walked up to people on the street and said, Hey, do you mind? You got five minutes? Would you mind just looking at this? And everyone (working on the project) had made the assumption that every person would use this acronym to make a million dollars. Well, the reality was completely different.
And the other thing I've got here is that if you're a new site and want to get things going quickly, you can try ads for "free plus shipping." And that way, you're going to end up with an email address.
You're running an ad campaign for a product that people buy for free, and they pay shipping.
You're basically buying an email address, and if you break even on the thing, there's a chance of getting future business from these people.
If you're new, that's quite a good way to get up and running and get things going, and you can get a feel for conversion optimization.
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Start Optimizing Your E-commerce Website for Killer Conversion Rates
Building strong conversion rates takes time, and you have to optimize your website with an informed strategy. Start looking at your Google analytics and search console with purpose, make decisions with the data you find, and test those changes.
If you'd like to speak with Craig about conversion rate optimization for your e-commerce website, you can contact him at https://www.craigconnelly.co.nz/. You can watch the full podcast on our YouTube channel, listen in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio (or wherever else you listen to your favorite podcasts).
And as always, the team here at SKU Agency is ready to help you convert your website visits and lift your sales with data-driven SMS and email marketing strategy. Get in touch today.
