When people want to understand website performance, one of the key metrics they want to look at is their ecommerce conversion rate.
Understanding the website conversion rate is important as it tells you the rate at which people visit your site compared to when they convert.
Conversions vary between businesses, as this can be sign up forms, contact queries, shopping basket completions and downloads.
Website conversion rates vary across different industries. According to Smart Insights, the average ecommerce conversion rate for consumer electrics is the lowest at 1.4%, while the highest is gifts, which is at 4.9%.
Here are the average ecommerce conversion rates based on industries:
- Gifts 4.9%
- Health & Pharmacy 4.6%
- Apparel & Footwear 4.2%
- Other 3.4%
- Sports 3.1%
- Jewellery & Cosmetics 2.9%
- Major Chains 2.3%
- Home Furnishing & Décor 2.3%
- Automotive 2.2%
- DIY & Tools 1.7%
- Consumer Electronics 1.4%
If you find yourself being part of a business within an industry and your ecommerce conversion rate is under the average, then it may be time to consider a conversion rate optimisation strategy.
Conversion rate optimisation is a program that enables you to make specific changes on your website with an aim to drive conversions.
When creating a conversion rate optimisation strategy, your strategy should be placed on key findings based on quantitative and qualitative elements.
We have written this blog to provide you with four top conversion rate optimisation tools that will help you boost your conversions and increase your revenues.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free digital analytics reporting tool that shows you user behaviour and insights on your website. You can find out where users are coming from, what pages they visit, what products/services they are interested in and much more.
It is a common install on many websites, but we were surprised when conducting audits that there were many websites that did not have this installed.
If used correctly, Google Analytics can help with providing valuable insights that can shape the conversion rate optimisation process for your business.
With the ability to collect data from your website, Google Analytics creates reports that allows you to understand user behaviour that you can then use when conducting a conversion rate optimisation strategy.
For example, you can find which pages drive traffic but have high bounce rates, which channels are not converting, and what devices are performing poorly.
Once you have gathered this information, you will be in a stronger position from a quantitative viewpoint to develop a solid conversion rate optimisation strategy.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is another powerful, free tool from Google. It allows you to place tags on the website that can then be used via Google Analytics to look at specific behaviours.
This tag management tool also allows you to quickly install third party applications, so you do not have to get a developer to do so via your website, freeing up time for more important things.
Google Tag Manager is a great tool to help with creating a conversion rate optimisation strategy as you can tag almost anything on a website. For example, if you wanted to create unique conversion goals to get usage statistics, you can create specific tags and then go into Google Analytics and create custom reports. This can be things such as:
- Usage of navigation bars on specific pages
- When the search function is used
- Click behaviour based on specific elements and pages
When working with an ecommerce conversion rate optimisation agency, one of the main things they do is go through the website and look at any possible conversion barrier or opportunity and look at creating unique tags.
These can also be referred to as micro-conversions, which is a powerful analysis that helps you get users further down the customer journey at efficient rates. Read our micro-conversions blog to find out how these can benefit your business moving forward.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a tool that allows you to understand what users are doing on your website using heatmaps and recordings. The tool also allows you to collect feedback and create surveys to get deeper qualitative learnings.
Heatmaps are a visual representation of what users are doing on your website. It highlights sections of your website regarding to frequency.
From this, you can find answers to specific questions such as whether people are seeing important content? How are people behaving with non-clickable elements? Are there any distractions? What patterns are formed across devices?
Their session recordings allow you to see exactly what your users see and what they do on your website. Hotjar allows you to see visitors clicks, taps and movements so you can see whether certain elements of the website hold value or causes distractions.
The pricing for Hotjar varies as it ranges from a free plan to an agency account. The free plan is limited though and if you are a website with on average 20,000 pageviews a day, you would be best to choose a business plan.
VWO
VWO is a powerful SaaS tool allows you to successfully run your conversion rate optimisation strategy.
It is an intuitive tool with great front-end capabilities that allow you to run A/B tests, Split URL tests, Multivariate tests and much more.
When looking at running A/B, Split URL and Multivariate tests, it is important to be able to segment your target audience and create experiments without much hassle. From one platform you can discover your analysis, create hypotheses, perform tests and also see results.
While there are other tools available, we found VWO to be highly affordable. Their plans vary, with some plans giving you advanced features for understanding user behaviour.
Pricing starts from $99 a month but the services offered are limited. They do have a high-end plan known as VWO Full stack, which providers server-side testing and gives you much more control.
Next Steps
Now that we have given you these super conversion rate optimisation tools to use, we hope you take this to help you when creating a conversion rate optimisation strategy.
Whether you are doing this internally, or looking for an agency, we believe these tools will be ideal in helping you take your company to the next step.
When looking for a conversion rate optimisation agency, be sure to ask about the work they have done in your sector or similar examples – it is always good to get an understanding of what they can offer and what successes they have seen previously.
We offer a free conversion rate optimisation audit to help businesses look at areas of concern as part of our conversion rate optimisation services. If you are interested in finding out more, why not speak to one of our experts today by contacting us.
