Digital content creators and editorial teams are always on the lookout for useful tools that help them deliver every reader a more engaging and relevant reading experience. Creating the smoothest experience of your website is the key to keeping those readers, and thus converting those readers into sales.
There is a big amount of things to consider when developing a strategy for optimizing your WordPress website. It is important to look at the most effective techniques for improving your website and optimizing your conversion rate. But first things first.
What does conversion rate means?
“Conversion rate” is the percentage of your visitors who end up reaching a given goal or performing a certain action.
Examples of these actions may be:
- Visiting a certain page or post within your website
- Visiting an external page
- Signing up for your newsletter (speaking of newsletters, make sure to sign up for our newsletter -it’s as useful as this article)
- Reading a whole article
- Remaining more than 2 minutes in your landing page
Which are the benefits of increasing your conversion rate?
If you double your website’s conversion rate, you will halve your “cost-per-acquisition” (CPA, i.e., how it costs to get each new customer). Here, you’ll find how extra you’ll earn.
Note that when your conversion rate does increase, instead of just sitting back and enjoy your profits, you can now afford to pay twice as much per visitor (either paying twice on AdWords or advertising in media that had previously been too expensive) and your affiliates can earn twice as much as before.
Which are the best techniques to increase your conversion rate?
A/B or Split testing is recognised as the best technique to increase your conversion rate. For example: if you have two possible headlines for a new post but are not able to decide which one use, you can run an A/B test or split test in which
- Half of your visitors see Headline A, and
- The other half see Headline B.
You then evaluate which headline brings in the most readers and leave that one as the permanent one.
Another relevant technique is to create Heatmaps and Clickmaps of your pages or posts. This technique shows graphical representations of where your readers click or spend more time with their cursor on your WordPress site. Clickmap and heatmap experiments can help you better understand your visitors because you can track what appeals to them. Clearly see which areas on your site are hot-spots and use this information to improve your WordPress site is a win.
Let’s see more details about how to start your testing.
Nelio A/B Testing
I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.
Josette Millar
The Process
If you are the owner of your blog or site, probably already have an idea of what to test. However, we recommend to follow the steps described below
1. Analyse, first, your landing page
The first task to do is asking yourself if every element in your website is the right one and whether it is in the right place.
The following illustrating example may help you on this task:
We want to improve the conversion rate of our WPrincipiante landing page, so, what to test? Well, our first thoughts are the following:
2. Identify your goals
The second step is to identify which are the elements in your website that bring you the most overall profit, that is, which your real goals are.
In our WPrincipiante website, our main goals are:
- Visiting and reading our published posts
- Clicking to our ads
- Sharing our website in social networks
- Remaining more than 2 minutes in our landing page
3. Map each goal, to the elements that can help you reach it
Next step is to map the elements identified in the first step to the goals identified in the second one. This mapping helps to identify what to test first.
Note that usually there is a bunch of elements that help reaching a goal and one element may help reach more than one goal.
In our current example, an approximation to this matching could be:
4. Start creating tests with Nelio A/B Testing
Performing all these tests is an easy task with Nelio A/B Testing:
- Getting started only requires subscribing to one of our plans and installing a WordPress plugin.
- It does not require help from designers and developers.
- It has been designed to be exclusively for WordPress.
- You only use WordPress built-in editors to create all type of tests and visualize results within WordPress.
Once installed the plugin and activated the service, you can create as many different versions as you want of your website, using the already known WordPress built-in functions.
Current version of the service (which is 3.2 at the moment of publishing this post) allows you to test alternatives for:
- Headlines of your Posts,
- Content of Pages and Posts
- Themes
- CSS variants
- Heatmaps and Clickmaps
Our development team is working hard to deliver new experiments, new conversion actions and new possibilities to help you improve your site the easy way.
In following post, Increase the Readers for your posts!, we explain which experiments should we create to reach the goals aforementioned. Contiue reading!
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