Conversion analysis is the cornerstone of any efforts to increase leads on your website. Without it, you can’t tell whether any of your experiments or optimizations are working. We’ll show you three ways you can leverage conversion analysis on your shopping cart, landing pages, and blog posts.
What Is Conversion Analysis?
Conversion analysis is a method of tracking your website visitors’ actions to see whether they do what you hope they will—convert—or drop off. A conversion analysis can help you identify which kinds of customers and which types of actions correspond to conversion, as well as when and where users fail to convert. It measures the impact of your experiments and tells you what’s working to increase conversions, and what isn’t.
To conduct a conversion analysis, you have to understand your customers’ journey. The best way to do this is to map out each step a customer takes in a conversion funnel so that you have an overview of the ideal steps needed to convert your website visitors into customers.
You can conduct a conversion analysis on any part of your product or website where you expect users to convert. Three common areas for conversion analysis include the shopping cart, landing page, and blog post.
Shopping Cart Conversion Analysis
Shopping cart conversions are the final step in an ecommerce conversion funnel. Understanding why your visitors aren’t making the purchase is key to increasing your bottom line.
Three Ways to Use Conversion Analysis on Your Shopping Cart
Here are three common ways to test and optimize your shopping cart:
1. Test shipping cost variations.
Online shoppers have become increasingly sensitive to shipping costs. It’s a major driver of shopping cart abandonment. Using Amplitude’s funnel analysis, delivery tech startup Rappi found that it didn’t matter which stage of the checkout they displayed shipping costs in—users would still churn. But by offering free shipping when customers placed an order over a certain amount, they incentivized larger order sizes, increasing each transaction by 15% on average.
2. Improve the customer experience with personalization.
Customer experience is one of the most important factors in any ecommerce conversion. It’s also a primary driver of customer retention. Blue Apron was investigating cart abandonment for their meal delivery service and used Amplitude Engage and Optimizely to test personalized messages to users who didn’t complete their purchase. As a result, they increased conversions by 7%.
3. Look for conversion drivers.
The Conversion Drivers feature in Amplitude identifies all the actions that take place in-between steps in your conversion funnel. It then gives each action a correlation score to tell you whether it is encouraging or discouraging conversion. Find out what actions users take right before the shopping cart page that impact their experience there. This will help you promote the behaviors associated with conversion.
Landing Page Conversion Analysis
A landing page is a standalone web page that you direct visitors to from various channels. It should ask users to complete an action, such as signing up for a free trial, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading an ebook. A conversion analysis of the landing page will show you how many users completed the action and measure your progress as you experiment to increase that number.
Three Ways to Use Conversion Analysis on Your Landing Page
Here are three common ways to test your landing page.
1. Remove friction in the signup flow.
Unbounce defines friction as “the psychological resistance that your visitors experience when trying to complete an action.” It’s your job to lessen that resistance by making the signup as simple and easy as possible. Some of that involves making sure the page design elements are clear and understandable, not overwhelming and busy. Additionally, don’t ask the user to fill in form fields unless they are absolutely necessary. If you only need an email address, don’t ask for their name, company, job title, etc. Test each iteration and see which increases your conversion rate.
2. Test different messages.
How you frame your call to action can have a big impact on whether users see the value of participating. If you want people to download an ebook, frame the ebook’s content in several ways and use A/B testing to see which message resonates the most. The same goes for the messaging for free trial offers.
3. Compare different platforms.
Run a conversion analysis segmented by what platform people use to visit your website—desktop versus mobile, for example. If there are significant differences between platforms, investigate why. You might have a bug or a platform-specific problem with formatting that is preventing users from converting.
In Amplitude, you can run this type of analysis using the properties feature on Conversion Drivers. Conversion Drivers allows teams to easily understand which platforms, plan types, campaigns, and channels are driving growth.
Blog Post Conversion Analysis
Companies use blog posts to address a variety of needs, from generating top-of-the-funnel traffic to converting qualified leads. A conversion analysis of your blog posts will help you identify how to optimize individual articles and find opportunities to convert traffic into leads.
Three Ways to Use Conversion Analysis on Your Blog Post
Here are three common ways to test and optimize your blog posts.
1. Use Amplitude’s Pathfinder to discover blog posts linked to conversion.
Pathfinder helps you see all the different ways users navigate your product or website. By looking at what actions users take after reading your blog posts, you’ll be able to find the ones that are linked to conversions—even if those conversions are a couple of steps removed. Add a CTA directly to the blog posts you identified as linked to conversions, then use a conversion analysis to see if more users take action.
2. Test different CTAs and offer placements.
Sometimes, the call to action that you think matches your blog post doesn’t actually resonate with users. A/B test different kinds of actions within your blog posts. For example, you might be prompting readers to download an ebook at the end of all your blog posts, but a newsletter signup would actually be more appealing. A conversion analysis will tell you which CTA works best. You can also test different design choices around where the offer is placed—at the end of the blog post or in the body, for instance—to see if that has an effect on conversion.
3. Refresh older blog posts that are losing traffic.
A common traffic pattern for blog posts is a period of growth, followed by a plateau, then finally a decline. When the blog post is in decline, it’s a prime candidate for a content refresh. Refreshing old content may involve updating the examples or statistics to make sure they are still relevant, expanding its length or scope, or making sure that it is SEO optimized. Combine a refreshed blog post with an in-line prompt for conversion, and you have a recipe for success.
Up Next: Retention
Without conversion analysis, you can’t identify whether your efforts to improve your website conversions are actually working. Once you have a good grasp of how to use conversion analysis to enhance your website, the next opportunity you should pursue is to optimize for retention. Without users who repeatedly convert—i.e., retain—you face an uphill battle to compensate with new user acquisition. Try our Customer Retention 101 email series to have lessons on retention delivered to your inbox weekly.
