Using Traffic Funnels to Improve Website Conversions
Before talking about website conversion, it’s important to know what conversion is and how it can affect the return on investment of your marketing campaign. To begin with, a conversion is an action that a user takes on your site, which is valuable to your business. Usually, it’s a sale but it can also include an action or task you desire from your visitor, such as: downloading a file, signing up for a newsletter, viewing a video, or putting a request for more information.
Once you know the value of a conversion, and the percentage of traffic that visits your conversion page vs. the traffic that do convert (which is the actual conversion rate), you can easily determine your ROI (return on investment) for your marketing campaign. Here are some simple steps that can help you to improve website conversions:
Use the right page elements: To build a path to the conversion point, you need to ensure that all your web pages function independently from the previous ones, and have an impressive beginning and a middle element, while guiding the visitor to the end step of conversion successfully. You should also build multiple conversion paths as 10 visitors can land on the same page and yet take 10 different paths to reach the last step of conversion. For example, while some may want to read about your company or check your special offers, others may wish to see your testimonials, check warranty or guarantee information etc. So, make sure to include calls to action elements, and narrow down the options to the most significant and common ones to meet the majority of your visitor's requirements. Starting from using relevant fields in your online form, to doing away with non-clickable visual elements or a secondary call to action that unnecessarily provides a path out of the funnel, ensure that you use the right page elements.
Check your conversion paths and fix the broken ones: Check your web pages regularly to find obstacles that may disengage your visitors or make it difficult for them to reach the conversion goal. Look for errors on the pages, missing information, broken links and missing calls to action. After you find the problems, fix them quickly. You can even use your Google Analytics account to identify potential problem areas and assess different versions to see which one performs the best before selecting any particular one.
Create the most efficient path: Your website should be as streamlined as possible. You can use your analytics to find out if there are places where steps need to be removed or added in order to make the conversion process more proficient. Remember – you objective is to add no more steps than are required and no fewer than what is needed to ensure conversions.
Test newer paths: Since each visitor’s preferences and needs are different from the others, creating a cohesive path to the conversion goal isn't an easy task. So, even after you have examined, fixed and re-examined your original paths to ensure everything is functioning well, you should start creating and testing new paths. You may even try adding/deleting steps in the existing processes as they may often help in improving conversions with specific audiences.
Creating a Traffic Funnel
To improve your website conversions and run a steady business online, creating a traffic funnel is an important step. You can use it to tap traffic from sources like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube etc into your funnel, and build your own traffic source. If you don’t control your traffic, your business may seriously get affected every time the major search engines change their algorithms or the social networking sites shut/penalize your accounts. Imagine what would happen to your business if Google algorithm changes affect your site rankings negatively, or Facebook cracks down on your fan page and shuts it down, or YouTube cancels your videos. To steer clear of such abrupt situations that can ruin your business, here’s how you can create your traffic funnel.
People and your business
Every successful business relies on a good relationship with its customers. However, you can’t build relationships with your visitors in just one or two visits to your website. Therefore, it is important that you capture the email addresses and names of as many visitors as you can, so that you get a chance to build a relationship with them.
Your website should have a really good lead magnet to get visitor’s names and email addresses. This could be a PDF report, a good piece of content, an impressive video, or a case study that will entice your potential subscribers to give you their email addresses and names.
Once your visitors enter these details into your site, they will get into your funnel. This is where you will start the process of building a relationship and trust with them. Subsequently, you can recommend products/services to them.
You can also set up a traffic funnel with a landing page to segment users first and see how a specific user type interacts with your site.
How to check your Traffic Funnel
Suppose you have a traffic funnel for a 3 page form fill up. While checking each page, you come across the following data:
Page 1 – 100% enter
Page 2 – 70% enter
Page 3 – 20% enter
Goal completion: 2%
This data shows you that though your visitors are moving down the early stage of the funnel, there is a large drop later in the funnel. So, you should check page 3 for usability, informational, and other issues to find out why there is such a large conversion abandonment.
Advantages of using a Traffic Funnel
Analyzing the data of your traffic funnel can determine possible reasons for visitors’ to drop out, which could include:
• Too many steps that lead to the conversion
• Missing call to action
• Inadequate information/information that’s not relevant
• Web page is low on the usability quotient
• Products/services are priced high
Thus, you can use the strategy of traffic funnel to create a conversion funnel, and isolate a series of web pages to build trust, inform visitors about your company and offerings, and attract them to the last step of conversion, which could be lead generation or sales or any other action that brings value to your business.