What is conversion rate in ecommerce? How to improve it?

What is conversion rate?

To calculate conversion rate you should take the number of conversions and divide it by the number of sessions on the website. This will tell you how website traffic translates into sales or other user actions.Conversion rate is also one of the most important performance marketing metrics. There, it is measured by dividing conversions by the number of users that clicked on an ad.

When to worry about low conversion rate?

It is hard to arrive at a universal conversion rate metric. The numbers can be different depending on industry or market.In the case of Google Ads, about 20% of accounts achieve conversion rate lower than 1%. The median is 2,35%, whereas 25% of advertisers can boast of having conversion rate of 5,31 (or higher).In effect, you should compare your conversion rate results with competitors from your industry.

The possible causes of low conversion rate

Low conversion rate may be caused by many factors, starting with badly formed ads and ending with the website errors.When the adverts are the cause, an advertising message usually is not consistent with content on the website – in effect the user is leaving the page disappointed because they didn’t find what they were looking for.When the website is the problem, the exact cause of low conversion rate may be:

• Slow loading time, unintuitive website that hinders the selling process.
• Nonresponsive layout.
• Too high delivery cost.
• An insufficient number of delivery methods.
• An insufficient number of payment methods.
• Bad quality of product photos.
• Insufficiently detailed products’ descriptions.
• Suboptimal SEO strategy (you are using wrong keywords).
• Too many distractions and notifications that could be irritating.

Before you start to work on your conversion rate, you should definitely diagnose your website.However, your observation might not always be accurate, therefore you should rather trust data than your intuition. There are many ways to get them. For instance, you can do an A/B test to compare two or more versions of a webpage or use one of the available tools for web analytics, like Hotjar that will help you understand how users really experience your site.

How to improve the conversion rate?

The diagnosis of the problems that may disturb the users using the website always should be the first step to improve your conversion rate.Afterwards, you should try the following ideas:

• Remarketing – it is not always easy to make a decision to purchase something. Users generally visit the website a few times and compare the offer with others before they put the product in your online store’s basket. Keep reminding the shoppers of your offer. You can do it through some remarketing techniques, like social media or email retargeting campaigns, but remember not to be too insistent – this way you may dissuade the customer from making the purchase.
• Newsletter – if you have huge traffic on your website, try to encourage your visitors to subscribe to newsletter. Thanks to that you will be able to regularly send e-mails to your potential customers. Unfortunately, the internet users usually don’t like to share their email address. To encourage them, it is worth offering them a promo code or an e-book with some useful tips.
• Social media marketing – you can try popular social media formats, like stories on Instagram to inform your audience about the newest products in your store. It can be a short movie, where you show your products up close and present details that can be hard to see in the photos.

Analyse, analyse, then analyse some more

It is not easy to improve the conversion rate on a website. Big changes sometimes have little or no effect. It may also be difficult to identify problems that the clients encounter on our website.However, it is worth to take up a challenge, because if you find the cause of the impediment, profits from your website could increase significantly and rapidly.If you don’t have enough time for that kind of actions, try to optimize or automize one of the other marketing areas. For example, you can improve the product feed management. With Feedink you will create product files adjusted to technical specifications of hundreds of integrated publishing partners with one click. Additionally, all your product feeds will be managed in one place and automatically updated. Thanks to that, you will be able to save a lot of precious time, that you could then spend on other marketing activities.