Your site is receiving traffic. The banners are generating clicks. Individuals are subscribing to newsletters or exploring your product pages. The problem is your conversions remain stagnant.
Sound familiar?
The reality is, the majority of companies do not lack traffic, they lack conversions and have a problem that slows down the entire process.
In this customer journey map there are several points when customers stop moving towards the final objective, e.g. a product order, a demo request, signing up for a service, etc.
Good thing is, after locating the places where people leave, instead of guessing, you can take corrective actions based on data. We are going to walk you through identifying conversions bottle-necking points with your funnel in this article, as well as how products like the Conversion Rate Optimization tool CRO Forge might be used by you to experiment with ideas and finally get better results.
What is a Sales Funnel?
The Sales Funnel is the path the potential customer goes through before the conversion happens.
For example, an Ecommerce funnel might look like this:
- potential customer first discovers your homepage
- he or she looks at a product
- purchases the item by adding it into a Shopping bag
- Initiating checkout
- Payment has been processed
- Closing the deal
For SaaS companies the journey could look like this:
- The blog reader comes across a blog post
- He or she reads an article
- Clicks on one of the products for a demo
- Signs up for the free trial of the software
- Registers for an account
- Pays for the paid software
Each stage is vital. Users abandoning even at one step will lead to lower number of conversions overall.
What Is a Conversion Bottleneck?
Conversion bottleneck is where many users leave the process.
Imagine 10,000 people visit your website.
- 5,000 visit the product page.
- 2,000 add something into the cart
- 700 initiate checkout
- and only 180 buy the product
The largest drop occurs during the transition from the checkout stage to payment.
That is a bottleneck.
Not the traffic but the fix of one single problem may dramatically improve your results.
Common Signs You Have a Bottleneck
Your visitors may be sending you signals that something is off. If your conversion funnel is experiencing a bottleneck, look out for these clues:
- A large number of visitors leaving your site through the homepage
- Many visitors just view one page and immediately leave
- Your product page has a relatively low add-to-cart rate
- Shopping cart abandonment level is high
- Users abandoning their accounts mid-way
- Fewer people are finishing forms, in other words, form completion rate is low
- High volume of traffic but little or no conversions at all
These KPIs indicate points of the customer journey where visitors either lose interest or run into difficulties.
Why Data Beats Guesswork
Guesswork takes up much time in business, and many pages are changed just because the businesspeople personally like certain designs.
Nevertheless, an attractive design does not mean a higher conversion rate. I would like to tell you that, having been in business for many years, I can be sure that it is all about customer experience and not aesthetics.
Good optimization is done through testing, analyzing, and improving. That is why CRO is so effective.
How CRO Forge Will Help You Identify Conversion Bottlenecks
When you have the proper tools, finding your conversion bottlenecks will become child’s play.
CRO Forge was developed as a solution to businesses, marketers, agencies, and growth teams optimizing websites based on actual and solid data instead of gut feelings or guesswork.
In your toolset CRO Forge helps you to:
- Run A/B tests smoothly and simply, with no extra layers
- Compare different versions of a page
- Accurately measure the level of conversion enhancement
- Testing the effectiveness of various headlines
- Determining the best layout for the content on the web page
- Assessing the effectiveness of different button designs
- Evaluating different forms of data input fields in the form of different layouts
- Changing and improving pricing pages with a test
And the cherry on top you will not have to worry about what your customers like or dislike because the results in CRO Forge are based on actual customer behavior.
Whether you are trying to convert more sales via a website and online store, improve your SaaS product, lead-generation site, create marketing or PR campaigns targeting potential clients, CRO Forge empowers you with the data needed to tweak and optimize your conversion funnel all along the pipeline.
Best Practices for Finding Funnel Bottlenecks
These tips will help you in your endeavor:
- Measure each step of your funnel.
- Pinpoint the greatest drop-offs for more in-depth examination.
- Depend on statistics rather than your gut feeling.
- Test one change at a time.
- Continue optimizing after every improvement.
- Monitor results regularly.
The concept of optimization should be thought of as a continuous activity rather than a one-off event.
Final Thoughts
Every Internet page is at least somewhat a work in progress. The success of a high-converting website versus an “average” one usually hinges on the ability to detect and fix the main bottlenecks.
First, instead of merely increasing your marketing budget for acquiring new visitors, think about why it is that your existing visitors are not able to make it all the way through. It is likely that they are dropping off at one of your funnels’ stages. A few tweaks at that particular stage may be a great lever to increase leads, sales and revenue significantly.
When it comes to website optimization, CRO Forge enables users to find ways of improvement, get the results of tests via A/B test validation and rely on real user behavior data to take optimization actions intelligently. Instead of guessing, with CRO Forge you will be sure what works and that is precisely what builds your confidence and long-term growth is the outcome.
