CRO tools are crucial for when you need to track user behaviour on your website. However, digital marketing experts in Singapore are still debating the essence of website usability. To establish a stand, the best place to start is in understanding what is conversion rate optimisation (CRO), the tools you need and why you should care about user behaviour.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation refers to the process that businesses increase the percentage of traffic that can convert on the already available products or services.
Many digital marketers have trivialised CRO and they have statistics to boot. For instance, a recent statistic showed that using long-form content increases conversions by 220%. However, some brands find that short-form content works best for their audiences.
User Behaviour
These are activities which a website visitor engages in after landing on your site. Elements such as clicks, page scrolling, reading blog posts and filling sign up forms and more make up user behaviour.
A website is like a store and when it goes live that is the equivalent of opening the doors of an actual store, and customers will come in at their own will. CRO tools are able to tell you how your visitor/customer/user acts while interacting with your site. Think of it as a CCTV camera that tracks customer patterns inside the store.
Your website works the same way. With the right CRO tools, you can understand user behaviour of all your website visitors so you can optimize each page for the desired action.
Monitoring User Behaviour on a Website Using CRO Tools
Previous ways of improving rankings typically involved writing long, extremely detailed and linked articles. It was not unusual to find a blog post with over 25,000 words. This cost a lot of money and with time, this trend started to slowly fade and the reasons were not as obvious:
First, the people who actually find the time to read those articles were not necessarily the target users. They could be new business owners without much cash, so they were not in the market to hire a marketing agency to boost their website conversion rate.
Second, most visitors do not have time to read the entire article in one sitting. The visitors will have to bookmark the page, remember where they stopped, and come back later.
Finally, while rankings may improve, comparing your results to Google SERPs would more often than not indicate that writing large articles did not have a noticeable impact on a customers’ ability to find the website online.
So how do you track user behaviour? And what do you do with the information you collect?
Monitor How Users Engage With Your Site
User behaviour reports are vital to grasping what people do when they arrive on your site. It does not matter what pages they visit or whether they are new or returning visitors. It all boils down to their behaviour while they are on your website.
Consider these options:
- Set user behaviour reports to run for a couple of months.
- Pay attention to scrolling, clicking, and form engagement.
- Check referral sources
Where does the majority of your traffic come from? Similar Web is a powerful tool that analyses your website and gives you rankings, the sources of those rankings (whether from organic search, social media or through referral sources), and with the data, you can then improve your activities to increase the website conversion rate.
For example, if 66% of our traffic comes from Twitter. This simply means that you spend more energy on the social media platform. Consider the following Twitter strategies to increase the traffic from the platform:
- Boost posts
- Running Twitter hash tags or twitter Ads
- Initiating polls or discounts
Twitter’s algorithm work in a way that is able to dispense content in less than 5 seconds to the world. It is the fastest social media tool to get things out and that is why it refers itself to the “What the World is doing right now.” When engagement improves on Twitter, more people will find your tweets organically.
But do not let this be your only source. Collect more data and experiment with Facebook and other social media sites before making any long term decisions. While it is proper to expedite the optimisation of your site, getting ahead of yourself will only slow down the process.
You can use CRO tools to collect user data and later implement them to improve website usability.
Why Do Users Leave Your Site?
Once you have enough data, analyse it to figure out how obstacles might influence user behaviour in negative ways. For example, does it take users 7 seconds on average to read your blog pages? Are the visitors who saw you on Twitter spending less time on your site than those who found you from Google?
Note these observations and what the data says. Do not draw conclusions yet; test your hypotheses to see how they pan out, then make educated guesses based on the user behaviour reports in front of you.
A possible list might look like this:
- Conflicting Call-to-action buttons on the homepage get approximately equal clicks
- Visitors click on the author photo, which is not linked
- More people click on blog headlines than on the call-to-action buttons
Once you have those observations, you can do something about them.
Set Specific and Attainable Goals
Future methods have to be in line with how you performed in the past. For example, if only 10 visitors have been converting per week, setting a goal of 500 for the next week seems overly ambitious and borderline impossible just based on a few clicks.
Narrow down on what you want to pursue first, such as email conversions or sales, so that your strategy aligns with it. This will ultimately change the course of things and impact the metrics from the tools.
Choose What Elements You Should Test
Looking at the shortlist of observations above and the conclusions from the data, you can make a few changes on the website to help guide user behaviour more effectively through the site. Conflicting CTAs on the landing and home pages also get an equal amount of clicks.
Many people click on the author photo, which is not linked, and blog headlines than on the CTAs. Based on these observations, you can create tests to see how variations against the original might perform better. You can then make the following changes:
- Reduce the number of CTAs to draw the visitors’ attention on the most action you want them to take
- Link the author photo to the author biography page
- Increase the size of the CTA on the blog (such as in the sidebar) to attract attention
Once you have created the variations, you are now ready to test them against other sections.
Conclusion
Website usability is an important factor to consider when doing conversion rate optimisation. With the various CRO tools available, you have the power to increase website conversion rate and sales. However, this is easier said than done.
For this reason, it is important that you consider hiring a professional SEO and digital marketing agency in Singapore. This is for the sole reason that they are able to predict the trends that will affect SEO and the CRO tools that will improve the result of your digital marketing activities.
Contact us for professional digital marketing services in Singapore. Our support team is on hand to answer your questions and offer a free and non-obligatory quote.
