No matter how many visitors you attract to your website, it doesn’t count for much if you can’t convert your traffic. The higher your rate of conversions, the more results you can squeeze from the same volume of traffic – whether your marketing objectives are to sell products and services, increase sign-ups for your e-newsletter, or promote downloads of a special report.

A recent survey found that conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the number one priority for digital marketers, well ahead of such marketing elements as search engine optimization, content marketing, and even mobile marketing. While many marketers consider CRO a vitally important task, their approach leaves much to be desired. A disturbing 63 percent report that their conversion optimization efforts are based on intuition and best practices rather than on actual testing. In short, marketers are sacrificing hard, actionable data for theories that they have heard about from someone else.

You Need the Right Tools to Get the Data You Need for Effective CRO

• The right conversion optimization tools can help you determine how visitors are interacting with your web pages and how they perceive your branded content.
• The key to effective CRO is to analyze visitor behavior and test various improvements for increasing your conversion rate.
• Assuming that your test data is statistically significant, you can proceed with implementing changes to your site secure in the knowledge that your conclusions are valid and truly actionable.

Quantitative Optimization Analytics
Quantitative research provides you with the hard numbers about how visitors are engaging with your web pages, and provides insight into possible problem areas that are costing you conversions, such as bounce rates, shopping cart abandonment, and exit rates.

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides detailed information about where your website traffic is coming from, what keywords were the most effective magnets in drawing that traffic, and which of your web pages captured the most visitor interest. You’ll gain valuable insight into your visitor’s website behavior and how it impacts conversions.

Included in the Google Analytics suite is a Content Experiments section which enables you to test different elements of a landing page to determine which variation delivers the best results. Features include the ability to determine what percentage of your visitor traffic will be included in the test, as well as email updates on experiment progress.

Creating More Effective Headlines
The success of your web page is largely dependent on the drawing power of your headline. Veteran writers who know firsthand the value of powerful headlines suggest that 80 percent of the total time you take in creating a piece of content should be spent on the headline. It’s that important.

Portent’s Content Idea Generator helps you quickly generate headline ideas for any piece of content. Simply enter your keyword in the subject box, click the arrow, and the Idea Generator delivers possible headline ideas, along with an on-screen analysis of why the headline works. To get more headline ideas, just keep clicking on the arrow.

Improving Your Site’s Usability
One of the most important yet frequently-overlooked factors in optimizing your conversion rate is the overall user-friendliness of your site. The more seamless your website experience, the better conversion rate you’re going to achieve.

The Five Second Test from Usability Hub displays your page to real users for five seconds, who are prompted to remember as much about the page as possible. When the time is up, test participants are asked a few questions (which you create) about what they just saw. While you can’t specify user demographics, the Five Second Test is a great way to get real-person feedback on the overall impression your site is creating.