{"id":3683,"date":"2015-09-28T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lcn.com\/blog\/?p=3683"},"modified":"2021-07-06T09:34:18","modified_gmt":"2021-07-06T08:34:18","slug":"ultimate-guide-to-increasing-conversions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lcn.com\/blog\/ultimate-guide-to-increasing-conversions\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversion Rate Optimisation: Reducing abandoned baskets"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this guide, we’ll go through some in-depth techniques that will improve your conversion rates by reducing abandoned baskets.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is there anything more frustrating than an abandoned basket for an e-commerce<\/a> retailer? It takes a lot of work to even get a customer \/ potential customer to this point, so to see the shopping cart abandoned at the final hurdle is heart-breaking, not to mention bad business.<\/p>\n

So your thorough SEO strategy or excellent PPC campaign has brought valuable traffic through the door, and your optimised landing page<\/a> did a great job of closing the sale to the point of adding a product to the basket \u2013 but then what happened?<\/p>\n

If baskets are being abounded, you need to find out why\u2026and now! Let\u2019s work out how to close the loop on these abandoned baskets<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

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It\u2019s not just about a single conversion<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Before you ask the question \u201cwhy are my visitors not converting\u201d you first need to identify where<\/strong> the major drop-outs in your checkout flow are happening.<\/p>\n

Understanding this allows you to better focus your efforts to parts of your website which can have the biggest impact on sales.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Identifying where potential customers are dropping out from your checkout flow<\/h2>\n

Ideally, you want to ensure your checkout flow is as simple and short as possible.<\/p>\n

The goal here is to make going from your product landing page, to the \u201cthanks for your order\u201d page, in as few steps as possible \u2013 thus reducing the likelihood of customers getting lost along the way.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Identify high bounce rates in Google Analytics<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Our first port of call is to check bounce rates for your landing page.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not familiar with the term bounce rate, it\u2019s simple: \u00a0Bounce Rate<\/em><\/a> is the percentage of single-page sessions (without engagement\/interaction) visitors have had on your site without.<\/p>\n

In other words, sessions in which somebody left your site from the same page they entered on, without interacting with the page (clicking links \/ adding product to basket).<\/p>\n[Tweet “Learn to identify high bounce rates in Google Analytics. “]\n

For example, a potential customer searches Google for \u201cPlaystation games\u201d and clicks through to the \u201cPlaystation games\u201d landing page of your site. They then leave your site from the same page, without visiting any other pages on your site.<\/p>\n

So as you\u2019ve probably worked out, a high bounce rate is a bad thing. A high bounce rate usually means something on that page is turning visitors off and making them leave your site quickly.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s identify those pages\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

To start, simply load up Google Analytics (we\u2019ll assume you have analytics setup, but if not, check out our guide<\/a>)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

From the menu on the left, look for \u201cBehaviour\u201d and then \u201cLanding Pages\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\"Analytics<\/p>\n

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From here you can view data on your landing pages, including bounce rate.<\/p>\n

To quickly see the worst offending pages, just click the \u201cBounce Rate\u201d column to arrange from highest to lowest (remember to filter out any irrelevant pages).<\/p>\n

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\"Analytics<\/p>\n

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From here you can easily see at a glance what pages are being negatively affected by a poor bounce rate figure.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Know what visitors are clicking: Use in-page analytics<\/strong><\/h3>\n

When creating a landing page leading to a conversion, you may find yourself linking to other pages on your site, or other websites all together in an effort to provide your visitor with as much information as possible.<\/p>\n

However, you can only really work out what links\/information visitors actually want by testing.<\/p>\n[Tweet “Know where your visitors are clicking with in-page analytics. “]\n

Using the \u201cPage Analytics<\/a>\u201d extension for Google Chrome, you can easily see what links are being clicked on your landing page.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Load up the extension, and visit your landing page (you can also access In-Page analytics<\/a> from your Google Analytics dashboard, but we prefer this method \u2013 it\u2019s quicker!).<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll quickly see the orange click percentage hovering over links on the page.<\/p>\n

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\"top<\/p>\n

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Using this data you can easily make an informed decision on whether a link should be present on the page at all, or if it should be moved to a more prominent position.<\/p>\n

For example, our \u201cSetting up IMAP email on your iPhone\u201d guide seems more popular than the \u201cMac Mail\u201d guide, so it\u2019s a good idea to give the iPhone guide more prominence and move it up the list.<\/p>\n

This can only help conversions as you are making sure you\u2019re only adding links to the page that visitors are finding useful.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Heatmaps: Where are visitors clicking?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Heatmaps are an invaluable tool that will give you exact visualisation of visitor behaviour on your web pages. \u00a0<\/p>\n

This information can be used to solve problems such as\u2026<\/p>\n