Is Conversion Falloff killing your Conversion Rate?

by Matt Bell | Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Businesses are spending a lot of their hard-earned money on online marketing to try and increase the amount traffic to their websites. Despite the increase in traffic though, many businesses are not seeing gains in increased business that are commensurate with the gains in increased visits to their site.

It’s something that SEO and PayPerClick specialists rarely speak of, mainly because it’s not part of their job. It’s called Conversion Falloff and it could be costing your money in lost business and expensive marketing services.

What is Conversion Falloff?

Quite often with completing a conversion goal, there are several steps to go through. At each step in the process, you are likely to find that some people give up and turn back. Below is a simple diagram which explains the effects of Conversion Falloff on a simple Conversion Path to purchase a product.

Conversion Falloff Diagram

What Causes Conversion Falloff?

Sometimes it’s because some visitors are impatient quitters. But most of the time, it’s because their expectations are not being met or having low confidence in what they are viewing.

Visitors lost early on in the Conversion Path tend to leave because of a lack of demonstrated relevance to their original search. Specific causes of this include:

  • Incorrectly targeted keywords for SEO or PPC campaigns;
  • Use of a generic landing page instead of one targeted to a particular audience;
  • Poorly written copy on the landing page;
  • Lack of relevant calls to action to address visitor expectations;

Visitors who exit later on in the path do so because they start to lose confidence and/or patience in what they are being asked to do. Specific causes include:

  • Too long a process for the expected outcome;
  • Excessive requests for seemingly unneeded information;
  • Failure of content and functionality to satisfy client expectations;

How do I minimize Conversion Falloff?

By addressing the common causes of Conversion Fall-off, you reduce the likelihood of visitors exiting the conversion path early. The more visitors who stay through each step, the higher the overall conversion rate will be. As a result, your marketing cost per sale drops and you achieve more sales.

Some handy tips to minimise Conversion Falloff are:

  • Target SEO/PPC Keywords effectively – Make sure your keywords are specific enough to attract the right audience and that your ad/meta description copy establishes the correct expectations. Every click that results in a bounce costs you money.
  • Use Relevant Landing Pages – The first page that the visitor lands on has to take them by the hand and put them on the path to greatness. If the user arrives on your website and can’t immediately work out why they have ended up there, its curtains for you via the back button.
  • Establish Expectations and Confidence up front – This happens on the landing page. Use calls to action and regular content to clearly explain what is going to happen next and why the visitor should go along with it. If the outcome is what they were looking for, they will go ahead.
  • Minimise the number of steps in the process – The more steps you have, the more exit points you provide for your visitors and more likely they are to become frustrated with the process. Balance the cost of paying a developer to simplify a process against the potential increase in sales.
  • Minimise the amount of information required – Only take the information you absolutely need. Not only is it a written law for information collection, it spares your visitors from asking the question, “Why the hell do they need that?”
  • Keep visitors informed – “How much longer is this going to take?” Many of us are busy people with many things to do. If we don’t know how far through the process we are and how much longer we are going to have to spend, well, you can guess what we are going to do.

Shameless self-plug

Are you getting lots of visits but not seeing the sales? Conversion Falloff getting you down? Maybe it’s time to do a review of your Online Presence. I know just the guy »

Commentariat

Has your Online Presence suffered from Conversion Falloff? How did you overcome it?