INTRODUCTION What is conversion rate optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is all about increasing the number of website visitors that complete a desired action, which we call a conversion.
In the B2B world, conversion rate optimization is aimed at growing the number of people who do specific things like filling out a form, downloading a PDF, or making an online purchase.
But it’s not that simple; we often separate these actions into macro and micro conversions.
Macro conversions are the big things, such as booking a demo or buying a subscription, while micro conversions are the smaller steps a prospect takes along their journey.
For a B2B company, these micro conversions could be anything from subscribing to your newsletter to registering for a webinar or viewing a specific page.
Why is CRO important for B2B revenue?
Despite the average B2B conversion rate being less than 2%, many businesses are plagued by conversions that are much lower than that.
This means you’re spending a lot of time and money to drive people to your website –but they disappear before doing anything.
It feels like a waste of resources and a missed opportunity
But conversion rate optimization is one way to reduce this waste
When you focus on optimizing for conversions, you’re able to achieve more from your same marketing efforts. That means a higher return on investment (ROI) without having to spend more money
And by making the road to conversion smoother, you can reduce the gap between when a prospect thinks about a solution and the moment they’re ready to buy. This shortens the sales cycle, which means you can close more deals, speed up payments and improve your cash flow
“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.”
Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder of Buyer Legends and N.Y. Times bestselling author.
Are conversion rates really that low?
The average conversion rate for B2B websites is less than 2%, but this does vary by industry
For example, B2B SaaS websites tend to have the lowest conversion rate at just 1.1%*. That’s no surprise when you consider that the average sales cycle for this industry is just over 2.5 months.
Some of the industries with the highest conversion rates include legal services at 7.4%, staffing and recruiting at 2.9%, and manufacturing at 2.1%
But these benchmarks can be misleading, as they measure all conversions on a website. That means micro conversions, like reaching a certain page or watching a video, are given the same significance as a macro conversion, like booking a demo. In reality, the average conversion rate for macro conversions is much lower
"Conversion rates are as unique as your business, but having some idea of industry averages will give you a sense of how you're currently performing. If you want your website to become your hardest-working salesperson, looking at conversions is the very best place to start."
Kirsty
Dawe, CEO of Webeo.
* Source: First Page Sage.
Industry
B2B SaaS
Biotech
Commercial Insurance
Construction
Engineering
Environmental Services
Financial Services
Heavy Equipment
HVAC Services
Industrial IoT
IT & Managed Services
Legal Services
Manufacturing
Medical Device
Oil & Gas
PCB Design & Manufacturing
Pharmaceutical
Real Estate
Software Development
Staffing & Recruiting
Transportation & Logistics
STEP ONE
ONE UNDERSTAND YOUR SALES FUNNEL AND USERS
Before you jump in and start dreaming up innovative ways to revamp your website conversions, it’s important that you understand your own sales funnel and what your most important macro and micro conversions are
How do customers behave on your website?
Website analytics tools will give you insights into how people behave on your website
For example, GA4 can show you how many visitors have landed on your site after clicking on a specific campaign, email or PPC advert, and help you analyze their behavior as they move through your site.
But you can’t get any insight into which companies those visitors are from.
Website identification tools, like Lead Forensics, can tell you which companies your visitors work for and what they do while browsing your website. This gives you a deeper level of industry insight that’s ideal for the B2B industry.
The key things you want to find out are:
• What does the average user journey look like? What pages do they land on, and which ones do they visit next?
• What pages do they visit before converting?
• How many people drop off at each stage of the journey?
• What are the highest exit pages on your site?
What are your key conversions?
When you’ve got your user journey mapped, it’s time to think about all of the conversions a prospect could make on their way to becoming a customer.
It’s a good idea to split these into macro and micro conversions, so you can give the appropriate level of attention to each type. Your macro conversions are probably obvious; these will be high-level actions like booking a demo or requesting more information.
Micro conversions can be harder to spot. It might be as simple as someone clicking from one page to the next, watching an embedded video or subscribing to a newsletter.
A good tip for identifying all these conversions is to take yourself through the user journey you identified and observe what actions you take. You could ask your colleagues to do the same as you view their screen – or use tools like Hotjar to capture heatmaps or session recordings and watch how genuine visitors use your website.
"We are not being the best we can be by focusing on just the overall website conversion rate. We are leaving money on the table. We are not getting enough credit. We are not getting a good understanding of the complete picture."
Avinash Kaushik, former Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google and author.
What metrics should you think about?
Conversion rate is the fourth most important metric for marketers and almost one in three measure this, according to research by HubSpot. But what metrics should you focus on? That depends on what your macro and micro conversions are.
The following metrics are often useful for looking at your conversions:
• Conversion rate = the percentage of sessions that completed a specific conversion action
• User conversion rate = the percentage of users that completed a specified conversion action
• Click-through rate = the percentage of users that click on a specific link or call-to-action
• Bounce rate = the percentage of users that leave your site after viewing just one page
• Average session duration = the average amount of time that users spend on your website
• Customer acquisition cost = the total cost of acquiring a new customer
However, most of these metrics only work if you’ve already told your analytics tool what you consider to be a conversion. In GA4, that means setting up events for specific actions and then marking the most important ones as key events.
“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.”
Carly Fiorina, Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
4 steps to work out your own conversion rate
You’ve looked at your analytics data, thought about what’s considered a conversion and even decided what metrics you want to measure – but how do you bring all this together to find out your own conversion rate?
There’s a tried and tested four-step process you can follow:
Define your
conversions and what they actually mean. For example, why does that specific click matter or what’s so important about making sure users reach a certain page? This focuses your attention and gives you a practical document that anyone in the business can use to understand conversions better. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Start
tracking conversions
In GA4, you can turn any of the default tracked events into conversions by simply marking them as such in the events admin panel. Without this essential step, you can’t accurately measure performance.
Collect data
You can’t retroactively report on conversions, so you’ll need to give your site time to populate your web analytics tool with data.
Analyze data
Segment your new conversion rates any way you need to, whether that’s by landing page, acquisition source, event conversions, etc., to get an understanding of what’s really happening on your site.
STEP TWO
TWO SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS
Once you have a truer understanding of your online conversions, you can think about how to improve them. But first, you need to decide what you want to achieve, and you need to know your baseline so you can measure the impact of your changes.
How do you decide your goals?
Setting specific goals will clarify what you should focus on and remind you of what you’re trying to achieve. These can be as big or niche as you want.
These goals often look like:
• Increasing the number of leads by getting more form completions, demo requests or contact enquiries.
• Better user engagement by encouraging more content downloads, longer duration times or reduced bounce rates.
• More conversions from specific landing pages by influencing people to click buttons or share their details.
The important thing is that your goals support broader business objectives and are relevant to your audience.
Whatever you choose, make sure your goals are SMART. That means they need to be:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-Bound
How do you work out your baseline?
When you know what your goals are, you’ll need to find out your current performance to establish a baseline for each one. This baseline will provide a reference point for evaluating your work, help you make sure your goals are achievable, and ensure you’re making data-driven decisions.
For example, if the conversion rate of your most popular PPC landing page is just 1.3%, you know that it’s overly ambitious to target a conversion rate of 10%. It also tells you that any conversion rate above the baseline is an objective improvement.
It’s helpful if you can pull this data together into a report before you even start your CRO
How do you prioritize pages?
It’s great knowing what your goals are and how you’re currently performing, but with websites spanning thousands of pages, it can be impossible to know where to start. This becomes even more challenging if you have colleagues from competing teams vying for your time or there’s internal confusion over what should be tackled first.
But if you can prioritize your pages using data, you’ll get a clearer sense of what could have the biggest impact or where the quick wins lie.
There are so many frameworks you can use to do this. ICE is the simplest; you weigh up the potential impact on the business, your confidence that the change will be positive, and the ease of implementing it.
Use our ICE prioritization template
To help you get started, we’ve built a template to help you prioritize your pages. Simply click the link and save a copy:
Get the template
You’ll be able to list all your important pages in the first column, then give each a score for impact, confidence and ease. The template will automatically add up these scores and show you which pages ought to be prioritized
STEP THREE
THREE PLAN YOUR FIRST CRO TEST
By now you should know what your goals are, and which pages you want to optimize first - but the preparation isn’t quite over yet. You still need to do a bit of work to plan your test.
What changes could you try?
The first thing to think about is what you want to change on your website to nudge up your conversion rate.
Some of the most common things to try are:
• Speeding up your website. When Vodafone improved its LCP (how long it takes for the largest content element to become visible) by 31%, sales grew by 8%
• Reconsidering the text, design and placement of your CTAs. TrustRadius got 2x more clicks on their CTA buttons when they placed them in a static banner at the top of the screen.
• Streamlining the fields in your forms. DocuSign removed non-essential fields from their forms and mobile conversion rates improved by 35% as a result.
• Reviewing the layout and copy on your pricing pages. Calendly saw a significant increase in its premium plan conversions after testing the presentation of plans and features, pricing structures and CTAs on its pricing page.
If you’re struggling to work out what kinds of things you could test, it’s helpful to refer back to your research and remind yourself what elements are causing friction. For some inspiration, you can also jump to the back of the book and take a look at our cheat sheet of quick wins
How many changes should you make?
You may end up with an extensive list of ideas, but you’ll need to focus on just one thing at a time. This is important because it allows you to measure the impact of that one change and build your understanding of what influences conversions over time.
If you test too many variables, you’ll get confused about what actually caused the effect and you won’t be any wiser.
What is your hypothesis?
Coming up with a hypothesis can help you think about what the impact will be and decide what to test.
Your hypothesis needs to be clear, specific and testable. There’s an easy formula you can use to help structure yours:
Because we observed [x] we predict that by changing [x] we will improve [x].
We will measure the impact by [x].
For example:
Because we observed the click-through rate on our book a demo button was below average on the landing page, we predict that by changing how we communicate the features of our service, we will improve the number of demo bookings. We will measure this by looking at the number of button clicks and the number of visitors who get to the demo booking page.
When you do this, make sure your reporting allows you to measure the metric you’ve focused on.
How will you test this?
It’s essential that you test your ideas before you apply the changes to your entire website. By only showing your new page to a portion of your traffic, you’re able to measure the impact of the change. Plus, it’ll save you from accidentally tanking conversions by implementing something that doesn’t actually work.
There are two main types of tests:
• A/B testing will show half your traffic the original, control version and the other half will see the new experiment.
• Multivariate testing allows you to compare multiple versions of pages across a bigger split of traffic. For example, you could keep 40% of your traffic on the control page but show 30% one version and 30% another version.
For beginners, A/B testing is the easiest to understand and work with.
If you have a niche B2B website that doesn’t get a high volume of traffic, you may also want to consider other ways to test your website changes. Alternative methods like beta testing to a small group of users, qualitative assessment of heatmaps or session recordings, and usability testing can give powerful insights.
"A simple test early - while you still have time to use what you learn from it - is almost always more valuable than an elaborate test later."
Steve Krug, Author of Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.
A/B Testing
Multivariate Testing
How will you run your test?
You also need to think about the mechanics of your test, including how long it will run for and what tools you’ll use to try.
You need to decide:
1. What CRO testing tool will you use? While it is possible to find free A/B testing with VWO, or free trials with other A/B testing tools, you may need to allocate budget to a dedicated testing platform.
2. How long will the experiment run for? It’s typically advised that you run your test for a month, to reach statistical significance. That’s when you know enough people have seen your control and variant pages and you can be confident that the behavior seen in the test will apply to real life.
3. What will you do if traffic is too low? Sometimes, the page(s) you want to test are so niche that traffic levels are low, and you struggle to reach statistical significance. If this happens, you should consider how to send more traffic to the page, perhaps with paid advertising, or whether measuring micro goals could generate more data.
4. When do the changes need to be live on your site? Don’t forget to consider key events, like B2B conferences, upcoming webinars, or external events like public holidays, which could influence your timeline.
Nearly half
46.9% of businesses performing conversion rate optimization tests run one or two experiments a month9.5% run 20+ tests every month
Source: Invesp
CRO testing checklist
▢ I know how customers behave on my website
▢ I know what the key conversions are
▢ I’m already tracking conversions
▢ I’ve documented my goals
▢ I know the baseline performance
▢ I’ve prioritized my pages
▢ I’ve written a hypothesis
▢ I’ve chosen the best type of test
▢ I’ve outlined how long the test will run for
STEP FOUR
FOUR TEST YOUR IDEAS
Thanks to all your thorough planning, the testing part of this process will be relatively straightforward - as long as you follow the right steps when setting up your experiment.
How do you set up your experiment?
No matter which testing tool you use, you’ll most likely follow the same steps when setting up your experiment:
1. Create a new experiment
2. Define the experiment by specifying which URL(s) the test will run on
3. Set up your variation(s) to test
4. Configure your targeting and audience and decide how much traffic will go to each version of the page
5. Select the goal(s) you want to measure
6. Preview the test to make sure the versions display correctly
7. Launch the experiment
8. Achieve statistical significance of 95% or higher (the point at which you’re confident the same results will be replicated on the website). If you have low traffic, you may need to consider how to send more visitors to the test or review your goal measurement.
9. Stop the experiment and analyze the results
How do you monitor the experiment?
Your CRO testing tool should allow you to log in and observe the latest results. Occasionally checking in on your experiment can be a clever way to see how the data changes as your sample grows and may give you an indication of what the result could be.
Make sure you monitor the statistical significance of the experiment, too. This tells you how close you are to getting robust results that you can trust. Some tools will call it the p-value, in which case it needs to be under 0.05, while others will call it the confidence interval and it needs to be 95% or higher.
Other things to check during your experiment:
• Traffic allocation. Is the test version being shown to people?
• Traffic volume. Are enough people seeing the page? How long will it take to reach statistical significance at your current traffic levels?
• Data collection. Does the tool show different results for each version?
• User feedback. Has anyone reported problems with the pages you’re testing?
• Error reports. Has there been an increase in the number of website errors?
Troubleshoot experiment issues
Most of the time your experiments will run smoothly – but there are a few common challenges you may encounter the first time you try this.
Challenge Resolution
Unclear results
Insufficient sample size
Data seems off
Experiment ended too soon
Did you have a clear hypothesis? Were you measuring the right thing? You may need to reconsider and try again.
Could you test the same changes on a page that gets more traffic or include more pages in the test? Think about how you can get more people to see the experiment.
What could have influenced performance? Was there a marketing campaign or changes to advertising? Consider what other factors could impact the data and try testing again.
Did you stop the experiment before the recommended duration of two weeks? Shorter timeframes can lead to unreliable data.
FIVE ANALYZE YOUR RESULTS
Your testing tool will tell you which version was the winner - but what do the results really tell you about your changes?
What should you be looking for?
Depending which tool you use, you should be able to see standard data such as:
• How many visitors saw the test page?
• How many of those converted? What was the conversion rate?
• What was the improvement in conversion rate?
• What was the confidence level of the results?
However, it’s also helpful to dig a little deeper and understand things like:
• How did traffic from different sources behave?
• Was there a difference between mobile and desktop traffic?
• Do you notice anything interesting about how people from different countries behaved, or did old users convert differently from new users?
You may need to overlay the testing data with user behavior insights from your analytics tool to get a clearer understanding of this.
“Data and A/B test are valuable allies, and they help us understand and grow and optimize, but they’re not a replacement for clear-headed, strong decision-making.”
Julie Zhuo, Co-Founder of Sundial.
How do you check for unforeseen consequences?
It’s also advisable to review your analytics data for the period of the test to check that there haven’t been any negative impacts that you didn’t anticipate.
Refer to your sales funnel and user journey research and think of all the pages that the test visitors may have seen after viewing the new page. If these weren’t included in your experiment, you should check that conversions performed as expected.
If you see an unexplained drop in conversions elsewhere, the test may have had an impact on behavior beyond that page. In this instance, it’s advisable to run the experiment again and include all the pages within the test.
"Make sure your tests have sufficient time to capture the full impact of your changes, particularly for features that might influence customer behavior patterns over time. Consider that a pricing change might show an immediate uptick in conversions - but lead to decreased customer lifetime value that only becomes apparent after a few months."
Duncan Gilchrist, Co-Founder of Delphina and Uber alumni.
How should you document the findings?
Once you’ve got a clear picture of what the data is telling you, it’s important to document the results of the test
This could be as simple as looking at the CRO report you set up before you ran the experiment. But if you’re sharing the results with your colleagues – or boss – you might want to focus on a few key areas:
• What problem did you identify?
• What was your hypothesis?
• How was the test different from the control page?
• What did the results tell you?
• What can you do with this information?
• What do you want to test next?
STEP SIX
IMPLEMENT THE WINNING CHANGES
You now know what leads to higher conversions, but if you don’t get the improvements out of the testing tool and on to your website, you won’t generate more leads.
How do you plan the rollout?
It’s wise to stagger the rollout, if resources allow. By breaking up the work and only deploying changes to pages in specific areas of your website, for example, you’re able to continuously analyze performance and check the updates are favorable for those users.
How do you get buy-in from dev teams
Tech teams are always inundated with requests, so how can you get yours to the top of the list?
These tips could help:
• Communicate the value of the change, and the potential impact to the business If the update is deployed to the whole website, what could that do to your total conversions? How will this help you meet the business’ goals?
• Involve the tech team as early as possible. Not only does this help foster a sense of collaboration, but they may have some fantastic ideas of things you could try.
• Celebrate wins together. When you share the success of the changes with the wider business, make sure you give your colleagues plenty of credit for helping to get the changes on the live website.
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple.
CHEAT CRO SHEET
CHEAT SHEET QUICK WINS TO TRY
Stuck for inspiration? Take a look at our cheat sheet of quick wins and see what has worked for other B2B companies.
CRO quick wins
We’ve looked through countless case studies, white papers, eBooks and websites to bring you seven of the most impactful things that other businesses have tested - and share what they’ve learnt about conversions:
1. Test your button wording. Using ‘submit’ instead of ‘click here’ can reduce your conversion rates by 3%, according to Unbounce.
2. Hide your navigation for key landing pages. VWO reports this doubled conversions when they tested it for Yuppiechef.
3. Create bespoke landing pages for each marketing campaign. Websites with 40+ landing pages generate 12x more leads, according to Hubspot.
4. Make your forms smaller. Dropping the fields from 11 to four can lift conversions by 120%, Unbounce found.
5. Add a video to your landing page. Videos can see conversions go up by 88%, according to EyeView.
6. Personalize your pages. By personalizing their website for the technology industry, Just Eat for Business saw an 811% increase in onsite conversion and the average time on site went up by 10%, Webeo reports.
7. Personalize your CTAs. When Arcserve personalized their most high intent pages and CTAs with Webeo, there was a 95% increase in onsite conversion
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”
Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.
Photo: Daniel Oberhaus, 2019
About Lead Forensics
Lead Forensics is the world’s #1 B2B website visitor identification software.
Our software identifies anonymous website visitors, giving you detailed info about the companies checking out your site. This unique insight helps you to understand conversions and user behavior at a company-level, allowing you to focus your efforts on converting your targets more effectively
And because we provide details of key decision-makers, you can turn passive interest in your website into active leads and real sales opportunities
Discover how Lead Forensics can help you improve your conversion rates
Claim your free trial to see how identifying your anonymous B2B website visitors and their on-site behavior can transform your CRO work.
With Lead Forensics, you can:
• Identify anonymous high-value businesses that are already interested in your website
• Work out which pages they visit and how they engage with them
• Track conversion paths for better insights into website conversions
• Get real-time alerts when high-value visitors are on your website and monitor their behavior as it happens
