Magento Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies Article

If you are an online merchant, or aspiring to be one, the obvious first step you need to take is to decide on what eCommerce platform you are going to us. If you are one of the many who have chosen to use Magento for that purpose, then it’s time to think about how to get the most out of your store.

While having a competitive, high-quality product is essential, making sure the product is well-marketed is perhaps even more important. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process that helps you to convert site visitors into customers. Naturally, you want your conversion rates to be as high as possible, simply because you want to, well, sell more. Here are some foolproof ways to increase your conversion rates and improve the overall business performance of your (or your client’s) online store if you are using Magento for your online store.

Conversion Rate Optimization tools

Magento comes with, or is compatible with, a lot of very useful Conversion Rate Optimization tools. For small, medium and medium-large online stores, Google Universal Analytics is an essential tool that will get you far, if you use it effectively (and it shouldn’t be an issue because it’s rather easy to use and it’s packed with useful features). If you have never used this tool before, don’t panic.

It may seem complicated and overwhelming, but it’s really rather easy and intuitive. You don’t even have to use all the metrics offered in Google Analytics. For CRO, the most important thing to review periodically is the Conversion Rate, which gives you an insight at how your conversions are going and how much you need to improve.

Also, check your Exit Rate, but bear in mind - it’s not the same thing as the Bounce Rate. Exit Rate usually points to poor content, low speed and technical issues, while Bounce Rate means that you’re getting a lot of low quality traffic.

Average Session Duration, along with Average Page Depth, are both valuable indicators of how your visitors behave on your page. These are pretty self-explanatory - in order to get better conversion rates, you obviously need to improve both of them.

Finally, keep an eye on traffic sources, since changing them in some way usually leads to a change in the conversion rate, either positive or negative. Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is a very useful tool, giving you important insights into what’s going on at your site on the visitors’ end, but keep in mind that these are just insights pointing at where the change should be directed. The nature of the change (the actual things you will have to improve) will depend on a lot of factors that you will still have to figure out.

Moving on from Google Analytics, Magento supports a number of useful CRO tools which are very inexpensive, and are therefore ideal for ecommerce owners on a budget. For example, MageMail is an excellent abandoned cart recovery tool, slightly better than similar tools that come with Magento.

It is not free, but you pay for resulting conversions only. Inspectlet is free if you opt for the basic plan, and it is a tool that allows you to see exactly where your shoppers are experiencing problems thanks to website heat maps that show you how visitors are interacting with your site.

For social analytics (showing which social media platforms are bringing the best conversions), we might recommend a great platform called AddShoppers, which can easily be integrated with Magento. Finally, for A/B split testing, you can either go with Google Content Experiments for free or try some easier and speedier solutions, like Optimizely and VWO.

Segmentation

A common mistake that many people make when attempting to improve their conversion rates is to not breaking their conversions down into different contexts, for instance “site to cart” and “cart to sale.” These are completely different things and require separate approaches. You can also break conversions down by device type, to see whether you get sales more from mobile devices or desktop computers, for example.

Finally, don’t forget the traffic source – review where your visitors are coming from, whether it is organic traffic, referrals, paid search, etc. After you have examined which sources do better or worse than the others, conversion-wise, you can redistribute your resources accordingly in order to improve your conversion rates.

Bonus Tip: Things to Avoid

Of course, there are practices that are absolute conversion-killers and should be avoided at all costs.

One is hidden costs – if you don’t offer free shipping, make it clear from the get-go. Unforeseen costs are a big turn-off for any customer and always come with a risk of cart abandonment, which is detrimental for your “cart to sale” conversion rates.

Next, make sure your customers can reach you quickly and easily via live chat, phone or email. Also, make your return policies and delivery timelines very clear. Here’s a little trick – don’t state your estimated delivery time as an approximate time-frame (“in 2-4 days”), rather, try to use an estimated date (“Nov. 18th). It’s been proven to have a positive effect on customers, just like express checkout and “wallet” payment options. Give us a call for more Tips or Help with your Magento store.

Agency Bio

2buy1click Ltd is an Efficient Magento 2 Development Agency based in the UK specialising in the development of Fashion, Beauty and Industrial Magento 2 websites. Our Team consists of experienced Magento Developers, Designers and Marketing Consultants that are dedicated to providing Outstanding Magento Development Services.