We’ve set up our website, uploaded content, and visitors are starting to make their way to our slice of the internet, now it’s time to improve the conversion rate. How will we know if they enjoy their experience once there? How can we improve our website in order to encourage more sales?

What is a Conversion?

Converting web traffic is an important part of brand-building and money-making online. But what is a conversion? Any goal set with the expectation that visitors will complete it falls under the category of conversions. The most basic conversion is a purchase.

Think of a conversion as kicking a goal. What are you aiming for?

Conversions aren’t limited to a user clicking the ‘buy’ button on our website’s shopping cart. Other goals we set with the intent of increasing sales include newsletter sign-ups, sending of a contact form, completing a survey or even clicking through to a specific page that we consider important for our sales process.

How To Improve Website Conversion Rate?

Improving conversion rates hinges on knowing what our target audience is looking for and being able to provide it in a way that is relevant to their needs. If a visitor of our site is in the market for a product we sell, we need to offer the best user experience and instill the necessary trust that will cause them to go through with the purchase. This entails knowing how our website’s visitors interact with our page.

Analysing Website Heatmaps

We’ve established that understanding how a visitor navigates our website and what they focus on while there, is important in making sales. What if there was a way to tell what our audience focused on when visiting our website?

Fortunately, this becomes possible by analysing website heatmaps. Heatmaps are graphical depictions of what visitors do on a website. The data concerning user behaviour are grouped together and represented as colors.

A heatmap is reminiscent of a weather map you see on a meteorology report that shows temperature readings. By looking at a heatmap, you can determine what people like when visiting your website and what they tend to stay away from. By knowing their behaviour, you can adjust your design and content to provide a more compelling and relevant experience so that you can meet your visitors’ expectations.

Website Heatmap Software

Valuable insight can be obtained from gaining a more in-depth understanding of what catches a person’s attention on your site. By using website heatmap software, you can then combine the knowledge you gain with metrics from your Google Analytics. This data includes monthly visits, average number of pages viewed per user as well as demographic information.

Using contrasting colors on your site can bring attention to important elements. This can then be evaluated with heat maps.

Other valuable metrics you can factor into your optimization efforts include information such as purchases completed, shopping cart abandonment rate, newsletter signup page views versus newsletter sign-ups and many others.

Using Hotjar to Improve Website Conversions

Hotjar is one such website heatmap software solution that offers website owners deep insight that can boost sales or work out other ways to improve the conversion rate. You can find out why a certain landing page is not doing what you intend it to and make the necessary fixes to get the conversions rolling in.

If you want to take a more proactive path to improve your website, you can run split-testing where you can run and evaluate two or more versions of a page. This way you can keep the one that is bringing in sales and throw out the less effective version.

Hotjar is a leader in providing heatmaps for your site. They have a great free way to start.

This website heatmap solution also does a great job of interfacing with your website’s analytics in order to make laser-precision assessments about how people are actually interacting with your site.

Just like you’d want to want to observe why people leave a brick-and-mortar store without making a purchase or inquiring for further information, you want to know how your prospective customers value the user experience on your website. Take the guesswork out of understanding your visitors’ habits and give Hotjar a try today with a free trial.

Now you’ve got a sale after improving conversions, you may ask yourself how you can take payments while on the go: after providing a service, at the markets, from your home or at your store you’ve opened. Our mobile billing article covers our two favorite billing apps that work from just about anywhere.