Increase conversion rates with a site audit using a Digital Experience Intelligence solution
Does your site have technical issues? Is it confusing to visitors? It may be time for a site audit.
A conversion audit is an examination of your site's overall performance in regards to how users interact with it—and convert. Audits help marketing teams understand:
What's confusing your visitors
Why conversation rates are low
What technical issues exist
Conversion audits are great at helping figure out everything that's wrong with a site, but outputs can often be laundry lists of small, disconnected problems. Time is best spent fixing problems, not triaging and sizing them up.
Start getting to the fixes that matter most by asking the right questions:
What's broken that makes the biggest impact?
What fix would have the most benefit?
Where are the high-value customers encountering problems?
In this article, we’re going to tackle 10 ways a best-in-class Digital Experience Intelligence solution can be used with conversion audits.
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10 conversion audit strategies using Digital Experience Intelligence
1. Check for low-performing fruit
Not everyone has the same experiences, particularly when it comes to devices and operating systems. An easy report to generate in Google Analytics is the conversion rate for each browser and operating system combination.
From there, simply search in Fullstory by browser and OS to bring up session replays for your lowest-performing combinations.
Patterns will emerge in session replays that can help explain what's causing low conversions: perhaps the site loads slowly or the content is cut off. Whatever the case may be, begin formulating a plan to improve the experience for users.
Takeaway: Use analytics to see the most popular configurations and then turn to digital intelligence to learn more about how those configurations are changing user experience.
2. Step into your customer’s shoes
You can have a stellar online presence, but it will all be for nothing if customer service is poor. Ask these critical questions about the customer experience:
What happens when you call your customer support line?
What's the experience like?
Are users treated in a way that aligns with your brand identity?
For example, a window manufacturing client whose installation team consistently received harsh reviews for their customer service - but does excellent work - undermines the brand experience other stakeholders work so diligently to create.
Takeaway: One call—that's all it might take to identify customer service problems that need attention.
3. Schedule website crawl tune-ups
A few regularly scheduled tune-ups will help make sure your site gives your customers a smooth ride. A web crawler is a bot that searches and indexes internet content and is responsible for understanding that content so they can retrieve it for inquiries.
Best practices are to periodically use a site crawler tool such as DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog to check for broken links and other issues.
Also, pay attention to your key landing pages, and check that you don't have content that's no longer relevant.
Takeaway: Schedule a website crawl regularly to avoid broken or outdated content.
4. Add and test an ad blocker
The average internet user is said to be exposed to thousands of ads per day. Many computer-savvy customers probably have an ad blocker installed. It’s important to know what your site looks like with one enabled.
Try using an ad blocker to see if your site still works correctly and key marketing messages are still visible for these users. Because ad blockers block both advertisements and analytics scripts, there could be trouble collecting data that gives insights into visitors' behavior.
Takeaway: Install an ad blocker on your site to confirm links are properly working, pop-ups or CTAs are firing correctly and you’re not missing out on valuable visitors due to browser failure.
5. Update metadata
The conversion funnel often starts on the search results page, before potential customers even get to your site.
Optimize your presence on SERPs by writing helpful meta descriptions using your keywords, along with tags, titles, and categories. Take advantage of Google's maximum meta description length.
Takeaway: Get recognized in the search engines by adding critical data to your meta descriptions, tags, titles, and categories.
6. Optimize for SERPs
If you can get search engines to select your site's content for the top of the page, you have an immediate advantage over your competitors, and the opportunity to begin converting customers before they even get to your site.
To start, learn how to optimize for brand search.
Takeaway: Do keyword homework on how to answer questions about your brand and incorporate them into your site.
7. Build customer segments
A segment is any saved search in Fullstory. Search for users who took certain steps to build a funnel, and who meet any combination of demographic or device criteria.
Begin by creating segments for high-value personas: the users who are (or could be) best customers. This will help aim the fire hose of session replay data at the most urgent blazes first.
Takeaway: Learn from top users. Search for their sessions and see how they engage with your website or app.
8. Run a conversion rates report
Run a Google Analytics report to get a list of the pages on your site with the lowest conversion rates.
The Google Analytics report shows the pages where users struggle, but in watching real users interact with these pages you’ll see the specific reasons why they fail. That's where session replay steps in—observe directly what's causing poor performance.
Takeaway: Use quantitative reports to identify opportunities and then use a DXI solution to see what's working—or not.
9. Make paid search pay off
A DXI solution makes it easy to search for and watch sessions of users who arrived at your site by paid search.
Review users' step-by-step progress, and understand the reasons why they convert—or why they bounce. Refine search results to investigate a specific action or outcome, such as form abandonment.
For instance, a session replay can reveal that users are filling out the form but then hitting the “Download PDF” button instead of “Submit.”
Nuanced behaviors around user experience are hard to understand with traditional analytics but easy to see in a digital experience intelligence platform. Zooming in on user behaviors with replay will help provide much-needed context around conversion numbers.
Takeaway: Search your sessions for those that arrive from paid channels. Optimize the experience so investment doesn't go to waste.
10. Listen to frustration signals
A key strategy in any audit is listening to on-page signals. Search for Rage Clicks: instances when a user repeatedly and rapidly clicks in frustration, which serves as a signal something isn't working as it should.
Consider this example of a customer having a disastrous time trying to select their seat at a client's concert hall site. They click everywhere trying to select a seat, their frustration mounting, but nothing works.
As painful as this session replay is to watch, it helps get to the bottom of the problem: a bug with the ticketing software that the concert hall used.
Takeaway: Sessions that include frustration signals are opportunities for quick wins. Search the DXI platform sessions for on-page signals like Rage Clicks and fix the error immediately.
Put these audit tips to work and boost conversions
Site audits are great but they're time-consuming and can leave you wondering where to begin. Use these tips to focus your efforts. Turn to a best-in-class DXI solution like Fullstory to prioritize fixes that will help deliver the most benefit to your bottom line.
Don't get lost in the weeds of site audits. Focus your efforts, harvest the low-hanging fruit, and get more users to convert.
