Getting conversion in websites with reduced traffic

Why optimizing conversion is difficult for websites with little traffic?

A good similarity would be in thinking of an empty store, where no one enters. It would be difficult to understand visitors to that store when you do not have many of them.

The CRO is a practice that is being applied by large multinationals or digital native companies, the reason is obvious, they have more resources and their digital equipment is more professional. However, this should not exclude small and medium enterprises to consider how to improve their conversion rate. No matter the size of your company to start working on the optimization of the conversion rate (CRO), even having a small volume of traffic you can do many things about it.

To emphasize however that if you are an SME or a start up with little traffic you have two additional difficulties:

1. Understand your visitors or what is the same, how can you know what prevents them from converting if you have a reduced volume of them, and
2. Measure the elements of your website that work. High traffic websites rely on A / B tests to measure whether their changes are statistically significant. When you receive little traffic you would need much more time to get the same degree of confidence.

We are going to address these two problems at a time:

1. The techniques you must use to understand your visitors if your website does not receive a lot of traffic

The following techniques can be carried out even if your website receives only a few visitors per day:

• User tests tend to be the most fruitful technique. Ask a friend, or someone at your fingertips, to browse your website. Once your website is sufficiently refined, try to get your target audience to start navigating your website.
• Watch the recordings of the visitors’ sessions. Doing so will give you an idea of ​​how visitors see your website, where they get stuck and the main vanishing points. In addition, you will see your creation through an external gaze.
• Talk to salespeople or people who have sold face to face the same type of product or similar products and take care of the main obstructions that potential customers oppose to try to remedy them.
• Analyze the websites of your competitors. If you have no obvious competitors, analyze the companies that are successful in similar sectors.
• Add your phone number prominently at the top of each page. Even if you have no plans to answer phone calls continuously. Having the phone number in view of potential customers often serves as reassuring.
• Increase incentives for visitors to complete surveys. The more you offer as an incentive, the higher percentage of answers you will get.
• Survey tools such as Google Consumer Surveys and Pollfish can be useful. Choose your target audience, write your questions and then you will receive the answers in a matter of hours.

2. How to measure what really works if your website does not receive a lot of traffic

Many people with a website with little traffic believe that the tests are not for them, because it will take too long to reach a relevant level of confidence and it will not be worth the effort.

We encourage you to start testing A/B as soon as possible! Remember that the benefits of an A/B test are forever and will take you away from your direct competitors. To understand more about A/B test you can consult the following article A beginner’s guide on A/B and CRO tests

How many conversions do you need to have a relevant degree of confidence in an A/B test? This depends on the following factors:

• Your current conversion rate The fewer conversions you get, the longer it will take to detect factors that hurt your conversion.
• The increase in the conversion rate you try to detect. A 100% increase approximately four times faster than a 50% increase can be detected. That is, the big changes that have a greater impact on the conversion rate are much easier to detect.
• The level of confidence you want to get when you close the tests. If you want to be 99.99% sure that your new page is not converting better by chance, you’ll have to wait a long time. We recommend that if you have a reduced traffic volume, do not be a purist and propose changes.

More strategies to improve the conversion in websites with reduced traffic

• Test the biggest and most daring changes. When you have little traffic, it is especially important to try large changes that are more likely to move the conversion significantly.
• Test the elements of your page that interest your visitors. Try to overcome your main objections. Highlight the things you like about your website. Change the offer, or at least how it is presented. Test elements that can double or halve the number of conversions. In other words, play it a bit, in short you are simply performing a test!
• Measure the “microconversions.” That is, if your conversion process consists of making a purchase on a web page, measuring the abandoned carts, visits to product listings, visits to the store, etc … And try to identify which are the main figa points.
• Test the main pages. Perhaps it may be obvious, but due to the low volume of traffic it is important to focus on the important aspects with greater potential growth. Some examples could be your main landing page or your check out page.
• If you run campaigns to drive traffic to your website and create ads, you can experiment and see which ad messages get a higher clickthrough rate. Extrapolate the results that you get in the ads to your web page.
• Combine similar pages in the same test. If you have ten home pages and you want to test the call to action button, apply the same change to all those pages and include them in the same test. Some companies have many more landing pages than they need, perhaps because they want each landing page to fit a particular keyword. We often consolidate these pages into one to optimize and then apply the results to all the other pages.
• Reduce the degree of statistical confidence that you consider sufficient to determine that a page is the winner of a test. Within the sector it has become an unwritten rule to declare a winning test with a 95% confidence level, but that does not mean that you can not use a lower percentage. You have little traffic, you are not in the position to demand too much statistics. Test, modify, advance and retest!
• Temporarily increase traffic to the page you’re testing, even if that means sacrificing some profitability. If the new page wins, traffic may be more profitable than expected

In the previous section, we recommend that you perform user tests to understand your visitors. In addition, regardless of whether you carry out A/B tests, we strongly recommend that you use user test as a way to measure the performance of the pages. In fact, many times getting an obvious result on an A/B test would take too much time, in these cases we recommend that you use only user test and return to the A/B tests once your business has grown.

The user tests have many and enormous advantages over the A/B tests:

• They are quick to carry out. A user test can take less than ten minutes.
• They allow to collect qualitative ideas. A two-month A/B test can tell you which page performed best, but a ten-minute user test tells you why.

Improving low traffic websites is like working in the dark, you have to work blindly, without feedback, so you should know what you are doing. Low traffic websites are much harder to optimize than websites that receive a lot of traffic.

You can only improve

The techniques described in this article are priceless. We do not know a better way to grow startups or small and medium enterprises.

If you feel overwhelmed, cheer up as every successful company has had to go through this stage at some point.

Conclusion

Now that you know the techniques to grow conversions on your website, try to identify which combination of them will give you the best results.

Do not stop desiring to experiment and above all do not give up if your first tests do not have a revealing result.

Poses hypothesis for improvement, tests, modifies and tests again…

¿What should I do now?

1. If you have more questions and want to know how we work and the possibilities of improvement of CRO that your website has, request a first FREE analysis and one of our consultants will contact you shortly to advise you.
2. If you want to continue reporting on this topic and many more you can download our ebook on the basic fundamentals of CRO to start optimizing the conversion rate in your digital business. You also have many other articles in our current blog where you will find references on this topic and many more.
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