For any business making money or acquiring leads online and gaining a positive return on investment, there are two major variables that will affect their success towards meeting these objectives: traffic and conversion rate.

Revenue Factors

• Traffic: traffic is primarily determined by an online business’s success at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click advertisement, email marketing, and Social Media presence. Z Global is experienced in both of these fields and offers services to optimize them.
• Conversion Rate: traffic to your site will not do you much good unless you are able to either create leads from online users or (even better) get the users to buy your product or services. The latter is especially important for eCommerce businesses. Conversion rates can be affected by a multitude of factors:

Conversion Rate Factors

• Highly-visible Call-to-Action buttons: making sure that call-to-action buttons are of proper size (eg big enough on mobile to be pressed by a finger), bright enough to be identified, and comprised of attractive color schemes (for example, red tends to turn people away).
• Concise and effective sales copy: customers tend to dislike reading and are especially fond of images, so when describing your product you should keep your words clear and concise.
• Cart & Checkout Process: one of the biggest factors, especially for mobile, is the complexity of the cart and checkout process. In general, the fewer clicks and input fields that are required, the better. Large companies like Apple (iTunes and App Store) and Amazon have switched toward one-click purchases in order to minimize the number of customers quitting part of the way through the checkout process. Additionally, for the input fields that are necessary, having placeholder text will help the customer correctly input their information.
• Consistency Between Advertisement & Landing Page: if you are spending revenue on advertisements, it would make the most sense to ensure that those ads lead to landing pages that reflect the content and allure of the advertisement. Otherwise, you are spending money on an ad that only causes confusion and obfuscates the offer you are making to the user.
• Credibility & Trust: while text in foreign languages, pop-up windows, and explicit advertisements can reduce trust in a site there are third-party certificate organizations like eTrust and VeriSign whose visibility can help reinforce a customer’s trust in your website and organization, and increase their chances of converting on your website.
• Distractions: flashy advertisements leading to external sites can lure your potential sale away from your website. In fact, anything leading a customer out of a conversion funnel is counter-productive and will increase the number of steps necessary to convert (thereby lowering chance of conversion).
• Slow Page Loading Times: an issue especially on mobile, studies have clearly shown that long loading page times significantly increase the chances of a user a.) getting distracted by other browser tabs they have open, b.) creating impatience and frustration in the customer, causing them to leave the site, and c.) may even hamper their perception of credibility and reliability of your website and company. Mobile versions of websites should especially be optimized to reduce the load on bandwidth (which is more limited on cellular networks). This often means simplifying the web pages, showing less content on each page, compressing and resizing images, and removing hardware-intensive features like Javascript or Flash.
• Product Reviews & Testimonials: perhaps one of the more intriguing factors, reviews allow potential customers to get real feedback from other users who have already bought the item. There are many plugins out there that can automate emails requesting for additional feedback, post good reviews to social networks, create Google Rich Snippets for extra visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs), and that can verify that user reviews are from actual buyers of that item. These systems allow website & company managers to get valuable feedback from their customers and even give them the ability to publicly respond to specific reviews.
• Re-targeting: more advanced eCommerce platforms often have the ability to track customer activity and base advertisements (on-site, off-site, or in emails) to those previous users. The tracking of their activity on the site creates data that can be used as context to help optimize the type (and frequency) of advertisements delivered to the user. The data can also be used to create targeted offers & deals to help lure the user back to make a purchase.

Our team at Z Global has extensive experience in increasing conversion rates and we feel confident that we will be able to help increase the effectiveness of your website in producing sales and leads. To start improving your business today contact us today!