Getting a lot of website traffic but little to no sales?

You probably have a conversion rate problem. 

It can be perplexing and frustrating to spend all that time grinding for traffic — only to stare at zeroes in your weekly sales report. However, the issue of conversion rate isn't as complicated as it seems. 

Read on to learn more about conversion rate, why it matters, and how to improve it. 

What is a Landing Page Conversion Rate?

Landing page conversion rate measures the chances of visitors performing a pre-defined conversion action. This can be adding a product to cart, subscribing to a newsletter, creating an account, or any other action that "converts" visitors into leads or paying customers.

The formula for conversion rate is as follows:

The higher the conversion rate, the more your page can impact your bottom line. 

After all, traffic is just a vanity metric unless you can convert all that attention into revenue. 

How Landing Pages are Used to Improve Conversion Rates

Creating landing pages can positively affect conversion rate in multiple ways:

• Attracting commercial-intent traffic — Creating dedicated landing pages for specific products or services allows you to laser-target keywords with commercial or transactional search intent. This, in turn, allows you to attract users who are more likely to convert into customers. 
• Highlighting conversion elements — Conversion-friendly elements, such as Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons, discount codes, and popups, are in line with the expectations of landing page visitors. In other words, landing pages can be optimized to bring as much attention to these crucial elements as possible. 
• Letting users skip to the information they need — When users go to a landing page, they don't expect a 2,000-word article that divulges everything there is to know about a product. Just get straight to the details they need to make an informed purchase decision, like the product's benefits, reviews, specifications, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). 
• Conveying quality through visual content — Unlike regular blog posts and pages, landing pages lean on visual content to present products and services in the best possible light. Informative visuals like demo videos, charts, and screenshots also provide a more engaging way to educate customers and convince them to make a purchase. 
• Using targeted messaging in ad campaigns — Creating landing pages lets you use targeted, promotional messaging for commercial-intent keywords in ad campaigns. Other pages, like your homepage or blog, can be too distracting to efficiently convert your ad traffic. 

Since landing pages are built from top to bottom for generating conversions, they're highly prioritized in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) strategies. This includes A/B testing, writing style adjustments, conditional popups, and page speed optimization. 

Building landing pages will also narrow down your CRO efforts to only a handful of pages — a significantly more efficient approach to running optimizations across your entire website. 

You don't have to worry about distractions or non-conversion-focused elements, like sidebar links, menus, and blogrolls, that might skew your page's conversion performance. 

Keep in mind that when it comes to landing page design, less is often more. 

You need to provide a compelling, distraction-free user experience that brings your audience's full attention to your conversion goal. This is especially important in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns where every wasted opportunity costs money. 

Landing Page vs. Main Website: Where to Focus Your Conversion Efforts?

First and foremost, remember that every area of your website that promotes a conversion action can benefit from CRO. 

It doesn't matter if it's your homepage, landing page, blog post, or resource page. If you want your audience to take action through those pages, you need CRO to ensure your traffic contributes to a business goal. 

However, if you have limited resources and can only pick one aspect of your site to optimize, you need to prioritize your landing pages. 

After all, the whole point of creating landing pages is to cash in on your website's traffic. And if maximizing your Return on Investment (ROI) is the goal, targeting landing pages in your CRO efforts is the more prudent decision.

What is a Good Conversion Rate for a Landing Page? 

The short (but correct) answer is it depends on your niche. 

Here are the average conversion rates per industry in ecommerce: 

• Arts and Crafts: 3.9%
• Electrical and Commercial Products: 2.6%
• Pets: 2.5%
• Health: 1.9%
• Kitchen and Home: 1.7%
• Home Accessories and Gifts: 1.5%
• Automobiles: 1.35%
• Fashion: 1.2%
• Sports and Outdoor: 1.2%
• Food and Drink: 0.95%
• Baby and Child: 0.8%
• Agriculture: 0.8%

Regardless of industry, a higher conversion rate is always better. But you also need to manage your expectations and set a realistic "target conversion rate." 

This is important for analyzing and fine-tuning your CRO strategies over time. 

At the very least, you should aim for a target conversion rate that's measurably higher than the industry average. 

Case Studies: Effective Landing Pages that Have High Conversion Rates

Before building a CRO strategy for your landing page, you can borrow ideas from successful businesses that already achieved high conversion rates.

Here are a few case studies that demonstrate how landing page CRO can drive business results:

Going: How Changing CTAs Boosted Conversions by 104%

For context, Going is a simple service that alerts members on flight deals in nearby airports. They offer a free plan with limited features along with a premium subscription that grants access to all domestic and international flights.

In their CRO strategy, Going wanted to see the impact of promoting a new CTA that allowed users to start a free trial — as opposed to just pushing their free subscription option. 

Through A/B testing, they ran two versions of their CTA side by side: "Sign Up For Free" and "Trial For Free." Not only was the second version shorter and punchier, it also came with the promise of gaining access to premium benefits without any risks. 

As a result, "Trial For Free" saw a 104% increase in month-over-month conversion rate. They have since dropped the "Sign Up For Free" CTA and used "Try For Free" across their entire website.

There are three key takeaways from this study:

• Keep CTAs crisp and impactful. Use CTAs that are concise, direct to the point, and tied to the benefits you offer. 
• Switch up your value propositions. Consider using opt-in offers like free trials, downloadable resources, discounts, and so on.
• A/B testing will save you time. Split testing the performance of multiple landing page variations is always faster than experimenting with one version at a time.

Beachwaver: How Prioritizing Website Speed Doubled Conversions

Beachwaver is an ecommerce brand in the women's hair styling industry that's struggling with high bounce rates and cart abandonment rates. 

The problem? A glaring delay in Beachwaver's website loading speed. 

With the help of Meta (formerly the Facebook company), Beachwaver turned to Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine to reduce initial loading time by 345 milliseconds and improve the website's overall responsiveness. 

A split test also revealed that deploying the Edge Delivery Engine resulted in a 210% increase in purchases — and that's just by utilizing the power of edge delivery. 

If Beachwaver's CRO strategy campaign can be summed up into one takeaway, it's to remember that conversion rate is closely tied to the user experience.

Loading speed, in particular, is a crucial element of site performance that has a profound effect on conversions. According to a study by Deloitte, a whopping 70% of online consumers consider loading speed as a make-it-or-break-it factor when shopping online.

Boarderie: Edge Delivery as a Shortcut to Supercharged Page Performance

Boarderie is a family-owned artisan cheese and charcuterie board maker that also faced page speed problems. 

Their business model banks on three crucial value propositions: 

• Get a custom, fully-arranged charcuterie board ready for gifting
• Conveniently order online and get your board the next day
• The product's aesthetic appeal 

Since Boarderie aims to ramp up sales through their online store, having a slow website is a huge bottleneck to profitability. However, the nature of their business requires the A-team to be all hands on deck in terms of business strategy and production. 

As such, Boarderie turned to an external solution that can deliver substantial results without considerable commitment in terms of time and effort — bringing us yet again to Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine. 

After deploying the product, a split test revealed that Nostra AI was able to boost Boarderie's loading speed by 40% as well as increase their conversion rate by 14%. 

The key takeaway here is simple: performance optimization doesn't have to compromise a website's visual fidelity or its function. 

While it helps to build your ecommerce website lean and light, there are off-site strategies you can use to bolster performance. This includes upgrading your hosting, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), or bringing the big guns and deploying an edge delivery network. 

CRO Strategies for Landing Pages 

CRO is undeniably an essential element of digital marketing. In order to develop a solid and informed CRO strategy, you must first understand the factors that affect your main Key Performance Indicator (KPI). 

That said, here are the factors that affect page conversion rates and why they're important:

• Traffic quality — To generate conversions, you need to attract people with the right intent, buying power, and preferred content consumption channels.
• CTA text, design, and placement — Numerous case studies show that minimal adjustments to the CTA can affect page conversion rates by double digits.
• Unique selling point — Some customers need to know the unique advantages of choosing a product over competitors before committing to a sale. 
• Customer trust — Apart from a unique selling point, savvy customers also need reasons to trust your brand and website.
• Checkout process — Any type of friction during the checkout process can turn away customers before they confirm their purchase. 
• Page design and content quality — Your landing page copy and design must engage users, build buyer confidence, and direct their attention to essential conversion elements.

Remember that user experience is paramount to squeezing the most conversions out of any page.

It's not just about providing top-quality content in the form of product descriptions, images, and other visuals. For most customers, the speed at which the experience is delivered can also be a deal-breaker.

Numerous studies prove that faster and more responsive landing pages consistently perform better in terms of user experience, engagement, and conversions. 

To better understand the relationship between landing page speed and conversion rate, let's take a look at the evidence:

• 53% of visitors or potential customers leave if a page takes longer than three seconds to load.
• Improving loading speed by 0.1 seconds can lead to an 8.4% increase in conversions.
• Reducing the initial load time and accelerating responsiveness can boost conversion rate by 15%. 

Dissecting conversion rate and the factors that influence it is the key to formulating your CRO strategy. 

To get the ball rolling, below are the top 7 tips for improving your landing page conversion rate:

1. Start Optimizing Page Performance

The best and fastest way to get a measurable bump in conversions is to prioritize page performance. 

Today, performance can be measured and analyzed using Google's Core Web Vitals metrics, namely: 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the time it takes to load the biggest content block on a page.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures the delay before the browser responds to user actions (e.g., clicks, keypresses, and screen taps). 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Tracks the largest impact and distance affected by unstable elements on a page. 

You can track your landing page's Core Web Vitals metrics with a tool like PageSpeed Insights.

At a glance, you can identify which Core Web Vitals metrics urgently require optimization. PageSpeed Insights also provides actionable recommendations that specifically target the detected performance-related issues on your page. 

Read our guide on how to improve page speed for step-by-step performance optimization tips. 

2. Make Sure You Attract the Right Traffic

When conducting keyword research, be it for SEO, PPC, or content ideation, make sure you scoop up keywords with commercial or transactional intent. 

These are keywords used by people when they're ready to take action.  

For example, when users search for "app development," they're probably only looking for free information. The keyword "mobile app developers near me," on the other hand, is used when users are looking to take action. 

Tools like Semrush make it easy to define the distinction between different keyword types. 

You can also use traffic analytics tools like Google Analytics to get to know your best customers a little better. 

Apart from tracking user engagement, Google Analytics also unveils important insights regarding your audience. This includes demographic data, the topics that catch their attention, and where in the customer journey they abandon ship.

3. Leverage Social Proof

Social proof operates in the same principle as word of mouth. It can help you win the trust and confidence of potential customers by showing that your product or service produces positive results for other people.

Some examples of social proof you can leverage are:

• Customer reviews
• Star ratings
• Testimonial videos
• Influencer quotes
• User-generated content on social media
• "As Seen In" logos
• Trust badges (e.g., accreditations, awards, and certifications)

4. Maximize CTA Visibility

On a landing page, your CTA should be one of the first things customers see upon arriving. 

It's understandable to look out for your audience and load them up with all the knowledge they need before hitting them with your "Shop Now" button. But in CRO, burying your CTA under a ton of content is a mistake that may cause you to miss out on sales. 

Consider the following tips when optimizing your CTA: 

• Use color contrasts to make your CTA button pop
• Present additional CTAs as popups or floating bars to ensure visibility
• Proudly display your CTA above the fold — next to your brand value proposition
• Keep your CTA text short
• Use a tool like Heatmap to optimize your CTA button placement

5. Promote Offers

Discounts, reward points, freebies, upgrades, package bundles, and bonuses can sweeten the deal just enough for some customers to convert. 

Different offers work for different niches. Just remember to keep it aligned with your target audience's needs. 

You can also instill a sense of urgency to make your offer more compelling. Some examples are offering limited-time offers and mentioning how many customers are already seeing great results with your product or service. 

6. Reduce Friction During Checkout

You can do everything right on your landing page and still lose a conversion due to a cumbersome checkout process. 

Unless absolutely necessary, avoid requesting more information or adding extra steps before bringing customers to the payment page. Should you need their email address for your mailing list, make sure it's optional and comes with an added benefit for your audience. 

If your product or service absolutely requires users to create an account, consider more streamlined processes like Single Sign-On to reduce friction. 

7. A/B Test Your Landing Page

No matter how skilled or well-funded you are, it's impossible to create the perfect landing page for your business — at least not overnight. 

It takes time to test new strategies, make incremental improvements, track your data, and adjust your CRO strategy based on your results. You can, however, speed up the process through A/B testing. 

In simple terms, A/B testing involves running two or more versions of your landing page during the same period. You then compare the performance of each version side-by-side to determine the best possible version faster than testing one iteration at a time. 

A tool like Heatmap and Hotjar has the tools you need to run A/B tests on any landing page. 

Remember, CRO is an ongoing process — not a weekend project. You'll need diligence, creativity, and a whole lot of patience to reap its full benefits.

Before we wrap up this guide, here are a few A/B testing tips you should remember: 

• Specify your goals along with the metrics and KPIs you need to track
• Focus on testing one element at a time during A/B tests to avoid skewed results
• Always run split tests when working with a website optimization company

How Nostra AI Can Help

Speaking of website optimization companies, it's clear that CRO is a big job that can stretch your team too thin. 

Performance optimization alone can take weeks or even months if you go DIY. 

If you'd rather focus on other aspects of CRO, address your page performance concerns with a turnkey solution. 

With Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine, you can easily unlock near-instantaneous loading speeds in 24-72 hours. Our crawler optimization service will also speed up the indexation of freshly made landing pages — allowing you to generate targeted traffic faster from search engines. 

Book a demo here to see what we're about!