When you’re busy marketing your website, attempting to convince web users to click through to your URL and to follow your links on social media and elsewhere, the focus of your activity is often to get people onto your web pages. But this is only half of the journey you’re hoping they undertake; you also want consumers to move through your web pages, land on your product pages and load a cart with products that they later checkout. To convert visitors to customers, you’ll need to improve your click-through rate – and below are four tips to help you do just that.
Why is Click-Through Rate Important?
It’s very simple: if your ads aren’t working, you won’t achieve the revenue and brand growth you want. Click-through rates are especially crucial for eCommerce websites, but it’s also key in marketing. If you have a low click-through rate, this can affect many aspects of your website and marketing. For example, if your adverts aren’t attracting enough attention, and they are failing to convince searchers to visit your site, Google will show your advert lower and lower in the SERPs. They will see that your particular ad isn’t gaining the impressions it needs, and it will deem the ad irrelevant to search queries: fewer clicks = less relevancy in Google’s eyes.
Additionally, if you are finding your current ads aren’t getting many clicks, this can push the price up on other ads you choose to create and post. You may believe that increasing the money you spend on advertising will help your click-through rate, but this isn’t always the case.
Find Out Current Click-Through Rate
Before you begin trying to improve your click-through rate, you first need to understand your current rate. Are you performing better or worse than you thought? What pages are currently most popular with site visitors? And, most importantly, why are they popular? Is the design better on one page? Is the font easier to read? Are there more persuasive call to actions featured? You can discover exactly how well your website is performing in a variety of ways, including using free tools on the web and calculating the number of clicks and impressions.
Below, we discuss four ways to improve your click-through rate.
Attractive Design
What are the first things that a web user is going to see when they arrive on your website’s homepage? This is not a frivolous question; with the majority of web users making judgements of a website in the first few fractions of a second that they spend on it, you need to impress them right away. Use all of your design prowess and UX knowledge to ensure that a web user is always impressed, and never repulsed, by the design of your home page.
Easy Menu
Navigating a website is all about using the menu at the top or the side of the screen. For those web users who are interested in exploring your website, you’ll want to show them the way, clearly and succinctly, to the pages they will be most interested in. Don’t hide your menu, or try to do something clever with your page navigation; instead, be bold, clear, and signpost your end user to the pages you want them on. Ideally, you’ll be able to get them to your product pages in just a single click from your home page.
Incentives
Another way to incentivize your web visitors to explore your pages further is to give them a sign that your website is, in some way, exciting and worth exploring. The best way to do this is undoubtedly by adding a banner describing a deal or promotion that you have running at the moment. This adds urgency to your visitor’s visit, as they will consider the fact that they might not be able to make use of this deal in the future. Add such incentives in order to encourage web users to explore your site.
Smart Sitemap
The sitemap of a website is the overall structure of the pages and how they interlink. When you’re setting out designing your website or paying experts in site design like the ALT Agency to do it for you, you’re looking to construct a blueprint that’s easy to follow, well linked-up, and simple in directing your visitors onto product pages. That’s the end goal: to deliver customers onto the sales pages that will eventually lead them to trade with you. If you can build a site map that services this fundamental need, you’ll be halfway towards running an effective and conversion-heavy site.
There you have it: why click-through rates are important, how to find out your current click-through rate, and four simple tips to help you make the most of each and every site visitor that arrives on your unique URL in 2020.