Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of identifying friction points on your website to make improvements that can lead to increased conversions through strategic testing and analysis. Conversion rate optimization for low traffic websites can be a little tricky to navigate but is not impossible.
If you have a smaller website that doesn’t receive 100,000+ visitors every month, you may have had some difficulty in the past with optimization efforts. You also may have tried consulting with CRO agencies in the past and they have told you that you don’t have enough traffic to run effective tests.
So what does someone do in your situation?
Statistical Significance
Before we can answer the question of how to perform CRO on a low traffic website, it is important to understand why having more traffic makes testing easier. The answer is simple – statistical significance. Basically, statistical significance is a measurement of the level of confidence you should have in a test.
The best rule of thumb for a satisfactory level of confidence is 95%. What does that mean? This is essentially saying that based on the data, if the test was run 100 times, the results would be the same 95 of those times. This isn’t a perfect explanation, but for our purposes, this is the best way of understanding it.
95% confidence is a pretty high threshold to meet. So, what makes it easier to meet that threshold? You guessed it – more visitor sessions. The more sessions in the test, the easier it will be to reach confidence.
Well then, if high traffic is so important, how then can tests be effective on lower trafficked sites?
Know Your Audience
Even with low traffic, you can get to know your target audience. Using insights gleaned from heatmaps, click rates, and session recordings will help you understand the needs and behavior of your users. These insights may also help you realize where you can improve elements that speak to user motivation as well as help you identify friction points that you didn’t know existed. Having a better understanding of your audience will help you to make changes with them in mind.
You can also survey users who both converted and didn’t convert on your site as well as get real-time feedback about specific pages on your site. Tools like Hotjar can give you this kind of insight. They even have a free version so that you can get some of the basic functionalities without costing you anything!
User Testing
This has been a useful strategy for User Experience Designers for a long time. Basically, put your website in front of some users who aren’t already familiar with it, and tell them to walk through it and provide you feedback. Their feedback can help you identify what is working well and where you have friction points that need to be addressed.
The best thing about user testing is that you only need about five users for decent data collection. This requires far fewer users than an A/B test would but is also limited in scope to just usability items.
There are services out there that you can use for this like User Testing and Lyssna (formerly UsabilityHub), but you can also perform this yourself with people you know. Just be sure that those individuals fall in your target demographic.
A/B Testing
A/B tests are a main staple of CRO. These tests compare two versions of a website to discover which one performs better, allowing data-driven decisions. It can take time for low traffic websites to reach statistically significant results, though. So, how can lower traffic websites run effective A/B tests?
Option 1 – Run longer tests
It is generally considered best practice to not run tests longer than six weeks, but when dealing with lower traffic, this may be unavoidable. The risks for running the test longer are usually due to seasonality, regular business cycles (promotions, etc.), and running the risk of users clearing cookies and double recording.
However, when dealing with lower traffic, this may be a reality that you have to live with and factor that into your decision-making.
Option 2 – Make decisions based on incomplete data
I know it isn’t ideal, but a reality that owners of a low traffic website will have to deal with is making decisions with flawed data. This means instead of the ideal 95% confidence, you may find yourself making decisions on 90% or lower confidence.
This is not a great spot to be in since anything below 95% confidence is essentially no confidence at all. So, what does one do when faced with this situation?
There are a couple of ways to approach this:
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- Use a tool like CXL’s A/B Test Calculator to estimate how long it may take to reach significance (95% confidence). If the estimate is a reasonable amount of time, continue to run the test.
- The other option is to just make a judgment call. Factoring in the length of time that the test has been running and observing the performance trend.
The second option can be difficult, and you may want to avoid making any decisions based on incomplete data and just go with your gut. The problem is our gut instincts are many times wrong.
The best approach would be to try to avoid this issue altogether, but how do you do that?
Option 3 – Make bolder changes
The best way to reach confidence on low traffic websites is to make bolder changes. This may mean that you cast aside the small incremental tests for something larger, or even multiple changes at once.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
When working with a particular university’s landing page, we noticed that after running several incremental changes we weren’t getting significant results. The decision was made to make a large, sweeping change that included the hero image, headings, and form layout. We quickly got results from these changes and saw a lift of more than 30%!
The tradeoff was that we weren’t able to identify what specific changes contributed most to the lift, but when your traffic is low, sometimes you have to approach the issue from a different direction.
Don’t Forget to Optimize for Mobile
On average, nearly half of web traffic comes from mobile users. Optimizing your mobile site to provide a seamless mobile experience for your mobile visitors is a necessity. By not optimizing your mobile site, you could be missing out on customers and conversions. As with your desktop website, you should understand your mobile customer audience and identify friction points that may occur on mobile but not on the desktop. Creating a seamless mobile user experience could increase your conversion rate and earn you loyal customers.
Conclusion
Conversion rate optimization for low traffic websites can be utilized with success. Low traffic websites don’t have less potential and don’t have to increase their traffic before they can benefit from conversion rate optimization. Instead of focusing on quantity, they can focus on quality. By increasing the quality of your website through knowing your audience, addressing friction points, prioritizing changes, and using A/B testing, your low traffic website could start working more for you, increasing conversion rates and retaining loyal customers.
Contact us today to find out how you can optimize your website.
