Have you ever thought about how users behave once they land on your website? You could be spending so much time and resources on a lead generation strategy that drives traffic but ultimately falls flat on conversions. As digital marketers would say, “Traffic is meaningless if you don’t get any leads from it.” That’s why it’s crucial to track the effectiveness of your campaigns by looking at your website conversion rate.
Adopting a conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy is essential to ensure an efficient lead generation campaign. It helps you increase the number of website visitors who complete a desired goal (increase conversions) while lowering acquisition costs to maximize the returns on your investment (ROI).
Whether it’s getting site visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, sign up or complete a purchase, increasing your website conversion rate even by just a tiny percentage can do wonders for your business. But what is the best CRO practice to implement?
To help you understand and keep track of your online conversion rate, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the most useful CRO statistics to inform your conversion rate marketing strategy.
Take a look at the list of conversion rate benchmarks and CRO statistics below to help you implement an optimized CRO strategy.
Conversion Rate Benchmarks
Your conversion rate optimization journey starts with benchmarking. Understanding conversion rate benchmarks in your industry gives you an idea of where your business stands among your competitors. Comparing your conversion rate with others’ offers insight into how well your campaigns are performing and what metrics you need to pay attention to during website conversion rate optimization. Take a look at some of these benchmarks below.
Top 5 Industries With Highest Conversion Rates (First Page Sage, 2020):
• Legal Services – 7.4%
• Point of Sale (POS) Services – 7%
• Staffing Services – 5.1%
• IT Staffing & Services – 3.5%
• HVAC Services – 3.3%
These are the top-performing industries based on sales conversion rate statistics. While each business or niche will see different numbers, these numbers help ascertain if your marketing techniques can see a respectable online conversion rate.
Top 5 Industries with Lowest Conversion Rates (First Page Sage, 2020):
• Commercial Insurance – 1.7%
• Higher Education – 1.4%
• Scientific Testing & Measurement – 1.3%
• B2B SaaS – 1.1%
• Computer Product Manufacturing – 1.1%
The difference between the top five and the bottom five industries is significant, and there are many reasons for this disparity. If your website has a one percent conversion rate and you belong to one of these industries, you are well within the average online conversion rate. But you should also see that as an opportunity to generate 100 percent more conversions if you bring that number up to two percent.
Conversion Rate of Online Shoppers Worldwide by Device (Statista, 2020):
• Desktop: 2.1%
• Tablet: 3.32%
• Mobile: 2.01%
This is a stark contrast from CRO statistics in years past that saw desktop users as more conversion-ready (170 percent higher conversions) than their mobile counterparts. Today, we see a significant dip in desktop usage and a rise in mobile and tablet usage, highlighting the growing use of mobile.
Sales Conversion Rate Statistics
Companies continue to allocate a good percentage of their marketing budget to digital strategies, highlighting the wide adoption of digital marketing techniques in generating user demand for their business. But does the amount of demand generated translate into sales and conversions? What is the best CRO practice to help create more conversions? Take a look at the following sales conversion rate statistics to see the current state of CRO digital marketing.
• Web traffic ranked as the second-most-common way to measure content marketing success. Total sales ranked first (HubSpot, 2020).
Total sales coming from traffic generated through content marketing strategies is still the best indicator of content marketing success.
• According to 68 percent of marketers, paid advertising was one of the most critical components of their overall marketing strategy (Hubspot, 2020).
With ad prices continuing to rise while costs pile up due to ineffective strategies, marketers will be forced to adopt conversion rate optimization to improve their efficiency.
• Fifty-eight percent of marketers said that their strategies for generating user demand can get them the results they need (Ascend2, 2018).
About 133 out of 229 marketers surveyed revealed that they were confident in their ability to create user demand using their strategy, while only 16 view their tactics as unsuccessful. And yet…
• Only 40 percent have adopted a strategic approach based on their understanding of the customer journey (Decibel & Econsultancy, 2020).
Most of these companies admit to focusing on short-term strategies or only fixing problems when they arise instead of adopting strategies to prevent them.
Landing Page Optimization Statistics
Your landing pages perform a crucial function in nurturing leads into paying customers. But without the proper tools and optimization, users can spend a lot of time on your landing page without ever leading to a conversion. Read the CRO statistics below to inform your conversion rate marketing strategy and improve the performance of your landing pages.
• Forty-four percent of clicks generated by B2B companies lead directly to the site’s homepage instead of a landing page that’s specifically built for conversions (MarketingSherpa, 2019).
The moment a user lands on your landing page, they are faced with a series of decisions that lead them to decide whether to convert or bounce. Certain elements like rich media and compelling copy will trigger that decision-making process. However, the user will not even have that decision to make if you don’t even have a landing page in the first place.
• Videos on landing pages increase conversions by as much as 86 percent (EyeView Digital, 2019).
The human brain is hardwired to respond to visual stimuli and movement. People prefer to watch a video over reading many texts, which is also why they are more likely to convert when your landing page contains engaging video content.
• Removing the navigation menu can increase sign-ups by as much as 100 percent (VWO, 2021).
The navigation pane improves the navigability of your website. But on a landing page, its mere presence increases the number of decisions users can make. Eliminating the pane presents users with fewer choices, allowing them to zero in on the choice you want them to make, which helps to increase conversions.
• Reducing the number of form fields to just three results is an optimum number for conversions (Hubspot, 2020).
You and your users have different goals when it comes to landing pages and form fields. You want to collect as much information as possible, while users prefer to spend less time filling up forms. It’s important to balance it out.
Website Conversion Rate Optimization Statistics
Traffic is at an all-time high, yet you’re nowhere near the level you want because you aren’t converting. That means there’s something wrong with your website. The following website conversion rate optimization statistics give you more insight into how you can improve your CRO strategy to increase website conversions.
• Website conversion rate drops by as much as 4.42 percent per additional second your site loads during the first five seconds of page loading (Portent, 2019).
It’s always important to make an excellent first impression, especially in marketing. Before even landing on your website, one in four users will close the window if it takes more than four seconds to load. Make improving site speed a priority in your CRO marketing strategy.
• Opt-ins presented as a feature box enjoy increased sign-ups by as much as 51 percent (DIY Themes, 2019)
Feature boxes may look invasive, but they’re actually one of the best ways to increase website conversions. They help your opt-in form stand out, making it more visible to your visitors. Here’s one helpful tip: use contrasting colors.
• Calls-to-Action (CTAs) that contained the searched keywords increased conversion rates by as much as 87 percent (Hubspot, 2017).
This is one reason why solid keyword research is essential in boosting conversions: It could impact your CRO strategy and your SEO efforts. One website saw higher conversion rates from blog posts when they integrated the most-used search keywords into the CTAs of 12 of their most high-ranking posts.
• CTAs used as anchor text in blogs improve conversion rates by up to 121 percent more than banner ads (Hubspot, 2021).
A decade ago, banner ads proliferated the internet. They were so ubiquitous that most people just tend to tune them out because they got used to seeing so many of them online. This is a phenomenon called “banner blindness” and is one perfect reason why your CTAs are much better integrated into anchor text.
Trends in Conversion Rate Optimization
The impact of having a CRO marketing strategy cannot be overstated. With CRO marketing, your business addresses customer pain points, bottlenecks in website performance and optimizes your marketing strategies to maximize your efforts. And while some of its effects are immediate, others take more time.
It’s crucial to adopt CRO digital marketing techniques early on. You can start by taking note of the following trends in conversion rate optimization.
1. More Focus on User Experience
Users have always been the focus of digital marketing, so improving user experience through conversion rate marketing isn’t exactly new. But Google recently announced that it is placing even more emphasis on user experience as a ranking signal in SEO, significantly impacting CRO services everywhere. Look for more UX-centered CRO marketing techniques that aim to strike a balance between maximum conversions and user satisfaction.
2. The Push Toward Mobile-First Optimization
Mobile-first experiences have been on the rise for a few years as the number of mobile users continues to skyrocket. According to Statista, the number of mobile users worldwide increased by more than one billion in a span of five years (2016 to 2020). This is one of the reasons why the pace in mobile-first innovations has increased considerably. CRO services will be looking to integrate mobile-first experiences such as voice search and augmented reality in their CRO marketing techniques for years to come.
3. The Demand for More Personalization
Today, we live in a world of personalization. Standardized, generic content is no longer going to cut it. In fact, 74 percent of customers now feel frustrated when the content shown to them isn’t personalized. This has been one of the growing trends in conversion rate optimization in recent years and isn’t going away anytime soon. CRO digital marketing specialists will look for ways to segment their audience for greater personalization during their interactions.
4. The Proliferation of Cheap Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Today, there is an abundance of cheap conversion rate optimization tools available on the market. Thanks to the proliferation of such tools, the barrier for entry into CRO has been lowered considerably. With that, we expect one of two things to happen: businesses will pay more attention to optimizing their growth channels or they will gain an appreciation of quality CRO services due to the abundance of subpar marketers. Either way, businesses win.
5. The Need for Sustainability
The advent of the pandemic was an eye-opener for businesses all over the world. Instead of adopting a tactical approach, only fixing issues as they arrive, businesses are now feeling the need to build a more sustainable path. Companies will increasingly focus on improving their processes through CRO, optimizing the entire business to eliminate any inefficiencies and making the customer journey more client-centric.
Conclusion
That ends our list of the top CRO statistics. Were you able to extract some knowledge from what we shared with you? Based on what you read, what is the best CRO practice for you?
As a premier CRO agency, we always aim to provide our clients value by optimizing their strategies. In sharing the statistics above, the goal of our CRO agency is to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. This way, you gain more revenue from your existing traffic without having to increase spending through launching more campaigns.
But sometimes, that can feel overwhelming. Conversion rate optimization requires constant planning and testing – two things that will require significant time and effort. Don’t worry; our CRO company is here to help.
Thrive is a top-tier CRO agency that helps you optimize your growth channels to maximize returns on your investment. Our CRO company implements the perfect mix of UX and aggressive marketing that propels your business forward. Create sustainable growth by getting in touch with our CRO company. Schedule a consultation with us today by filling out this form or by calling us at 866-908-4748.
