A bit of a trick question: If you had $100 to spend, would you be better off devoting that money to doubling the traffic to your site?

Or doubling your conversion rate?

Many marketers get this wrong.

Despite years of front-line, real-world experience to the contrary, more and more online marketing budgets are disproportionately aimed at driving traffic, rather than conversions.

There’s the notion that things like SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing and the like are far more important than increasing shopping cart sizes, decreasing abandonment, upselling and cross selling.

To be sure, driving traffic is a critical mission for any e-commerce site.  After all, no visitors, no sales.

But at the same time, even the most brilliant SEO or affiliate strategies will be for naught if the site itself fails to entice customers to actually buy.

That’s precisely where site testing, optimization, and personalization come in.  Failing to actually sell goods on the site can cost brands the effort, the dollars, and the brand equity that they devoted to attracting all that traffic.

Doubling your conversions can be dramatically more profitable than merely doubling your visitor numbers. And here’s why:

You want insight, not just raw numbers

Slice and dice your site traffic analytics all you want. But at the end of the day, they are still just numbers. What rings the cash register is actionable solutions you can use to improve your customer experience.

The first step is to employ an internal test-and-learn methodology to understand what visitors to your site are engaging with, where they’re dropping off, where their gravitating towards. (Hint: this may even differ by traffic source!)

But only through continuous A/B and multivariate testing, can you actually begin to understand your visitors and place content decisions in their hands. You can fundamentally change how your organization learns about its online traffic. In other words, nobody should be increasing traffic or making a site without a focus on improving conversions.

You want sales, not just visitors.

Yes, going to your boss and detailing how you doubled site traffic in the last quarter is a grand accomplishment! But can you really document how that increased traffic contributed to sales? Do you really know?

If you aren’t tracking conversion rates, or attempting to optimize the site in any way, boosting traffic rates is simply doesn’t matter.

Once visitors land on your site, your goal is to get them to buy (and hopefully become repeat customers). This is where testing and personalization are essential to turning traffic into sales.

Optimizing your site for content, design, offers, and copy is the only way to ensure your are taking full advantage of your site traffic. If the experience is irrelevant, frustrating or cumbersome, you might as well have not ever invited them to your site in the first place.

Better experience, more dollars

Today’s consumers are good at comparison shopping. They research, they sign up for emails, they track down deals.  Which may lead you to believe that the key is to boost your traffic as much as possible.

But the reality is, if you provide a really stellar online experience, they will want to come back, again and again. Which makes the overall job simpler, and clearer.

Thanks in part to more advanced testing methods, it’s a lot easier to listen to what your visitors want (and need).  Customers have become a lot more vocal even if they don’t know it. Through their clicks, page views, bounces, reviews and purchases, your online customers offer real-world feedback about their online experiences, in real-time. So pay attention to them. Make website changes and marketing decisions based on your customers, not on what your gut — or marketing budget — is telling you to.

Personalizing wins

Getting into a traffic war with your competitors is a sure-fire way to waste resources and precious attention.  It’s far more effective step up your game by using testing and conversion optimization to gather data and visitor profiles that can dramatically increase actual sales and repeat visits.  You may even find that segmenting your customers by where they came from can help you convert them into loyal and repeat buyers.

When it comes to their websites, major e-commerce players need to realize that only through a customized combination of multivariate testing, optimization and personalization best practices can they truly begin to tailor experiences in meaningful and profitable ways. It’s an ever-evolving practice that reaches miles beyond SEO, ad targeting and landing page optimization. But the rewards of it means a lot more return traffic, and a lot more improved conversions.

Follow the money

No matter how you define a conversion, at the end of the day, the holy grail for e-commerce marketers is to increase site sales. And the dollars are in the details, not just the volume. Focusing on conversion rates is where you’ll see not only site engagement improve, but revenue as well. Your traffic drivers might bring you more people, but conversion strategies bring you more money. No contest.

When it comes to site optimization and traffic acquisition, the best brands aren’t just surviving — they’re thriving. By focusing on the deep analytics and insights gained from testing with online customers, not just boosting traffic, not only improves the efficiency and effectiveness of their e-commerce site, but several other aspects of their businesses as well. They have a better grasp on who their customers are, how they buy, when they buy and what they buy.

In short, they can offer experiences more suited to customer needs and wants — and that is the true goal of any e-commerce business.

These days, consumers have more choices, more incentives and more reasons to comparison shop for the best deals out there. But Marketers can use online behavior and web analytics to reveal patterns and warning signs indicative of the type of customer retention issues that lead to “online cheating.” The question is, are they?

If caught early enough, these issues can be easily connected. To do so, marketers must identify which types of data patterns to pay attention to and use that data to inform their next steps.

1. Homepage Bounce Rates of 55% or More
If more than 55% of visitors are turning around as soon as they get to your site, it’s a major red flag that something is terribly wrong. It’s likely that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for. (BTW: you should know that the average industry home page bounce rate is around 50%, and that a well-performing homepage has a bounce rate of between 0% and 25%.)

So what gives when this issue arises? It’s usually due to issues with layout, design, navigation, site elements, functionality, content, or messaging. By A/B and multivariate testing these homepage elements in various combinations, marketers can discern which elements are contributing to a higher conversion rate, and which are contributing to the high bounce rates.

2. High Average Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates
Many online shoppers initiate a purchase, only to leave the items behind in their cart. The Baymard Institute found that the average cart abandonment rate is about 65%. Luckily, there are a number of options you can test to bring this number down. These include estimating shipping costs at an earlier point in the buying process, allowing guest checkouts, highlighting in-stock versus out-of-stock status, providing auto-fill forms based on cookie tags for repeat visitors, and using shipping discounts or specials.

3. Low Search Engagement
The importance of search on visitor engagement and purchases is often overlooked. By encouraging consumers to explore the site and streamlining the shopping process, the chances you’ll turn more visitors into customers, increases. Every single component of the search feature—placement, layout, default search box text and even the color, size and design of the graphic elements—affects engagement with this important tool. Multivariate testing can help marketers discover which combinations work best for their target audience

4. Unsatisfactory Average Order Values
What about those customers that just aren’t buying as much as they could be? Chances are they have a very specific product in mind, and aren’t being persuaded to add more items to their cart.

This is where personalization can really help. By inserting and/or customizing information that’s relevant to a specific user based on implicit behaviors (items purchased, pages viewed) as well as explicit details (location, age, gender) provided by that particular user, you’ll be able to customize their recommended items. Product recommendations and behavioral targeting are two common ways to combat this problem.

5. One-Time Buyers
66% of Amazon.com’s sales are attributed to repeat buyers. Remarkably, only 7% of the entire ecommerce industry can say the same. But it’s going to be tough to match this success without employing automated personalization with behavioral targeting solutions.

Using data such as previous purchases, searches, page views, geography, demographics, type of button click, transactions, etc., is crucial to keeping customers loyal. Behavioral targeting tailors content and offers to individuals based on both their past behaviors and their unique “buyer personas”.

Placing customers at the heart of online content decisions and giving them unique, personalized experiences is an important part of faithful consumer relationships.

While focus groups attempt to simulate and gain insights on what the customer potentially thinks, nothing can substitute truly anonymous, honest and unbiased feedback. Websites, however, can now provide this level of data in real time. Using a combination of online testing, web analytics and CRM data, today’s marketers know what actual people, doing actual searches, on their actual sites are actually thinking—and responding to—when in the browse and buy mode. It’s this level of insight that can spur improvements to product offerings, social media, in-store efforts, other offline experiences and overall marketing efforts.

No, testing and analytics won’t eliminate old-school focus groups altogether, but now that marketers have access to a lot of rich real-time data and insight into their products and marketing efforts already available to them, it’s much easier, scalable and more cost-effective. So how are websites replicating—and advancing—the traditional focus group? We look at four ways that your website can replace focus groups:

1. They’re producing data that can inform overall branding and in-store shopping experiences

We’re all aware that an online store experience has to mimic some of the same elements consumers expect in a physical store: easy-to-find products, items positioned strategically on the “shelf,” helpful customer service and so on. But where we may fall short is the reverse: using online data to improve brick-and-mortar efforts.

For example, testing and personalization insights can reveal that a particular product recommendation is effective at converting more visitors into buyers. From this, a company could reproduce this experience in its stores—whether through its associates or with product displays placed near checkout. Or if a brand notices online visitors are consistently gravitating toward a certain editorial tone or responding positively to distinct button colors, these things could also be integrated into in-store signage, advertising, direct mail and beyond.

2. They integrate in-store purchase data to customize online experiences

Just as your site is continuously collecting customer data, so are your physical stores. And the two worlds must collide in order to mutually benefit from one another. For instance, if a customer buys a TV without a warranty, the purchase may trigger an email or site promotion that highlights coverage for the TV. Ever bought something from the Apple store, like an iPhone? If so, a few days later you inevitably receive an email about your new iPhone.

In the end, it’s about making smart recommendations based on the user’s known activity, no matter where that activity originated. And unlike a focus group, this activity is really happening, in real time.

3. They’re leveraging social media and loyalty data

Social media and loyalty programs are gold mines for customers’ activity in the real world: What do they do? What do they like? What are their preferences while engaging with a brand they return to again and again? Now this data is being used to create unique individual profiles, and tailor their online experiences accordingly.

Take a hotel website: some are using social and loyalty data to enhance the customer experience from booking through checkout. Information such as program status, recent travel activity, “likes,” travel frequency, prior or frequent destinations can be fed directly into an automated targeting model and greatly improve the precision and appeal of any offers displayed to this valuable customer—such as a free room upgrade, tickets to a nearby event or a car rental. By already knowing the customer’s background, the website can take care of the rest.

4. They’re using online reviews and site engagement wisely

Shoppers don’t only share their preferences by purchasing products, they do it through their product reviews and other activity on the site. Over time and across customers, this activity can tip marketers off to items customers are likely to purchase in the future, specific problems they’re trying to solve, and even nuanced life situations—all of which can trigger different direct marketing efforts.

A good recent example of this was Target’s teen pregnancy discovery. While this particular situation led to debate, the customer’s patterns were so consistent that the store was able to flag her for a triggered direct mail campaign personalized for pregnant women. Focus groups just can’t compete with situations like this.

Business and consumer brands have traditionally approached marketing from two totally different vantage points. And it’s obvious why: buying cycles are longer, buyer mentalities are different, and products typically require more investigation before a purchase. But the reality is that B2B buyers are very similar to B2C consumers— whether it’s buying a new car or new enterprise software, consumers want to be educated and informed. They want to feel as though you understand them and their problems. And they certainly don’t want to be bored to death with encyclopedic catalogue-type information.

While there are always going to be distinct differences between b2b and b2c marketing practices, B2B websites must make some B2C-inspired adjustments to keep up with savvy consumers. Sites must be more visual, more concise and more consumable, taking the following into account:

1)     Design your site for the consumer, not the company

Just because you aren’t a retailer doesn’t mean your site has to follow a typical design pattern that most B2B sites are known to follow. You know it well: a dedicated area for a rotating hero graphic; some space touting your news and events, and maybe a few awards; and, of course, customer logos prominently displayed on the site. 

But take a look around at leading e-commerce brands and you’ll find a necessary constant: they design the site with the buyer in mind. When you hit the homepage, you know exactly what products they are offering, which promotions they are running, and you are comfortable navigating or searching the site. Their hero imagery is used strategically, the calls-to-action are prominent, and simple, actionable navigation jump-starts the shopping process. B2B companies often fall prey to the internal design and jargon trap, but it’s easy to get your value proposition across without content overload that creates a confusing experience.

2)     Start testing, seriously

B2B marketers spend copious amounts of money driving traffic to their website, but spend next to nothing on converting said traffic. I can’t help but think we are leaving leads—and money—on the table as B2B marketers.

The rapid increase in adoption of A/B and multivariate testing by B2C companies has fundamentally shifted the way websites are designed (and updated) forever. Today’s leading B2C companies are not only employing testing technologies to improve customer experiences and conversion rates, they also are making this a must-have practice for their site. Just as you wouldn’t dream of neglecting SEO, playing guessing games with your site content is no longer acceptable.

While your website may not be performing B2C-like monetary transactions, a B2B site is still an important touch point in the sales and marketing funnel. Specific elements, such as calls-to-action, landing page layouts, homepage design and forms, are high on B2C marketers’ list of optimization priorities—and yet, they are very much a part of a B2B site. The bottom line is, any small change, addition or update to your site can negatively or positively impact conversions, but if you aren’t testing, you will never know.

3)     Treat your content like a category

If you think about a typical B2B tech company, it likely has a product or service to offer, or even a blend of both. Either way, the company’s aim is to educate the prospect to drive a sale. Like many B2C sites, your products and services pages are a category. Your case studies, white papers, e-books, articles and events are a category. Any area that helps inform a decision and convert a visitor (i.e., form fill out, contact us action) should be optimized accordingly.

Your content pages are crucial to making this educational process frustration free, while giving visitors an array of choices to explore and engage with. For example, quick “pop-outs” when visitors mouse over a white paper that give more detail without having to click onto a landing page can be a great way to provide that information. “Light-boxing” a video player applies the same technique, while keeping the focus on the sole content. Large images to support product copy and listings will focus visitors’ attention.

4)     Employ deeper search and sort capabilities

For B2C companies, search is a must-have that, when optimized accordingly, has been proven to lead to higher conversion rates and sales. There is no exception for B2B.

Search functionality enables visitors to easily locate your product(s) and/or service(s) based on certain parameters— leading them down the path to become educated on exactly what they are looking for, as well as get enough questions answered to want to learn more and make contact. Additionally, any user who is engaging with search on your site probably knows a bit more about you—so offering that user more sophisticated searches can help speed up the process. With sort and filter functionality, you allow users to dive deeper into your products and resources, understand their choices and know that you have what they want!

5)     Allow product reviews

It’s time to take those typical “customer quotes” you splashed across your homepage to a new level. B2C companies have cited that allowing for product ratings and reviews from previous buyers can help sway uncertain customers or reassure them that they are buying into something great. If you’re already asking a customer to write a case study with you, or endorse you in a press release, consider asking for a product review in similar B2C fashion—and displaying it accordingly on your site.

When it comes to display, stars or numbered rankings, offer an immediate signal that others have bought, used and rated a particular product. Now, those customer logos you have on your “Clients” page have suddenly come to life. And they encourage visitors to look to longer, text-driven reviews for more product information and insights. Connect this to a form or “Request a Demo” link, and you’re not only getting product endorsements but improving lead gen too.

The reality is that today’s B2B online customer experiences are falling short to the far-superior B2C buying experience. B2B sites that don’t aim to play catch-up sooner rather than later will risk losing business, and budget. Your website is often one of the first touches a prospect makes, so don’t waste the opportunity to capture—and convert them—for a deeper conversation.

When you think about it, the Darwinian idea of evolution is not a far cry from the way we as marketers adapt and change to new technology. With new ways of selling, new channels for promoting a brand and new ways of engaging customers, we’re constantly evolving to stay ahead of the game. And now in the era of rock-solid online competition, we have to evolve even further and ask ourselves: What does it take to lead the online conversion movement?

When it comes to our online strategies, it’s easier than ever to use data-driven, scientific tools to inform ourselves about what is really making our customers click. Through an iterative process of testing and personalization, your online visitors will begin to unknowingly select the best-performing content for your site. And the weaker content should become extinct with all the other not-so-great content choices that have cycled through your site. But in the end, the strong content survives, and in turn produces a web environment that pays off: better customer experiences and higher conversion rates.

1. Learn from those who are bigger, faster and stronger
When it comes to site optimization, the fittest brands aren’t just surviving—they’re thriving. Leading retailers have realized that the deep analytics and insights gained from testing with online customers is not only improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their e-commerce site, but several other aspects of their businesses as well. By having a better understanding than ever before of who their customers are, how they buy, when they buy and what they buy, businesses are now able to do everything better. For example, they can offer experiences more suited to customer needs and wants, they can cross-sell and upsell in-store, online, on mobile, on tablets, even in social, and they can drive more sales than ever before (which they figured out via constant, but relatively straightforward, changes to these sites).

2. Test your theory
Want to know the secrets of the most successful online retailing giants, eBay and Amazon? They test their websites constantly and as they go. Building on initial multivariate testing and website optimization programs that lead to increased site traffic, interaction and sales, those leaders roll out a variety of page and site variants to different customer segments to attain increasingly nuanced results and metrics.

Thanks to a continually evolving understanding of their customers’ behaviors, those powerful brands are able to regularly improve their websites in response to consumer needs and marketplace demands—all without disturbing the customer experience or implementing drastic changes that might compromise revenues.

3. Examine outliers
Online, everyone’s opinion matters—no matter how unexpected or seemingly bizarre an opinion might be. What you think customers want or how you think they should interact with your site just isn’t relevant because they will engage with you online exactly the way they want. That means that you need to start paying careful attention to everything they do. Ultimately, your visitors should design your website based on the choices they make on your pages. Testing will enable you to follow every aspect of their behavior and their interactions with your site, and it’s up to you to take that information into account to create the optimal site experience for your visitor.

Of course, customers don’t necessarily want the same things, and that’s where behavioral targeting and personalization comes in. With personalized web experiences for each customer, your website, mobile, tablet and social sites have the power to speak directly to individual customer needs, wants and interests—no matter how unique—thereby increasing customer loyalty, individual conversion rates and even purchases at checkout.

4. Select the best results, and apply your findings
Thanks to today’s cloud-based technology, you don’t need to wait thousands of years for the winning traits of your site to be revealed. Your testing efforts will begin to reveal data insights in a matter of days or weeks (though the lifespan of a test will vary depending on site traffic, conversion rate and uplift from the default).

Follow the 95% confidence rule when ending a test and identifying a “winner.” Here is the rule in layman’s terms: Based on what you observe in a test, you are 95 percent certain that the alternate or new version is better than the original.

Furthermore, that trait-selection process isn’t a one-off. Your site can be an ever- expanding and evolving centerpiece of your brand with a strategy for “continuous optimization.” Many factors can change how even your most loyal customers use your site, such as holiday seasons, promotions or just a maturing buying life cycle. With continual testing and optimization, you can ensure that your site is always in sync with consumer needs and behaviors.

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Take it from Charles Darwin, the man who has been quoted as saying, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” The success of your e-commerce site isn’t driven by the size or cleverness of your marketing team; it’s driven by your team’s willingness to respond to the demands of customers and adjust accordingly. Only when you evolve will your consumers evolve into loyal, active buyers.