For the last 2 years, I watched how the traffic of my startup grow. After I had managed to get more and more visitors to my website, I started paying more attention to conversions.
The effort to increase my website conversion from 2% to 3% (that’s about 30% increase) is lower than increasing your traffic by 30%, not to mention you improve the quality of your website when you optimize it, you make it clearer to the visitors.
Having good numbers in Google Analytics is not everything though. What good is a visitor that registers, but he doesn’t know that he will eventually have to pay for your product? “On the web you can find everything for free, right?”
So I did also a few tests directing my register now button to the Pricing Page. The conversion numbers from visitor to registered user dropped yes, but the conversion from users to premium users grew significantly.
On the free tools page, 80% of the visitors didn’t even think about converting (based on geographical analysis and conversions), but they were using the tools heavily. Keep this in mind when you offer free tools. Even if the tools are free for them, they are not for me: I pay 3rd party services for some data, server power etc.
Focus on getting quality traffic
You may often find that promoting heavily in social media or posting everywhere can get your website bounce rate really high (high = bad), so measuring channels just on visits or conversion rate is not really enough.
Look at the effort spent on each channel. From some channel it’s easier to get 1000 people to visit your website, but only 5 to register and from some another channel you may work the same to get 100 people to visit your websit,e but 20 to register.
Where should you focus your marketing efforts?
Once I’ve hit my product market fit, I started going where my targeted user were. This showed in a decrease in traffic, but a lot higher quality visitors (bounce rate improved by 20% and average visit duration by 40%).