Email, SEO, social, content marketing, PPC… the list of channels you are told to optimize for goes on and on and on.
You’ve got tons of traffic sources you’re relying on to attract people to your website and sometimes it can get overwhelming.
Depending on who you talk to, some channels stand out more than others. To some, that channel is SEO. To others, it’s email marketing or paid acquisition through social media. Every business’s priorities are rarely exactly the same.
The only problem? Relying on just one traffic source is dangerous. Don’t get us wrong, we encourage doubling or tripling down on a small amount of channels or even just one channel that produces strong ROI/ROAS, but we mean it can be dangerous betting the house on just one channel. It can leave you exposed.
You could wake up one day with a Google penalty, causing your keyword rankings to disappear. Or Instagram might change its algorithm so favor content from certain accounts over others. How about Apple’s iOS privacy change in early 2021 lol 😉. Did your remarketing efforts also take a hit like the entire planet? Yup, probably. Changes that are out of your control can be disastrous for any brand if you’re relying too heavily on one channel or another to drive a bulk of conversions.
Spreading your conversion opportunities across several channels balances the risk. If one goes down, you’ve still got the others to rely on until you’re back on your feet. Just like your money manager says. Say it with me…”diversification”.
Mitigating risk is everything when it comes to dollars and cents so below we’ve compiled a list of helpful conversion rate strategies that really work for merchants. We have broken the strategies down by traffic source to help you navigate the nuances specific to each channel. Optimize away!
Let’s get into strategies shall we?
Segment your traffic source data by device
In other articles, we touched on the importance of general segmentation and how doing that well helps marketing teams better target their ideal customers. And while those articles highlighted some different techniques/use cases, this section will teach you the value of segmenting your audience(s) specifically by device.
From the most zoomed out level looking back down at more granular segmentation strategies, segmenting each traffic source by the device is an important step because it allows your business to assess each source’s conversion rate before prioritizing which to work on. So if you’re a mobile first, Instagram native brand for example, you should allocate your resources and focus your attention on optimizing your mobile, Instagram conversions first rather than optimize for let’s say, desktop and tablet traffic. Don’t misunderstand this and assume that means you can ignore desktop or tablet traffic, it just means after the audit reveals your strongest device is mobile and your conversions are highest via Instagram, you should prioritize your conversion efforts appropriately. This makes sense right? If you are converting most of your traffic via email and that traffic is split between mobile and desktop, now you’ve got a healthy debate amongst your team on where exactly to prioritize your conversion efforts. We can get into decision frameworks and prioritization techniques at a different time though, don’t you worry!
Create source-specific landing pages
We do go over this in other articles but it is so so important. In too many cases we come across companies that send traffic to the wrong pages. They spend a lot of time, money and effort designing beautiful landing pages that end up underachieving. Why? Rather than sending users to product specific landing pages or source specific-specific landing pages that are built with all of the nuances of each channel, companies send traffic to home pages and general product pages. This isn’t your best move. You are pizzaing, when you should be french frying.
In order to optimize your eCommerce conversion rate by traffic source, you want to make specific landing pages, sales pages and product pages for each traffic source. For example, if you run Google AdWords campaigns, create specific landing pages for these ads. If you run Facebook or Instagram ads, create specific landing and sales pages for these ads.
So, what does that look like?
When targeting social media traffic specifically, ensure that your landing pages are more visual than text-based. This probably isn’t terribly new to you but it gets overlooked or poorly executed upon all the time. In the realm of social media, include text as needed but social media is a visual platform and you should maintain that consistency by using imagery and video to convey your offers — not text-heavy Q&A style content. In some instances with particular brands, heavier text strategies have success but they are the exception, not the rule. We tend to see more text-rich content work better for organic traffic. Pay attention to the context of the medium, and even more specifically to your audience’s preferences, and then architect your landing pages, sales pages and product pages accordingly for more success. Optimize what works and faze out what doesn’t over time.
When it comes to PPC (Pay per click) campaigns vs SEO, we recommend your brand split test the layout of your landing pages per traffic source to see what works and what doesn’t. We’ve had a lot of success using Google Optimize to do this and we think you will too. But for SEO campaigns on desktop, mobile and tablet, for Google search and Bing search engines, you’ll often need a lot of keyword-rich text to help you rank in search results, commonly referred to as SERPs. When you are optimizing for PPC campaigns though, that’s typically not as necessary. It can vary by traffic source and audience preferences by brand but PPC campaigns usually convert better by being less text-heavy. The little details can give you some of those little wins.
Sometimes brands are able to understand their audience(s) so well that they create strategies with funnels designed to accomplish different goals on different channels. For instance, if your social channels post super visual, less educational content or ads, you may come to find that your social traffic is less aware of our product when they enter your sales funnel than say, the traffic entering your funnel from paid or organic search. You can’t have the same landing page for all sources of traffic in this moment even though all traffic is entering the same stage at the top of your sales funnel. Each channel’s traffic is a little different and needs to be tweaked just enough to fit the channel’s specific idiosyncrasies. So in this instance, your business should design your landing page with more educational copy on it for the traffic coming from social than it does on the landing page for your organic search traffic. Your organic searchers are already doing their research on your product(s)/service(s) and may convert from totally different copy on separate landing pages. But in order to get your social users who you feel may come to shop with you but are a bit undereducated, the educational copy on those landing pages is the kicker that converts!
If that weren’t enough, we also recommend that your business play around testing different layout elements on your channel and device specific landing pages. We have seen plenty of brands’ conversion rates benefit from explainer videos published above the fold. Some brands are able to grab and hold a user’s attention this way and achieve phenomenal results. You can also test out different sized as well as colored add to cart and checkout buttons while you’re at it. Sometimes color and size changes can have a significant impact on your conversion rate but fair warning – we have also seen merchants lose their minds fretting over every little detail of their website, emails and landing pages to the point of extreme burn out. Don’t do this to yourself. Often conversion problems lie within your user flows somewhere along the customer’s journey and fixing those issues is a lot more impactful than simply tinkering with the size or color of a button. Don’t miss the forest for the trees so to speak but it is good to pay attention to detail.
Post content geared to each social media platform’s usual demographic
You see this happen probably every day of your life and if you’re like most marketers, your eyes roll 🙄. Misunderstanding the context of each platform is such a social sin is it not?! For example, don’t you love getting served a political post in your LinkedIn feed designed for business content? So. Much. Fun.
The people you’re targeting on LinkedIn likely won’t be the same users you’re communicating with in exactly the same way on TikTok or Instagram. Good chance you communicate with your users differently yet again through your email marketing efforts too. All channels require their own context and strategies. The tactics are different and the way information is communicated/received varies from channel to channel.
Ultimately, understanding the marketing subtleties will help your brand enhance its conversion rate. Post content on each platform relevant to its demographic and audience preferences, and you’ll increase the likelihood of getting responsive traffic to your website. You should absolutely be aware of the nuances permeating each channel when posting content to each traffic source. Use Facebook and Instagram to show off the more human, down to earth side of your brand. Post valuable content on LinkedIn addressing your users’ pain points. Maybe don’t post political messages on your brand’s Pinterest page? That isn’t the place for it. Snap is best for short form videos, don’t make it too text heavy and if your audience skews older, maybe reconsider using Snap as a priority marketing channel altogether. YouTube is a visual medium, don’t post super text-heavy content. Be smart and feel out your audience’s likes and dislikes if you want to increase your conversion rates. Ignore all this valuable information and watch your conversion rates stagnate or worse, decline.
There are many social media platforms across the internet, and every platform has different types of users exhibiting behavior that seems to be generally accepted within their respective ecosystems. It is your job to understand your customers and your audience(s). Spend the time really getting to know your ideal customers and tailor your messaging to specifically match each marketing channel’s rules within the context of your brand’s personas. This is a winning formula that will see conversions balloon.
Run retargeting campaigns for each traffic source
Retargeting is one of the stronger marketing tools the internet has given us. Behavioral retargeting is a form of online advertising where companies target consumers based on their previous internet behavior. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target webpage or email, which sets a cookie in the user’s browser. Retargeting, also known as remarketing, primarily uses paid ads to target users who have visited your website or social media profiles. This online advertising strategy can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website because for most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting is a tool designed to help companies reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away. Pretty neat huh? That is until Apple said hold my beer 🍺 with their iOS 14 update!
Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple Javascript code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the Web. That worked well for brands for a long time.
Retargeting is such an effective strategy because it focuses your advertising spend on people who are already familiar with your brand and have recently demonstrated interest. That’s why most marketers who use it see a higher ROI than from most other digital channels. So when your brand is using Google Adwords and Facebook Ads pixel tracking for remarketing campaigns, you’ve previously been able get relevant messages in front of potentially high purchase intent users who’ve already visit your ecommerce store, looked around, maybe added an item or four to their shopping cart but for whatever reason, still left your sales funnel without completing a purchase. Executing this strategy well likely empowered your business to experience lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increased sales, while also having the ability to track where the new ads, leads, and sales are coming from.
But now that Apple has made this strategy more difficult for many brands because marketing efforts/budgets are less targeted and optimized, we are in an era where merchants are having to get more creative. Essentially, in an increasingly cookieless world, brands have to fight harder to achieve the same or even higher levels of ROI. First party data is now the sexy way to capture audience behavior, data is more opaque than it used to be, costs to acquire customers keep increasing and the returns per channel are harder to come by than they were even just a couple of years ago.
There are certainly ways to combat Apple’s privacy changes and we, as a marketing community, will continue to come up with intelligent ways to hit our conversion goals. We suggest using retargeting strategies in conjunction with inbound and outbound marketing or demand generation efforts to achieve maximum results. Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display ads are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion optimization in a vacuum. Conversely, retargeting/remarketing is stronger at helping increase conversions, but it won’t necessarily drive people to your site the way some of the other top of funnel tactics do. Your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic and retargeting to get the most out of that traffic.
Something to try today: Remarketing advertising works particularly well when brands show ads to past visitors who have abandoned their shopping carts. If you can get channel specific with the ads you show your visors and make those little tweaks, even better. Users will see the product ads on other websites/social channels. Yes, they may be less targeted today than they were two years ago but if done in conjunction with other intelligent marketing strategies, this is a great technique to bring back past visitors and try to entice them to convert using some coupons, discounts, loyalty perks or other benefits.
Offer a unique incentive for each traffic source
Like we discussed in other sections, each traffic source has its own nuances and rules. We know this. But in addition to customizing landing pages and sales pages to each traffic source, you will pick up incremental wins by tailoring the incentives to each traffic source as well. So if your audience is really receptive to coupons and discounts (honestly what shopper isn’t?) through Instagram, don’t offer the bulk of your coupons through LinkedIn or YouTube. That makes sense right? When attempting to boost your conversion rate, offer appropriate incentives for each traffic source. If your goal is to optimize conversions via social media shares, understand your best channels and then double down on execution. It makes little sense offering your best deals to shoppers through direct mail if the data is telling you that email marketing is your most effective method.
With a lot of merchants, we’ve seen success when brands offer free shipping. We have dissected free shipping at length in other articles but the data keeps telling us that shoppers, agnostic of niche, channel, sector or industry, love free shipping. Offering shoppers free shipping could be that one thing that really puts you ahead of the competition, especially if the potential customer is shopping around the internet for the lowest bottom line – which many, many people are doing all of the time. This does not mean you need to shift your marketing strategies to reflect offering incentives that force businesses to compete in a race towards the bottom of who can offer the cheapest prices or anything like that. Doing so can devalue your brand and your product(s)/service(s). We are simply trying to make you aware that having many fishing hooks in the water, so to speak, can yield results from many different fishing poles if our analogy resonates with you. You should have an email marketing strategy, a social media presence, a variety of lead magnets at the top of the funnel so on and so forth right. But don’t overlook the ability of offering free shipping via different channels to deliver conversion results. People love free. Bake it into your pricing strategies and your marketing strategies but watch it come back to you in perpetuity through your CAC/LTV ratios over time.
Pay attention to who your different personas are. Pay attention to which types of users add items to cart but don’t complete purchases. Which channels are these users coming from? How can you tweak your offers and incentives to match their behavior better, channel by channel? Start out broadly but get more granular with your audience(s) over time and as budget permits. Do this systematically over time and your conversions will incrementally increase over time too.
Consider purchase intent for each platform
It’s really key to understand that based on the channel the traffic is coming from, the quality of said traffic can vary a lot. For instance, purchase intent traffic from Google search usually has a higher conversion rate than traffic coming from social media. Many companies we’ve worked with insist that email marketing traffic consistently converts at a higher rate than many of the other marketing tools the average eCommerce merchant uses to grow conversion rates. Many times, higher conversion rates tend to suggest there’s a correlation between purchase intent and incremental upticks in conversion rates.
Obviously the quality of traffic and channel execution varies from brand to brand as well as industry to industry but the contestants remain, testing/experimenting with message copy, creative and channel against different audiences is your best strategy to learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s still important to optimize your landing page and website, this goes without saying, but clearly there are additional factors working together to get high conversions.
One method we’ve seen some merchants try out when attempting to parse out purchase intent for further analysis is they separate conversion rate attached to the process of user going from landing page to add-to-cart from the conversion rate attached to the process the user executes going from add-to-cart to completed checkout, or order completion. After you’ve segmented out both types of users, dig deeper and understand which channels each type of user is coming from. Are there patterns you can identify?
Hopefully that wasn’t too confusing but said another way; break your conversion rate down into two separate conversion rates during the same checkout flow. One number will tell you the purchase intent of users you should classify as browsers because they are people displaying lower purchase intent signals. And the other number will identify the more serious, higher purchase intent shoppers because those users made it further down your sales funnel, almost all the way or completely all the way to the end in the result of a completed purchase. This will help you understand which batches of users you should spend portions of your marketing budget getting your message in front of versus cohorts of users that aren’t worth your dollars.
There are also additional ways we recommend you segment your users to better understand which users display higher purchase intent from those that may not. Some of the more direct strategies you might try out derive from BOFU (bottom of the funnel) tactics. Understand the behavior of your users that make it to the bottom of your funnel or all the way through to completed purchase so you can reverse engineer what type of customer journey got them to complete all the earlier stages in your funnel. Once you understand what works to get users to the bottom of your funnel, optimize each earlier stage of the funnel to maximize the amount of opportunities your business has to move leads successfully through your funnel. You might align your marketing team’s goals, who specialize in optimizing strategies towards the top of your funnel, around SLAs (service level agreements) that help assign value to marketing materials they spend time producing. You know, assets like whitepapers, webinars, downloadable guides, case studies etc. When your top of the funnel teams build processes that can accurately measure the strength of the leads they bring in, segmented by persona and channel mind you, your business will have built a valuable machine that can detect quantifiable purchase intent.
Boost site speed for PPC traffic
Research collected over the last fifteen years shows that as mobile page load times increase from 1 to 5 seconds, the probability of a shopper bouncing increases by 90%. That’s basically a death sentence for your brand, is it not? Unfortunately, many merchants suffer from slow loading pages and it’s super fixable. Instead, we see a lot of businesses focus such a big bulk of their attention on landing page design, layout, features and lots of other really critical things that for sure command proper attention but this tends to also cause many to overlook prioritizing fast page load times.
Typically we see merchants that suffer from slower page load times really feel it when it comes to optimizing their pay-per-lick (PPC) campaigns. Like we discussed in an earlier section, marketing teams spend their time, money and energy optimizing landing pages to perform as effectively as possible per channel so that the company can capture high purchase intent leads and move them through their sales funnel. So why would they want to sabotage the company’s expensive marketing efforts by pages that give consumers a bad experience? You’d be shooting yourself in the foot! Think about what would happen if shoppers are leaving your landing pages before they load because they’re just slow. Maybe the images take too long to display in high-resolution on smart devices. Maybe your social integrations are crazy engaging but they might also be bogging your landing pages down, creating delays too. If you find yourself in this position, it doesn’t matter how beautiful your landing pages are or how big your PPC budget is. The name of the game is getting users to see your offers. If you are having trouble getting users to do this because your pages are failing to load, you need to take a step back and stop spending money on marketing and getting new users. Audit which channels are affected, if any, by testing different offers and different landing page layouts (copy & creative), and then prioritize which channels to fix over time. Sometimes minor fixes can lead to major results.
Site speed complements everything your internet presence is designed to do and should be one of your top priorities across all channels and devices.
Be open to changing the goal of your ads depending on the product you’re selling
It’s important to recognize that your business goals are all about providing visitors with the maximum possible value at every stage of the customer journey. When you’re using Facebook ads, Google ads or any other platform to run ads on, the best way to drive traffic will be unique for each business. The messaging, the creative, the landing page, they all need to be customized to the nuances of the behavior displayed by users on each channel. But you can even change the strategy on how you reach your audience per channel if need be. At least we encourage you to remain open to changing the goal of your ads depending on the product you’re selling and the target audience’s level of reception/engagement to your marketing. You always want to make sure your marketing efforts are aligned with your potential customers so you can optimize conversions per user per channel.
For example, let’s say you have an online brand that features low priced, easy to explain products that have a short customer journey. Logically, it makes sense to send traffic directly to the product landing page. Alternatively, if you are offering a higher-priced, more complicated product that has a longer customer journey, it may be better to drive visitors towards more informative content in the first place. This is where your content marketing efforts are there to nurture quality leads and move them through your sales cycle. No two businesses are exactly the same so as a company, you’ve got to understand who you are, how you are positioned in the market and against competitors, how your customers perceive your brand, how markets respond or don’t to your messaging and what makes your product valuable so that you can successfully craft an intelligent business plan. It is critical to understand the sales cycle of your offers so that you can optimize your sales funnels.
An optimized sales funnel at every stage will increase conversions and grow overall revenue. But you won’t achieve the results you want if your business remains rigid, regardless of what the data is telling you. You’ve got to let the data inform you about user behavior per channel and for different products/services and adjust your messaging intelligently. You are only locked into the strategies you’ve determined you are locked into. A healthier approach, in our opinion, is to let the user behavior dictate how you craft your paid ad strategy per channel and if different products/services require different approaches even on the same channel, so be it. As William Arthur Ward so eloquently put it, “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” A winning formula in a world full of constant change necessitates making adjustments as user behavior evolves over time. Your paid ad strategy should reflect that reality.
Final thoughts: Always be testing…conversion optimization is a grind!
In the end, with so many channels happy to take your money and help get your brand’s message in front of targeted users, it is your job to figure out which avenues are worth allocating resources to and really pursuing and which are not. Each channel has its own unwritten rules, its own accepted behaviors, preferences and nuances. We covered that plenty above but it will seriously benefit your marketing efforts if you do your best to understand these platforms and their communities so that you can position your messaging appropriately and effectively.
Finding multiple ways to be successful at converting shoppers just browsing into completed purchases is key to the success of any brand’s long term strategy. In order to be good at driving conversions across multiple channels, a lot of planning, strategy and roadmapping have to intersect but strong diversification of revenue generation does ultimately balance your marketing/tech/human capital investment risk. For instance, if one channel goes down (remember when facebook and its subsidiaries just didn’t work for a few hours in October 2021?), or behavior shifts away towards some other shiny new platform (think of how traffic fluctuates between Instagram, Snap, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, LikeToKnowIt, Reddit, Twitter and even Clubhouse maybe… you get the point – really any number of other popular tech universes), your business feels confident it can generates leads, conversions and revenue in repeatable, predictable and hopefully scalable ways until the dust settles and the market risk your brand is vulnerable to subsides, as it will to some degree for everyone who also uses those tools to reach users.
Mitigating risk through the marketing lens is worth everything when it comes to the process of how your brand should approach the planning, structure and framework for your business. Audit all channels where conversion rate applies and analyze where the data is telling you to allocate resources. While SEO, influencers, one or two specific social channels or a robust content marketing approach may prove to be the highest-converting traffic sources today, there’s no reason why other channels can’t compete or overtake the top spot over time as user behaviors shift. When it comes to where your strongest conversions are coming from, turn over every rock so to speak and scour everything that gives your business a chance to earn a customer’s business.
Use some of the techniques in this post to build a strategy for each traffic source. Measure the impact using marketing dashboards for each. Or find some makeshift way of building out traffic specific strategies that work for you at this point in your brand’s lifespan. We’re all at different places in our eCommerce journey but it is important to make sure you measure your revenue generating efforts intelligently and keep wherever you store this info somewhat organized. Google docs and excel sheets work until you’re ready to move on from them. No shame in that game.
All the best! 
