Improving Your Conversion Rates

So, wanna know something stupid about me?

While I sit here writing this newsletter, I’ve got a big TV over my desk powered by my Mac. It is basically my 4th monitor. And…

I have an ASMR video playing in the background up there. Some dude shoe shining. It is weirdly relaxing while I’m sitting here writing and working.

When I first heard the term “ASMR”, I thought it was the dumbest thing I ever heard. In some ways, I still do. But… yet here I am. Embarrassing myself at the start of my newsletter.

Well, fueled by some awesome coffee and a weird ASMR video, how about we dive into this week’s newsletter where we’re going to talk about your conversion rates, improving them, and some paid traffic. Oh, and a bunch of updates from the world of WordPress.

Let’s roll….

How To Methodically Increase Your Conversion Rate

We all want to increase our conversion rates. Whether it be for an opt-in, a landing page, or making a sale…. the goal is always to make number go higher.

Now, one thing I notice a LOT is that too many people don’t even measure. They don’t even track the stats. And if that’s you, it is time to get moving on this.

Conversion Rate = # Of Goals / # of Visitors

So, if you had a landing page for people to opt-in for a lead magnet and it got 100 visitors and 5 people opted in, that’s a 5% conversion rate.

Easy peasy.

Individual landing pages have a conversion rate. Sales pages have a conversion rate. And, your entire site has a conversion rate.

For instance, if you look at the average number of new email subscribers you get per day (or per week) and compare that to your site’s traffic, your entire site has a global conversion rate. It would take into account all opt-ins across the whole site. And, most global site conversion rates tend to be in the 1-2% range these days. Not super high.

When it comes to increasing these conversion rates, it pays to be methodical about it. Otherwise it would feel like throwing wet daycare pasta up against the wall and seeing if it sticks. And we all know, usually it just drools down the wall.

It comes down to a few basic guidelines:

• Pick one specific page to optimize. You can do others at same time, but point is that each page should be tracked separately.
• Ensure you have accurate tracking stats on both conversions and visitors so you have the conversion rate. Also, ensure you’ve got other analytics for that page as it will come in handy for tweaking.
• The more traffic you can funnel to that page, the faster the process goes. I find that using paid traffic can help speed things up. This makes the traffic flow steady and quick enough so you can actually test things without it taking forever to see a result.
• Test different things, but one core thing at a time. This way when the number goes up or down, you know why.

Quick example…

I’m slowly working on optimizing the conversion rate for optins to this very newsletter. Frankly, I haven’t been happy with it. So, thought I would put some attention on it.

I’m starting with the main landing page for The WP Edge. By tweaking this one page, it gives me one central place to concentrate on. Focusing on the global site conversion rate would introduce too many variables.

On my landing page, the opt-in form itself is built with Fluent Forms. I can track conversions directly with that, however I also use Conversion Bridge in conjunction with Fathom Analytics. (Note, these tools are all available to Concierge clients in the Toolkit). So, conversions to that form are fed right into Fathom as conversion events. And, the opt-in form on that page is unique so that it only appears on that page and nowhere else.

Now, I can track specifically the conversion rate of that single page. I can also see device type, browser, referral sources, etc.

I decided to ramp up the traffic to the page using paid ads on X (formerly Twitter). With a steadier flow of traffic, I can now work on tweaking this landing page over time. Right now, using the ad, I am flowing about 100 people per day to that page. Which is actually perfect for testing and tweaking. And right now, my conversion rate is 6.1% over the last week. Frankly, that’s not very good for a landing page, so I have some work to do.

One thing I am noticing is that the incoming traffic from the ad is almost all iOS phones using Safari. When I first saw this, it immediately brought to mind that I needed to improve the mobile responsiveness of the page. Desktop users are converting at 26.7% (which is way more like it), but those phones are only at 4.6%. So, going to be spending more attention on the conversion rate specifically for mobile. I also may tweak the ad targeting so I bring in more desktop users versus the heavy weight toward mobile going on right now.

But, see, while this is all basic stuff, it is far more methodical than just…. guessing.

And yes, it costs a little money. Right now, I’m dedicating $20/day to these ads. I don’t mind. Cost of doing business. And it sure makes things go much, MUCH faster. In fact, I’ll likely just leave it running. I think having an “always on” paid traffic campaign to send new leads into your business makes a lot of sense.

Concierge Client Update

On today’s theme of conversion rates, optimizations and paid traffic, I wanted to talk to my Concierge clients for a second here…

While I’m not going to run your paid traffic campaigns for you (trust me, you wouldn’t want me to ), I can definitely help you with the mechanics.

I still have a few clients who I don’t even think have any analytics set up. I offer Fathom Analytics to clients on the Concierge Core plan or higher and I’m happy to set you up. I never do it on an assumption, so you would need to tell me you want it. If you’re on Google Analytics or some other alternative, that works, too.

I also love using the Conversion Bridge plugin. It works with Fathom, but it works with a ton of other services as well. And what thus plugin does is makes it much, MUCH easier to deeply integrate your website into your analytics so you can track specific events and paid traffic performance.

For instance, we can track individual submissions on forms because Conversion Bridge will track conversion events for your forms and report it back to your analytics software. This allows you to track conversion rates.

Each funnel, each landing page…. it needs to be looked at separately so that we ensure we have the proper mechanics to be able to track and then improve the conversion rates.

And all of this is stuff I can help you with as a Concierge client of mine. In fact, that’s one of the things about Concierge…. that I know the business side of this stuff but also the nerdy crap.

I probably won’t proactively go through your site and spot these opportunities. I have too many clients to be able to do that. But, if you reach out to me in Basecamp and set up a task for it, we’ll ensure the mechanics are set up on your site so you can track and improve your conversion rates. And I can probably even take a look at your stats and maybe point out some opportunities.

WordPress News & Updates

WordCamp US in Portland, OR. In case you hadn’t heard yet, WordCamp US is going to be in Portland, OR from August 26-29. While it is likely to be a big one, I won’t be there. I bought a ticket to last year’s (the one where Matt Mullwenweg decided to launch his war against WP Engine) and decided not to go then, too. Just didn’t feel like traveling to Portland for that. I hope next year they do it somewhere closer to me here in Florida, but not only that…. Portland just has some issues and isn’t the best venue, IMO.

Fluent Forms Gets A New Logo. If it a very subtle change, but Fluent Forms showed off a new logo on their X account. Not a re-design as much as it is bringing their branding consistency into it.

Overhaul For Amazon S3 Storage For WooCommerce. This plugin has been overhauled with an entirely re-written codebase and now supports automatic offloading of product downloads to Amazon S3. If you’re selling large downloads using WooCommerce, this plugin can be super useful for offloading those files to S3 instead of your own server.

Hide AI From WordPress. Came across a funny little plugin… Hide AI. The purpose is to remove references to AI tools from the WordPress admin. While I am definitely not anti-AI (it would be dumb to be, frankly), I will say I think a lot of plugins developers have been rushing to build AI integrations into their tools just as a way to look cool where the actual use case doesn’t justify it. So, yeah…. maybe hiding some of that stuff from the interface would be nice.

Conversion Bridge 1.8. Derek (cool dude, BTW… we hung out at PressConf) has just released Conversion Bridge 1.8. This one supports integrations with Microsoft Ads and Reddit Ads. It also includes an enhancement to custom event tracking to select multiple pages from any custom post type. There’s a lot more to it, so check out the announcement.

Cloudflare Will Help Block AI Bots. Cloudflare made some news this last week with the announcement of the ability to block AI crawler bots from ever being able to access your site. They call it “Content Independence Day“. “No AI Crawl Without Compensation“. I could talk more about this issue, but it is a real one. AI bots crawling our sites, taking up resources, sucking up our content…. only to help train and fuel their AI systems that don’t send any traffic back to our sites. I had once Concierge client that we had to block the Apple AI bot because it was sucking up so much bandwidth and returning NOTHING. So, I’m really happy to see a company as large as Cloudflare helping out with this issue.

Make Your WordPress Admin Look Nicer. If you’ve ever used the full-site editor in WordPress, you’ll see it has a pretty different interface than the rest of WordPress. Frankly, it is nicer. Well, this little plugin you can find on GitHub is an “exploratory” option for re-skinning the main WP admin with that styling. There’s a link there on the GitHub page to a WordPress playground where you can see what it would look like. And some of the “big names” in WordPress have been playing around with it (link on X) and like it a lot.

FluentCart Is Coming Along. If you missed my “first look” video at the upcoming FluentCart, check it out here. But, they aren’t resting at all and I’ve been following along in the community on the continued development. FluentCart has built a nice integration framework so outside developers can easily build integrations with FluentCart. The licensing system has gone modular so those of us that don’t need it can turn it off. It now has a Brands taxonomy. I love how quickly this is moving and how receptive they are to feedback.

How Sharable Checkout URLs Will Work. WooCommerce 10.0 is about to be released and sharable checkout URLs is one of the core enhancements. This will enable you to pre-populate the shopping cart and checkout with products. Remi Corson has a writeup of exactly how it works.

PersonalizeWP 3.0. Version 3.0 of PersonalizeWP is out with a focus on Woocommerce. It includes 6 new display conditions specific to WooCommerce. So, for instance, you can have a block show up conditionally only for users with a certain cart value in their shopping cart, or who haven’t ordered in a certain amount of time. Check out the full update here. Also, keep in mind, PersonalizeWP recently went completely free, so now even the PRO features are open to everybody.

WP Beginner Turns 16. Syed Balkhi wrote a post about WP Beginner officially turning 16 years old. Crazy to see how time flies. I remember hanging out with Syed quite a bit back in the “old days” not long after he started WP Beginner. He hadn’t even gotten into the development business yet. 16 years later and it feels like he owns half the damn WordPress space. I sometimes give a hard time to Awesome Motive (his company) for the aggressive tactics I’m not a big fan of, but under all that… always had a big respect for Syed. Happy Birthday to WP Beginner. And, no, this was not “WP Beginner Verified”.

Why You Should Use Paid Traffic

Up above, you can see that I’m working on tweaking conversion rates by using paid traffic. So, I just wanted to zoom out and look at the big picture here. Because, this isn’t just a newsletter for WordPress users. This is a newsletter for solopreneurs. We’re here to conduct business. And I hope you’re paying attention to your numbers.

In my opinion, having one or more paid traffic funnels that are always on makes a whole lot of sense for most businesses. And many of my clients are doing this. In fact, just the other day my son saw one of my client sites on screen because I was taking care of a tech issue for him. My son comes in and says “I recognize that logo!”. My son had seen an ad for my client’s site on Instagram.

In my case right now, I am spending $20/day on X. It had been a really long time since I messed around with Twitter ads. But, the options they have over there are pretty common and also show why using paid traffic can be so useful.

Yes, you can choose the usual stuff like gender, language, location, device type, etc. You can even choose specific mobile carriers if you would like. But, narrowing down using these variables won’t usually get you specific enough to reach your target market with an ad.

So, you can dial it in using keywords, “look-alike” audiences on different X accounts, interests and more.

So, for my ad going out for this newsletter, I can target the keyword “WordPress”.

I’ve also included a bunch of X accounts which are pretty relevant to what I do and my newsletter. So, I have “look-alike” audiences for things like BuddyBoss, WP Fusion, MemberPress. I also include Matt Mullenweg himself. I include many other WordPress plugins and personalities in the WordPress space. And to expand out to not just people who do WordPress all day, I included accounts like Smart Passive Income (Pat Flynn’s site) because his target audience has a ton of overlap with my own.

Now, I could (and will) spend more time dialing this is, but the point is that you can use paid traffic like this to get right in front of your ideal target market.

My ad for this newsletter is appearing on X with people who are interested in WordPress. If they talk about WordPress, they may see my newsletter ad show up in that thread.

That’s all on X. You have similar options with Meta (so you can hit Facebook or Instagram), LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. You’ve got to use the networks most likely to have your target market.

So, zooming out here…

• Paid traffic can help you dial in and reach your specific target market.
• By doing it regularly, you will dial in on exactly the right hooks and how best to reach the exact right people.
• It gives you a steady flow of new people so you’re not sitting there struggling on how to expand your reach.
• You can ramp it up or down, depending on your budget. But, I really think it makes sense to just have a budget item for this even if it is just $5-$10 per day. Don’t look at it as “an expense” because then it is easy to look at it as something to be cut or avoided. Advertising is a core necessity for most businesses. Look at it like your electric bill. Something you just do without thinking much about it.

When you put money into traffic, you look at it entirely differently. And that mindset – in MY opinion – goes a long way to determining the success of your business.

With my Concierge clients, no, I don’t get into helping with paid traffic. I am far from a “guru” on that topic. But, I can give you some high-level advice on it, and I can of course help you with the tracking and the mechanics of it. So, if you wanna jump in, just reach out.

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.