There are many ways of measuring success when evaluating your website’s effectiveness, but the main ones are probably CTR & conversion rate.
CTR (or Click-Through Rate) is a percentage that illustrates user engagement with your content. It is estimated from the number of users that clicked on a particular link compared to the total number of users who viewed it.
Conversion rate on the other hand is the percentage of your website’s users that completed a process (that can vary depending on your website goals). Some examples could be the user purchasing a product, completing a form, opening an email you sent, etc…
Different impacts on your businesses
CTR
Click-through rate, calculated using ‘(clicks ÷ impressions) x 100‘ , can be used to measure the following :
- Organic search : when a user searches for something related to your website’s domain of expertise, and your website appears in the search results (an impression), a higher CTR indicates that more people are drawn to your content. This means that you have relevant content and have maximized your traffic.
- User engagement : this is used to measure your content’s relevancy inside of your website (how many users will click on a link after landing on one of your pages vs bouncing). User engagement is useful since it is a metric used by Google to determine the quality of a website : so having a higher CTR will in turn improve your SEO.
- Digital marketing campaign : If you have a campaign in progress, CTR could be used outside of your website to determine the effectiveness and quality of your ads. Since you usually pay for ads per impression, having a better quality ad would allow you to get more visibility for the money you spent.
In general, a low CTR means that you have low initial engagement (so low visibility). You can learn how to improve your CTR further down below.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is a more direct form of determining your website’s impact on your business’s bottom-line since the goal you have set is relevant to your business’s activity.
For example, if you have an e-commerce website with a high conversion rate, you know that you have sold a lot (compared to how much you have invested in visibility). whereas if you only have a high CTR, a lot of users will have visited your website and viewed your content but nothing guarantees that you have sold products and in turn, made money.
Low conversion rate means that regardless of how many people viewed your content, it was not convincing enough to entice them to convert. If you have an e-commerce website for example, you have made little to no money since you have sold very little.
How to measure your CTR and Conversion rate
One of the best ways of checking CTR is through Google Search Console. Google Search Console provides valuable insights into how users interact with your website in Google search results. Using this powerful tool, you can check your total clicks, total impressions, average CTR, and average Position. You can further refine the data by selecting specific date ranges, queries, pages, countries, and devices.
How to improve CTR and conversion rate
Improved content
This is rather straightforward since all you have to do is to write more and improve your content’s relevance to your business’s activity. This ensures that users who find you are more likely to convert.
For example, you could have thousands of visitors for your car dealership website, if you have only written posts about bicycles, and thus attracted bicyclists, you won’t be able to sell any cars.
Page speed and visual clarity
The key to improve CTR and conversion rate is to reduce bounce rate. One of the major culprits of a high bounce rate is a slow page load speed. If your website is slow your users will grow frustrated fast and leave your website (bounce) before they even have the time to view a page and in turn convert.
Here are a few things that could be negatively impacting your website’s speed :
- Unoptomized assets : Non compressed or wrongly formatted (jpg, gif, etc…) images, slow javascript, too many assets to transfer, too many elements in HTML, etc… You should clean up your website since all this will slow it down. If you use WordPress as a CMS you could use a plugin like Autoptimize for example.
- Too many plugins : Having too much code being executed in the backend could be slowing down your server. Try being more minimalist and reducing the number of active plugins to increase speed.
- Caching : Server-level caching allows you to save on server processing by storing each page’s elements in a cache then simply delivering the stored elements when a request is sent. You can learn more about caching from WP Rocket.
- Hardware issues : If your server is not powerful enough for the amount of traffic you have, the loading will be very slow. If you find that your server is overloaded you could contact your provider to upgrade it or introduce load balancing.
- Geographical position : The greater the distance, the slower the transfer. You have two solutions for this problem : either choose a server location that is in proximity of your customers’s/users’s location or makeuse of CDNs or international providers.
Another factor could be confusing or ugly UI. If your website is outdated, impossible to navigate or ugly, the user could lose trust or be lost. All this will grow frustration and increase bounce rate. So if your website is confusing or not aesthetically pleasing, you should revamp it : it should be worth it in the long run. Keep in mind that your website is a reflection of your image and is often the first impression potential customers have of you.
This also applies to you if your website isn’t responsive. Remember 58% of worldwide traffic comes from mobile and Google’s mobile first policy. So if you wish to improve your SEO an CTR, you should design your website for mostly mobile users.
Search speed & relevancy
Growing CTR and conversion rate consists of reducing your users’s frustration when they visit your website. One of the best ways to do that is to include a good search experience, one that is both fast and relevant. This will ensure that your users can effortlessly find the content they need.
This is especially critical for e-commerce businesses, as your entire business model relies on users finding products to purchase.
Recommendations
Recommendations (or personalization in general) are a good way of improving CTR since the role of AI recommenders is to push relevant content to users, on a user-per-user basis based on previous interactions. This is one of the best ways of increasing CTR. You could check out Recombee’s case studies and Algolia’s customer stories. They show off very impressive numbers (40% higher CTR, 10% total orders, etc…).
If you wish to learn more about recommendations, you could check out our guide on recommenders. You could also learn how to equip your WordPress website with recommendations using recommendation plugins.
Conclusion
CTR and conversion rate are very different but having a high rate for both is necessary for businesses. CTR is used to improve your visibility by creating attractive content whereas conversion rate is used to improve your business’s bottom-line by maximizing the number of users that complete a desired process (purchase, subscription, etc…).
