Author: Gravity Agency

An empathy exercise

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

We already know that the online market is getting stronger! And it's constantly receiving new investments, which is great for brands and consumers. The consequence is that it gets harder (and more expensive) to drive qualified traffic to your business every day due to the increasing price of ads in the auction or the intense SEO efforts required.

Google defines Quality Score as an estimate of the quality of your pages, ads, and keywords. The higher the quality of your content, the lower the prices and the more favorable the position in the ranking. And this score is quantified and measured, among other things, by how relevant you are.

But what does 'relevance' mean, and how do you scale it?

That's where it gets tricky because nobody outside of Google has that information accurately. What we do know is what we assume from experience and observing what helps in that quality index.

Three main attributes are essential for an excellent Quality Score. They are Landing Pages, Keywords, and CTR.

1. CTR

Click through impressions - is how many times your link was clicked on divided by how many times it was served. This KPI is how the search engine identifies whether your page is relevant. The more people click on it when they see it, the more Google understands that what you are displaying is good content, therefore relevant.

2. Keywords

They are crucial for adding relevance to your page. These search terms are responsible for associating a specific subject to your website and product. That's why it's important to understand what people are looking for and how they search for that content. So you can work with appropriate keywords.

A great tip is to work with long-tail keywords. They are more interesting for improving your Quality Score, as they don't have a high level of competition and can help you reach a specific audience interested in what you have to say/sell.

3. Landing Page

It is the place to which the user is redirected after clicking on a link. Therefore, it must be worked properly with SEO techniques and strategies to be understood by bots and crawlers. Within this attribute, there are many techniques we could mention. Such as internal and external links, content, friendly URL, image optimization, compatibility with mobile devices, performance and others.

Ultimately, search engines want to provide useful results for searchers and direct the right audience to the right content. As you are a search engine user, imagine what you want to find as a result of your search. This empathy exercise is excellent for helping you understand consumer behaviour. For example, you don't want to wait for a page to load; you want it to be fast. So why would your visitor want that?

You did CRO and didn't even notice

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Suppose you have a page that attracts 1,000 visitors a month, and that page has a conversion rate of 10%. To increase your sales, you don't need to bring in more traffic; you can improve your traffic conversion. These actions have increased your conversion rate, and you now get 200 conversions.

You didn't need to create another page or produce new material; you just improved what you already had. Congratulations, you did CRO and didn't even notice. Cool, right?

Understanding what conversion is

But before talking about conversion and how to optimize conversion rates, you should understand that a conversion, which is part of the acronym CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), is much more extensive than just turning a visitor into a lead or a sale. It involves various actions that a visitor can take on a website.

For example, the visitor might click on a banner that takes them somewhere else or request to contact a seller, or maybe buy something on your site, or start a software evaluation. Either way, many possibilities could be a conversion.

Defining the type of conversion that makes sense for you requires knowing your results. With that, you can know which CRO techniques you should use. For example, if it's lead generation, having Forms on Landing Pages makes perfect sense. If the idea is to increase sales in your ecommerce, consider optimizations such as buttons that encourage registration.

About Conversion Rate

As we said, besides conversions, another concept to master when dealing with CRO is conversion rate. It's essential to understand this concept to know the efficiency of your pages and track overall business results.

Illustrating:

Imagine we are calculating the conversion rate of Visitors who become Leads. The aim is to capture contacts from those who have browsed the site. And with that, know who they are to nurture them later. Let's imagine that our website has 10,000 hits and, in a certain period, 500 people filled in the form. That means we had a 5% conversion rate of visitors into leads.

The positive point of the conversion rate is that it can be calculated at all stages of the sales funnel: top to middle, middle to bottom, etc. Thus, you can diagnose where the bottlenecks are and where the weaker strategy needs to be optimized. It is essential to know the metrics you want to analyze at each stage and have an overall diagnosis of your website's performance. This knowledge makes it easier to target the exemplary efforts to the suitable needs.

Make better use of your traffic

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

A CRO strategy consists of a set of practices that increase conversions. This acronym comes from Conversion Rate Optimization, a structured and systematic way of improving performance on websites. Thus, taking better advantage of the pages' traffic without necessarily attracting more visitors.

And we're not just talking about website optimization; CRO techniques also apply to landing pages, test requests, and call-to-action in general. It aims to increase the rate of website visitors who perform a specific action that you have decided as your goal. It could be submitting a form, making purchases, signing up for an assessment, etc. With proper CRO techniques, businesses can generate more leads or sales without investing more money in website traffic - which can be very expensive - increasing marketing ROI and profits.

Illustrating the ideas

Consider that you are a real estate website, for example, with a form and a contact link located at the bottom of the page. This form is your goal; you want people who click "submit" to hand over their details so your sales team can contact you and then sell homes. Your website receives an average of 2,000 visitors per month, of which 20 are converts or just 1%. You believe that number is lower than you expected. So? What can you do with this information?

Well, you can try to increase the number of visits. It can be useful, but you will need to pay to generate more traffic. Paid media is fast, but it can be costly in this competitive market. Or, and this is where we're talking about CRO, you can increase the CTR of the form's "Submit" button.

But first, you need to understand:

"because people are not pushing the button"

• Is the form too long?
• Where do people leave off?
• Do people scroll down the page?

Suppose your problem is that you have too few contact points on your website, making it difficult for those who want to make a request. In this case, you can solve the problem by adding multiple contact options with attention-grabbing phrases at various points in the customer journey. But you can only know all of this by analyzing your situation.

The secret of CRO is to study the data you have and use it to run tests. Only by testing your options can you improve and optimize your conversion.

CRO is not about what you believe; it's about data

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Trying out new ideas on the site is extremely complex. Finding opportunities seems very easy, as we all have an area that "we know could be improved". But this can lead to a path of changes that, in the end, have no added value and bring no concrete results.

And, as we said, CRO techniques are not about what you believe is essential; CRO is about data. The process is about diagnostics, hypotheses, and tests that consider, among other things, visitor behavior. That's why you need tools that help you analyze your results and, with those tools, plan some basic actions.

The secret of CRO is to study the data you have and use it to test; only by experimenting with your options can you improve and optimize conversions. But where to start?

1. Always have an objective

If you've read our previous articles, you may have noticed that the first is to figure out what business metrics you want to impact. Is it lead generation? Increase sales opportunities? Scheduling requests? And so on. This step is crucial as it defines your entire strategy and how your results are varied, and therefore how you are measured. So, it should impact all your decisions.

2. What is your persona?

With this in mind, you must understand who the people interested in your product are. It would be best to establish a persona; this should be a crucial step in establishing a strategy. Mapping the consumer journey helps you understand why they are consuming your product.

3. Do you fully understand your sales funnel?

It would help if you intensely studied your sales funnel. With that, observe and understand which pages or sections have the highest rejection rate. With this information, you can optimize the bottlenecks.

4. Research is the key to human understanding

It is always essential to research with questionnaires, phone calls, and emails. With this, you understand human behavior better and get ideas of usability. Maybe your website is too confusing, and you didn't know it.

5. A/B test on your hypotheses

If we have a lot of hypotheses, A/B testing is key to testing them. It makes your life easier by making it simpler to understand what your audience likes best. Is it better if the button is blue or red? Should the form be at the bottom of the page or in the top right-hand corner? With the right technology, you can test these hypotheses and choose the one that performs best.

CRO is directly related to good sales. It's not about traffic; it's about doing a good job with the traffic you already have.

Start-up that leads online consumers to the physical shop offline aims to grow 20% by 2021

Brazilian Simplex took 2020 to restructure while growing 11% in the year of the pandemic; company has a team on three continents to serve clients as big as Burger King Mexico, Dafiti and Traders Club with solutions aimed at better performance of websites and e-commerces

São Paulo, March 31, 2021 - The Brazilian start-up Simplex - specialized in increasing traffic and sales conversion of e-commerces - took advantage of 2020 to diversify the performance of its Indexa platform, winning new clients that aim to increase traffic in their physical stores, such as Burger King in Mexico.

"If before, with the Indexa platform, we improved the SEO performance of important e-commerces, that is, in 100% online transactions, the novelty is that we have developed a new functionality - the Store Locator - for multichannel demands, as is the case of those who have a website or online store, but who also aim to increase physical sales, and in the case of Burger King, of its cafeterias in the neighborhoods ", exemplifies Lee.

"Initially, Indexa has been responsible for increases of up to 20% of the total organic traffic of e-commerce sites like Mobly," says Lee. The platform uses artificial intelligence to "predict" what consumers are looking for on the web and offer them, in milliseconds, automatically created landing pages with products that exactly match all the keywords of their searches, bringing information such as prices, images and details of the items sought. sought. These pages have the same layout as the e-commerce site, respecting all the rules of search engines to optimize SEO results, i.e. organic (unpaid) search results.

The map to the physical store

"Now we are also capturing searches from users who, for example, are leaving a medical appointment and want to eat a hamburger on the way home. We will offer a landing page tailored to this type of search, in order to direct you directly to the cafeteria in the neighborhood where he is", he explains.

According to Lee, Store Locator - Indexa's new feature - predicts searches that cite more famous geographic references near its customers' physical stores, and, as it does for traditional e-commerce, creates landing pages that contain the same terms used by the consumer, in order to meet exactly what they are looking for.

Growth and capillarity

According to Lee, Simplex's goal today is to focus on building technologies to improve the performance of websites, e-commerce and online operations. In addition to being scalable, these solutions must also be quickly adaptable to other uses and customer challenges. This orientation allowed Simplex to earn BRL 5 million in 2020 and the intention today is to grow 20% by the end of the year.

In practice, Simplex's entire range of services has also experienced an increase in demand. The company now supports companies such as Dafiti, Kanui, Tricae, TradersClub and Labi Exames, Westwing (Brazil) and the French brand Kiabi, an e-commerce giant in Europe.
The company's founding partner points out that the year 2020 was also the stage for other changes at Simplex. The company's current 20 clients - in countries such as Japan, Brazil, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Portugal, the United Kingdom, China, France and Italy - led the start-up to review its way of operating. "We gave up physical offices in favor of having a team spread across three continents, all from home office. With a 100% digitized operation, we were able to redirect our investment to what really matters: qualified professionals to serve our customers where they are", says the company's founder.