Conversion rate optimization agency that measures where visitors drop out before they get in touch

Who needs conversion rate optimization services?

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is for a business that already gets visitors and wants more of them to get in touch. The method is the same at every size; where the visitors are lost differs:

• Established local businesses: a single location or service area, where an enquiry means a call, a booking or a short form.
• Multi-location and regional businesses: location or area pages, each with its own path to an enquiry. One fix may be needed on many pages, and each page is read on its own numbers.
• National businesses: more traffic, several teams and often paid search. Busy pages can carry a split test.

A site with few visitors has little to measure yet. Our reviews call a step “too few to tell” when fewer than 50 visitors reach it in the window, or fewer than 20 start a form, because one visitor moves a rate on 20 by five points. Then the first job is being found, which our SEO services and SEO web design cover.

What does a conversion rate optimization company actually change?

Mostly small, specific things, each answering something the numbers showed. The usual ones, from our review method:

• The next step is out of sight: few visitors scroll as far as the call to action. Move it, or the phone number, higher, and give phones a call bar that stays on screen.
• The page doesn’t answer the question: visitors read for a long time and scroll deep, but few get in touch. Add what they came for, such as price ranges, the areas served and how soon you can start.
• The form asks too much, too early: people start it and stop at one field. Make that field optional, cut it, move it later, or turn free text into a choice.
• The browser refuses a valid answer: one field keeps throwing errors. Loosen its pattern, use the input type that brings up the right keyboard on a phone, or say the format.
• One source lags the rest: visitors from one search or ad get in touch far less often. Send them to the page that matches what they searched for, or fix that page’s title and answer.

A redesign is rarely the first move. It changes everything at once, and then no one can tell which part moved the number.

How do you see where visitors drop out?

Name the steps first: a visitor lands, scrolls to the call to action, clicks it, starts the form or the booking, moves through each field, submits, and the enquiry arrives. Measure each one and the drop between any two shows.

Then split the weak step by landing page, source, device and, for a form, by field. Rank what you find by the number of people lost: a poor rate on a page few people see costs fewer enquiries than a fair rate on a busy one. Compare phones with phones. Phones take fewer actions than desktops on almost every site, so a phone problem is one page’s phone visitors doing worse than phone visitors site-wide.

Google Analytics counts a session as engaged when it lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event or has at least two page views, and its bounce rate is the share of sessions that weren’t engaged. A visitor who reads one page for a minute and then calls hasn’t bounced.

Microsoft Clarity adds the picture behind the numbers: heatmaps built from every click and scroll on mobile, desktop and tablet, and recordings of single visits. It masks what visitors type into input boxes in every masking mode, and a first-party cookie joins one visitor’s page views into a single recording. On sites we build, it runs only where it’s switched on, with that masking left in place.

Can you trust the conversion rate in your analytics?

Only once you know what it counts. Google Analytics reports an enquiry as a key event only after someone creates or identifies the event that records it and marks it as one.

Two more catches. Google Analytics may withhold data from a report that includes demographics or search queries when there aren’t enough users, so that nobody can work out who a visitor is, and a narrow date range on a quieter site makes that more likely. And Google Ads divides conversions by the ad interactions that can be tracked to a conversion in the same period, so its rate leaves out visitors from organic search and referrals.

So we check the measurement before reading it. The leads our measurement records should match the enquiries your business received, give or take one or two. A gap means a form the measurement can’t see, or enquiries lost on the way to you. Our own measurement reports to our portal by page, source, step and device, without Google Analytics’ thresholds.

Watch the rate and the count together. When traffic falls, the casual visitors leave first, so the rate can rise with no new enquiry. That’s why a change counts only when the number of leads moved too.

Where should conversion work start?

With anything that fails outright. A form that throws a delivery error has lost a real enquiry, so fixing it comes before any test. A day with no page views on a live site means the measurement broke.

Then look at the site the way a buyer does, on a phone and on a desktop, before reading a chart:

• Is the next step in sight without a long scroll?
• Is the phone number a tap target?
• Does the page answer price, area and timing?
• Does the form ask for anything the visitor doesn’t know yet?

A “no” to any of these is the first change. After that the measurement takes over, and the step that loses the most visitors goes first.

Why change one thing at a time?

Because two changes made together can’t be told apart. Each change in our method is written down before it goes live: the drop it targets, why we think visitors leave there, the change, the number it should move and which way, its baseline, and the date to re-check it, 28 days after it goes live. That’s four whole weeks, so each day of the week counts the same before and after.

At the re-check, the step’s rate after the change is compared with its baseline. It counts as moved only when the difference is more than twice its standard error, about 95% confidence, and the number of leads moved the same way. Anything less is “no clear change”, which on a smaller site may mean it’s too early to tell, and the window can run another 28 days. A clear drop is usually reverted.

At about 1,000 sessions a period, a step that goes from 30 leads (3.0%) to 48 leads from 1,050 sessions (4.6%) is not a clear change, though its rate rose by half. One that goes from 30 to 55 leads from 1,000 sessions (5.5%) is. A small site needs a big change to prove anything.

Each verdict also names what else changed in the window, such as a season, a price or an advert, because those move the same numbers.

When is an A/B test worth running?

When the page has the traffic. A split test shows two versions of a page to different visitors over the same weeks, so the season and the ads hit both alike. The catch is the sample: to see a step move from 3% to 4.5%, at 95% confidence and 80% power, takes about 2,500 sessions for each version. Few pages on the sites we build get that in a month, so before and after is our default.

When a test does run, Google’s testing guidance keeps it from hurting search:

• No cloaking: never show Googlebot one version and people another.
• A canonical tag on each variant: every alternate URL names the original as the preferred one.
• Temporary redirects: a test that sends visitors to a variant URL uses a 302 redirect, not a 301.
• A short run: the test lasts only as long as it needs, then the winner goes live and the test’s URLs and scripts come out. Google says a test left running for an unnecessarily long time may be treated as an attempt to deceive search engines.

What makes a form easier to finish?

The Nielsen Norman Group, a usability research firm, lists ten web form guidelines: keep the form short, put each label close to its field, use a single column, follow a logical order, avoid placeholder text, size each field to its answer, mark optional fields and keep them to one or two, explain any format a field needs, drop reset and clear buttons, and make error messages specific and hard to miss.

It points to a study by Seckler and colleagues, published in the CHI 2014 conference proceedings: 78% of people sent a form that followed basic usability guidelines without an error on the first try, against 42% on forms that broke them.

On the forms we build, the measurement shows where a form loses people: the field a visitor stopped at, the fields the browser refused and any message that failed to send, without recording anything the visitor typed.

What do landing page design services include?

A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on from a search, an ad or an email, built around one offer and one next step. The work covers:

• The match: a headline and opening answer written for the search or campaign that feeds the page.
• The answer first: what you offer, who it suits, where, and how soon, before any detail.
• One next step: a call, a booking or a short form, repeated down a long page.
• Proof that holds up: named work, real numbers and dated sources, never a made-up review.
• Measurement: every click and form step recorded from the first visit.

For B2B buyers, the page also answers what a buying team asks before it talks to sales: what’s included, what it costs in ranges, how it starts and who does the work.

A landing page that repeats a service page with small changes can carry a canonical tag naming the main page, which tells Google the address you want people to see in search. If you run Google Ads, landing page experience, how relevant and useful the page is to people who click the ad, is one of the three parts of Quality Score, which Google calls a diagnostic tool and says is neither a key performance indicator nor an input in the ad auction.

We design, build and measure the page. We don’t manage ad campaigns, so the campaign stays with you or your ads agency. A page for a promotion that lasts a few weeks may suit a landing page builder better.

Can conversion changes hurt your search rankings?

Not usually, if they’re small. Google says small changes, such as the size, colour or placement of a button or image, or the words of a call to action, can have a surprising effect on how people use a page but often have little or no effect on its snippet or ranking. Three kinds of change need more care:

• Pop-ups that cover the page: Google says intrusive interstitials and dialogs make content hard for search engines to understand, which may lead to poor search performance. It suggests a banner that takes a small part of the screen instead, and asks you not to cover the whole page or send visitors to a separate page for their input.
• Elements that push the page around: a banner or a form that loads late and shoves the content down adds to Cumulative Layout Shift, which Google advises keeping below 0.1.
• New headings and titles: they change what a page says it’s about, and so what it can rank for. Our page on SEO web design covers how those words are planned.

Can conversion work happen without rebuilding the site?

On a site we build, yes. Changes are made in our own system, checked on the private preview, then put live, and the measurement is already there to judge them.

On a site built elsewhere, conversion work starts with a rebuild. A site on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace is rebuilt in our system first, with each old address redirected to its new page, and measured from the day it goes live. Our page on website migration covers that move. The first review after it is a new baseline, because the old site’s numbers measured a different site.

If you want to keep your platform, someone who works inside it may suit you better. The method on this page works on any site.

How does this site measure its own leads?

The way we’d measure yours. Every call to action, form step and booking step on this site reports to our own portal, by page, source and device. Microsoft Clarity runs here too, with what visitors type masked.

If your browser sends Global Privacy Control, or you opt out on our privacy page, the Google tag and Clarity stay off, and our own first-party record keeps running. It goes to our portal and nowhere else.

The first lead-loss review of this site runs 30 days after it goes live, and every site we launch gets the same review. If your enquiries feel low for the traffic you get, book a 15-minute call. Have your recent enquiry numbers and your traffic side by side, and we’ll read them with you.