Website traffic is an essential resource for any online business. Yes, there is an obvious reason – because more traffic converts to more customers and therefore more money.
But traffic is also essential for data-driven optimization techniques such as conversion rate optimization (CRO).
A typical CRO testing procedure relies heavily on website traffic for data to run the final test.
For established companies like Amazon and Microsoft that are gaining millions of users every day, deriving insightful data from web traffic is no big deal.
However, conversion optimization is more difficult for low-traffic websites.
This does not mean that these small businesses should give up on conversion optimization and rely on implementing random hypotheses.
The following CRO tips and tricks have proven effective on low-traffic websites.
The difficulty of optimizing low-traffic websites
We know how important testing is to make sure your website works optimally and generates revenue.
Tests are data dependent and require large amounts of data to produce meaningful results.
Increasing your website’s rank and traffic will help you get data.
But adopting this method can be very expensive and time consuming for new or small businesses.
We can’t wait to see your website rank organically and implement CRO best practices.
However, it’s also difficult to run CRO when your website has very little traffic.
Such websites have small sample sizes, and running tests on small samples takes an unreasonably long time to reach statistical significance.
Additionally, if you call the test before it reaches statistical significance, you run the risk of implementing false positives and shooting yourself, potentially ruining any progress you may have made over time.
This is why A/B testing and optimizing low-traffic websites is difficult for most marketers.
CRO Tips for Low Traffic Websites
if google [Proven CRO Tips]Browse to find a number of common CRO best practices that work well for high-traffic websites.
But what if you’re just starting a new website or are struggling to get an audience for some other reason?
1. Run Low Confidence Tests
Confidence level is an important part of the statistic that tells you how true a test result is for an entire population.
Simply put, it tells you how reliable your test results are and how safe you are from implementing false results.
The higher the confidence level, the more likely the test result is true.
for example:
- The test between samples A and B is performed with 95% confidence.
- This shows that sample A is better than B.
- This means that there is a 95% chance that this result is accurate and sample A actually outperforms B.
- And there is only a 5% chance that this result is false, and sample B is better than A.
When running tests on different samples, you need to choose a confidence level that ultimately determines the sample size.
A 95% confidence level is the industry standard when performing CRO testing. This leaves only a 5% or 1 in 20 chance of a CRO test result being false.
This is a risk everyone is willing to take.
However, to be 95% confident in the accuracy of the test results, a large sample size is required, and sample size is not a sufficient resource when running tests on low-traffic websites.
In this case, it almost makes sense to lower the confidence level to reduce the sample size required to reach statistical significance.
Lowering the confidence level speeds up testing and provides results in a shorter timeframe than running tests at industry-standard confidence levels.
Note, however, that lowering the confidence level may reduce the accuracy of your test results.
It’s up to you to trade test accuracy for time.
In my opinion, you shouldn’t be afraid to test with an 85% or 80% confidence level.
It’s better to test different variations in a shorter timeframe rather than waiting to run the test with a large sample size and 90% or 95% confidence.
2. Track micro conversions
Conversions are a spectrum with many micro conversions all the way up to the ultimate goal of your website, one macro conversion.
Micro conversions are incremental steps that represent a user’s interest in your brand.
If you’re optimizing a low-traffic website, we recommend tracking micro conversions. This is because small conversions occur more frequently, so there are more than one macro conversion.
For example, an e-commerce website may have a higher add-to-cart rate than completed orders.
Alternatively, a SaaS product may have more free trial signups than premium signups.
Tracking these small conversions will give you a higher baseline conversion to build your tests on.
It is well known that increasing the baseline transformation reduces the sample size required to reach statistical significance and pass the test.
However, tracking microconversions trades accuracy for the likelihood of a successful test.
Micro conversions don’t always contribute to your bottom line. Also, optimizing your website for these variables can lead to misleading results.
As a result, you may end up doing more damage than good.
So how do you track micro conversions and still be able to make money in terms of website conversions?
Focus on micro conversions as part of the overall user journey and optimize these variables to improve the overall user experience of your website.
3. Ask for big changes
When you try to test a low-traffic website, you can’t test the finer details and gain detailed insight into user preferences.
And honestly, at this point, I can easily survive without it.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t A/B test at all.
Significant changes in variation can increase the lift of key variables.
This means that implementing significant changes to your variations will most likely result in significant changes to your baseline conversions.
Please let me explain.
If you were to test a small change between sample A and sample B of your website, the difference in conversion would be very small.
The conversion rate for sample A might be 5%, while the conversion rate for sample B might be 5.5%.
Image created by the author in January 2022Because the sample size is not large, a 0.5% increase in conversions is not enough to conclude and implement that sample B is better than sample A.
However, when implementing large-scale changes to your website, you may notice a greater lift between controls and variations.
Sample A (control) has a baseline conversion of 5%, while a significant change in sample B can generate a conversion of 45%.
This represents a 40% rise, indicating that sample B is better than A and can go up further from there.
Image created by the author in January 2022In short, if your test variation increases conversion lift, whether positive or negative, it’s easier to declare a winner.
4. Use personalization with dynamic data
Nearly 66% of customers expect personalized online engagement based on previous interactions and online behavior.
Website personalization is a key CRO strategy that leads to increased conversions regardless of website traffic volume.
Website personalization requires providing dynamic content to web visitors. This is because this content is more relevant to user preferences and resonates more.
Serving dynamic content is also a data-driven approach that does not rely on web traffic.
It is based on data obtained from various sources such as:
- online behavior,
- Search history,
- website interaction,
- position,
- demographic information,
- social interaction,
- CRM data,
- more.
Netflix is a prime example of a business that offers dynamic content.
Send you push notifications and emails with personalized content recommendations and tailor content on your Netflix homepage based on your viewing history.
Of course, personalization also requires testing and optimization. However, testing in this case is less dependent on website traffic than in other cases.
For example, our e-commerce marketplace, Linio, had over 4 million products. They wanted to optimize the customer journey and direct customers to the right product.
To that end, Linio employed a personalization engine to create highly personalized experiences.
Website personalization efforts resulted in a 30% increase in conversions and a 23% increase in revenue per user.
5. Deploy Usability Testing
User or usability testing involves testing your website to uncover its friction points and identify how well it helps your target audience.
It helps us discover key areas of our website that need improvement and improve the overall user experience.
Usability testing is essential for any size website.
However, it is especially useful for low-traffic websites as it requires only a few people to run the tests and still yield meaningful results.
The sole purpose of enhancing UX is to increase conversions. So using usability testing to improve her UX should be an important part of a CRO’s arsenal.
You can’t (and shouldn’t!) rule out usability testing just because it’s a qualitative approach.
Additionally, qualitative data is largely underutilized, so usability testing to optimize conversions can give you an edge over your competitors.
Be careful when choosing usability test participants.
Ideally, test participants match your target buyer personas.
But if that’s not possible, it’s a good idea to make sure these people know a little bit about what you’re doing in order to provide context to your tests and contribute to meaningful results. It is important.
To use Torsten Tromm’s example, the Polish Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity was struggling to get donations from web visitors.
They wanted to find out why online visitors were not donating, so they introduced usability testing.
In the tests they conducted, people found their websites confusing and difficult to navigate.
A visitor wanted to donate but didn’t know how.
So we redesigned the website to move the donation button to the top of the side menu and replaced the copy of the donation button from ‘Support it’ to ‘Pay Online’ to clear up confusion.
As a result of these adjustments, their giving increased by 420%.
6. Use the Integrated Feedback Form
The purpose of CRO is to optimize your website for a better user experience.
Also, understanding your audience is critical to good UX and should be considered in conversion optimization.
Brands can spend millions of dollars understanding their audiences to optimize their customer touchpoints and make them more relevant to their users.
Deploying an onsite feedback form can help you understand user behavior and doesn’t cost millions of dollars.
These forms give you insight into how your target audience feels about your website and its needs.
A closer look may reveal trends in user behavior that guide the optimization process.
However, you need to ask the right questions so that the feedback you collect will lead your optimization campaign in the right direction.
Additionally, feedback forms should be well-crafted and timed so as not to frustrate users.
The last word
Conversion rate optimization is a data-driven process and, when performed on your website, relies heavily on the data collected from your website visitors.
However, for low-traffic websites, this data is limited. This means that the sample sizes used may be small and quantitative tests may appear unreliable.
That’s no reason to give up on CRO entirely.
There are many quantitative and qualitative optimization tips and strategies you can implement to increase your conversions regardless of your website traffic volume.
These strategies include statistical approaches such as reducing confidence levels and reducing variability.
Even if your traffic is too low to see these tips, you can still visit our usability tests and feedback forms for equally valuable insights.
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Featured Image: Griboedov/Shutterstock
