For a lot of online travel companies, a conversion audit is a very effective, high value way of optimising their website. This structured approach allows anyone with a website to understand and assess their biggest opportunities to implement changes and new features to their website, to grow conversion. This guide explains the benefits of a conversion audit and provides you with a simple process to follow to make sure yours is successful.
What is a conversion audit?
A conversion audit is used to assess how well you are serving your customers, where there is potential friction in your booking journey and where you have opportunities to improve your online sales.
Your website conversion is the ratio of customers that book against the total number of customers that visit your website. The audit aims to increase the amount of sales (or other key metric) you receive from people that visit your website.
A conversion audit specifically focuses on how you can improve the conversion of your existing audience. The purpose is not about driving more traffic to your website.
Most general website audits focus on SEO tactics. These include assessing if you have the right quality of links, level of keywords and if you’re serving any duplicate content. Key factors in SEO ranking do include conversion and the time a customer spends on your website. Therefore, a conversion website audit is still going to help your travel business to rank for SEO terms.
Travel website conversion can be as low as 0.7% on mobile and 2.4% on desktop. Increasing these numbers by a small % can make a huge difference to your bottom line. It is likely that converting the audience you already have on your website, is going to be the easiest way to make a difference to the profitability of your business. Therefore, investing your time and efforts to increase your conversion is the most successful way to drive more online travel sales.
What are the benefits of conducting a conversion audit for your travel website?
You can conduct these internally
You already know who your customer is. You already expertise on what these customers are looking for. You can use this knowledge effectively to boost your online sales. A conversion audit is a low cost, effective way of increasing your profits.
It is an easy place for anyone to start to understand conversion rate optimisation
Conversion rate optimisation is relatively new in a lot of areas of the travel industry, especially for airlines. Not all companies have dedicated optimisation roles internally, or the capability to run their own AB tests. Conducting a conversion audit internally can help you to grow skills, understand what to look for and use strategic methods to increase your online sales.
With the team that you already have, you can follow the simple steps set out in this guide to understand your biggest opportunities and work out how to improve them.
A conversion audit will lead to more successful enhancements to your website
With more than 97.5% of travel customers leaving without completing their purchase, it’s important to understand why and how you can solve this. Conducting a conversion audit is the easiest way to use data to understand where key problems might lie, tie this in with what you know about your ideal customer and then generate ways to improve this.
A conversion audit gives you a strategic and tactical focus, which will deliver effective results.
You focus internally instead of on competition
The fact that customers visit up to 160 websites, shows that competition in the travel sector is vast. It’s likely that customers are getting something different from each of these sites, and you don’t know which ones customers are actually choosing to book with. As much as inspiration and ideas can be gained from competition, it is more beneficial to focus internally on the largest opportunities you have to grow your own conversion rates.
How do you actually go about conducting a conversion audit for a travel company?
In order for an audit to be successful, you need to set a clear outcome – you need to know what you want to achieve.
The audit then follows these three simple steps:
- Gather insights to understand what customers are doing on your website and why
- Prioritise the key opportunities you have to drive improvements
- Generate ideas that solve these key opportunities
By starting with the outcome in mind, and ensuring that all of your ideas are driven by the opportunities that you want to solve, which are driven by data – you will deliver quality features that meet your goals.
Setting a clear outcome
As a business, you will know which levers you want to pull to grow your online sales. Conversion is often a key driver, but you might want to create a more targeted outcome such as:
- Customer retention (repeat bookings)
- Average margin per sale
- Sales for one particular product ie. luxury hotel sales
- Ability to cross-sell other products
You can assess where you have the biggest opportunity to drive your bottom line and set this outcome for your audit. An outcome should be a clear target, and should be measurable. An outcome is never a deliverable itself ie. a new website. Instead it focuses on what you want to achieve from building this new website ie. higher conversion.
Regardless of your chosen outcome, the audit follows the same process. What you’re looking for in your insights, opportunities and ideas will focus on the outcome – so always keep this in mind. Conversion is the most common lever for companies to drive, so for the purpose of this article, that is where I shall focus. But, if you have any questions on any of the other outcomes, please reach out to me.
Conducting the optimisation audit.
Step 1. Gather insights:
Quantitative Data:
Google analytics (GA): GA is the most common website data tool – if you use alternative reporting then feel free to use this, as the approach is the same. There are 4 key areas of your website data to assess: Entry points:- Where are your customers coming from (PPC, SEO, email marketing)?
- How are these customers converting?
- Which landing pages attract the most traffic?
- How are these customers converting?
- Where customers are progressing with ease?
- Where do you have the highest drop-off rates?
These three key areas will give you your initial understanding of where you might have gaps in the customer experience and opportunities to improve. You then need to combine this high level understanding with other insights to understand why customers are dropping off at certain points.
Component level data:
Once you understand the main customer journey, you can dig into page level specifics where there looks like there is an opportunity to improve. Key examples of this are form completion and error rates. It’s not uncommon for travel websites to create friction in the checkout form by making it compulsory for customers to provide their passport number when they might not have it available when they want to book.
Behavioural analytics:
Combining your funnel data with tools like hotjar provides a strong understanding as to where you can optimise.
You can view scroll depths, mouse clicks and mouse moves to understand where customers spend their time on the page, which features are helpful and where customers are becoming frustrated. You can also see screen recordings of sessions to watch how customers use your site and what they find challenging.
Surveys:
You can use hotjar, or other tools, to ask questions. Common examples of this are:
- Exit surveys. These are used to understand your reason for leaving without making a purchase
- Post-purchase surveys. These aim to understand what you found easy and your reason for booking.
- In site surveys. These can be used to ask page specific questions to understand why your customers might love your luxury hotel page, but get frustrated by your summer holiday deals finder.
AB/MVT data:
If you run your own AB tests, you can gain a lot of insight from assessing what has and hasn’t worked. If something has worked, and you understand the rationale behind this, then you might be able to see how this pattern could help in the rest of the funnel.
For example, if I look at a common theme for the AB tests that I have ran over the past years – the most successful theme is reassurance. Travel is an expensive purchase. Experiments that highlight the following factors help a customer feel confident about booking with you:
- Value for money
- Why a product is great ie – best rated, popular among other families
- Flexibility or cancellation terms
Websites use reassurance to help increase customer confidence in their selection.
Travel is a very important purchase, which means that purchase anxiety is typically high. Understanding that the theme of reassurance has been successful, helps me to understand where else I can add value.
Qualitative data
Now that you know what customers are doing on your website, you need to continue to understand why they are behaving this way. The best way to achieve this is by speaking to your customers.
This can be done in 2 main ways:
User testing: This allows you to understand customers thoughts and behaviours as they use your website and where they might find it challenging
Talking to customers: By speaking to your customers, you can understand why they use your website, why they travel and what their requirements are. This helps you to uncover new opportunities and assess where you could make the experience easier for customers to achieve their goals. Customers looking for a honeymoon are likely to have very different requirements to customers looking for a family summer holiday – by speaking to them, you can start to understand what they need.
There are several ways you can speak to your customers, and they don’t all require a big budget. You can:
- Use an agency to recruit customers for user testing/interviews
- Recruit customers directly to speak to through social media/email mailing lists
- Visit travel shops, hotels or the airport to speak to real travellers
- Speak to colleagues from departments that don’t your website very often
Step 2. Prioritise the key opportunities:
By following step one, you will have a comprehensive understanding of:
- Who is using your website
- Why they choose to use your website
- Where they experience pain points in your journey
- Where you have opportunities to better serve your customers
You now need to assess the data that you have on these points to understand where you should focus your time in optimising your website. The best way to know where you will gain the most value from optimising is through assessing reach and impact.
Reach refers to how many people will see a change. There is little point in optimising a page that doesn’t get much traffic to it, unless you have plans to drive more traffic there.
Impact assesses how much you think you will shift customer behaviour by making a particular change. If you’re at a natural drop-off point, like the results page, you might not be able to have as much impact as you can in the checkout. You can combine your data with your customer insights to understand where some of the biggest pain points and opportunities might be to make a difference.
You always want to make sure you’re assessing reach and impact in relation to your desired outcome. If you want to increase profit per customer – you want to focus on the areas where you can sell your high value products, like room upgrades.
So how do you actually do this?
Now that you have collected the data, you want to review this to understand where your key opportunities lie. You need to assess your customer funnel, landing pages and entry points to:
- Understand the key pages that are causing the biggest drop-off in conversion
- Review customer journeys across different entry points to see if any have a greater drop-off in conversion
You can assess each of these areas using reach and impact to highlight your biggest opportunities to make a difference to your website conversion. I suggest then choosing the top 2-3 areas to focus on and break down further.
To understand where you can really drive impact in the areas that you’ve identified, you need to look at the next level of data. This is where any component level quantitative analysis you have, or any qualitative research that highlights why customers aren’t progressing, comes in handy.
For the 2-3 areas you’ve identified as being your focus, you now want to understand:
- Which components are driving these problems ie. if landing page CTR is low, are customers struggling with your search form?
- Where are customers getting frustrated on the page?
- Which previous experiments have influenced changes in this space?
- Which insights from your customer conversations point to any problems/opportunities in these key areas?
You should now know which pages of your site you need to focus, and what the key opportunities are within these pages to drive improvements. Keep these optimisations quite high level ie. at a particular page or component level – you still want to steer away from thinking about the exact solution to implement at this stage.
You will now have a view of your key opportunities, and the key insights you have for each one of these, for example:
Opportunity one: Improve luxury hotel landing pages conversion.
From our research we know that:
- The product imagery does not look very luxurious
- Customers want to understand price points
- 40% of customers that start interacting with the search form don’t complete a search
You now want to prioritise each of these, again using reach and impact to help you to understand where to focus. To help prioritise, you can use a scoring grid, or a visual chat to help rank each potential area of improvement.
You want to take any opportunities that you place in the top left of the grid, and focus on these for our next step – idea generation.
Step 3. Generating Ideas
The biggest mistake that people make in website optimisation is taking the insight above and generating one way to solve a problem/opportunity and then implementing it. Often, in conversion optimisation, there are several ways to solve the same problem. Some of these methods will be more successful and add more value than others, and therefore it is important to assess multiple ways of achieving your goal.
To generate different ideas to optimise your area of focus. You can take inspiration from your data, how competitors solve this problem and your past experience. You can also run an ideation session as a group to get a wider range of inputs. There are different ideation techniques that you can use to help you achieve the best results.
Generating ideas:
You want to take your biggest opportunity ie. optimise the search form and generate ideas to optimise this.
You might have more data in this space, for example:
- Error rates
- Which form fields customers drop off on
- Which form fields customers interact with the least
- How many customers amend certain fields
Looking at this data helps you to understand the different ways to optimise your search form.
You might have also seen search forms that you think are great on competitor websites, or implemented a test previously that made less elements compulsory which was successful. All of this knowledge will help you to generate some great ideas.
In this example you might generate ideas like:
- Provide error validation before a customer submits the form
- Make fields non-compulsory to make it easier to progress
- Make some form fields like dates of travel more flexible
- Improve ease of use of the date selector by giving customers the ability to select from a calendar
To prioritise these ideas you should still think about reach and impact, but combine this score to generate an overall ranking for the value that each idea would deliver. You now want to compare this to the effort of implementing this solution – which is usually driven by your development team’s input. The top left on the below scoring grid, is where you want to focus your time to get the best return for investment on your ideas.
Outcome: As a business, we want to increase our website conversion.
Insight: We know that 70% of our customers do not progress from our luxury hotel pages, which leads to a low conversion rate.
Opportunity: In order to increase our conversion, we want to focus on our luxury hotel pages by ensuring that more customers are able to complete a search and progress.
Ideas: To optimise the search form we should implement these changes in this order:
- Provide error validation before a customer submits the form
- Make fields non-compulsory to make it easier to progress
- Make some form fields like dates of travel more flexible
- Improve ease of use of the date selector by giving customers the ability to select from a calendar
This way of structuring your thoughts helps you ensure that all of your ideas will achieve your key goal.
And that’s it! It’s now time to start implementing the improvements and seeing the rewards of your audit.
Let me know how you get on and if you have any questions about any sections of the process. I would be more than happy to help guide further.
If you would like some support / someone to conduct your website audit for you, then get in touch.