3 Ways of Conversion Optimization for Content Websites

When we say conversion optimization those who know this term think of e-commerce websites. Well, e-commerce sites do constitute a big portion of this sector. However, there is another stakeholder in this equation which is content providers who are mostly overlooked. For e-commerce websites conversion optimization means,
a greater ratio of costumers over the visitors whereas for content websites,
the assessment for conversion rates and the method for conversion optimization may vary according to your KPI’s. What we need to keep in mind is whatever kind of a website we have the main goal is to make the visitors take certain actions that would help us make more money. Here are 3 main ways of conversion optimization for content websites.

1. Landing Page

I have been talking about landing page optimization a lot. You can also find a couple of articles about this in our blog. However, it gains even more importance when it comes to content websites. The reason is when you go to an e-commerce website you more or less have an idea about what you may encounter on that page. Moreover, you may also know what you are going to buy or not. But,
this is not the case for a content website.
You don’t go there for a specific product or a campaign you just go to a content website, be it a news site or a blog or anything else, to see an article or to get information about some news updates or just to check if there is anything important going on there.
So what you service them on your landing page is the uttermost important part of conversion optimization. If you can keep them on your landing page for a while and somehow canalize them into an article, read, ad or any other page of interest it’s a plus in your conversion scoreboard. So try to make the most out of those milliseconds one would spend making a decision to leave the site or not.

2. Recommendations and Personalization

Next step is recommendations and personalization. Here,
there is a fork.
The visitor either is a subscriber/registered user or a new visitor. If the visitor is a user whose behavior and previous read history already known to you then it is easy to target him/her.
Let’s say you own a news site and there is this registered guy in your site who only read news about politics and has never read an article or news about sports. Well, in this case it is obvious that we should recommend him news about politics instead of sports. However, if this person is a nonregistered visitor then you don’t know him/her at all.
What you can do is first monitor his/her behavior even a single action and then recommend related content that people visiting those pages looked at previously like we do in e-commerce sites, too. You can also ask for the visitor’s age range or gender to at least have an idea about him/her and personalize the content you are offering.

3. Retargeting

Last but not least,
do not ever forget retargeting.
If you were patient enough to read this article until this point, then I suggest you to take look at this one as well. As you can also see in that article, retargeting plays an important part of this business.
You should always try to keep your subscribers/users updated about a new article, recent events and developments about certain topics. For instance, using the same example as before you may want to send an email to your user about a new election and its results since he is interested in politics. You have enough info about these people whose mail-addresses you already have because you previously monitored their behavior and analyzed.
So it’s time
to give them what they need and regain them. How frequent you should send e-mails to them is again another issue but this one has no simple answer. All in all, you need to somehow attract their attention again and lead them to your website but without overwhelming.