Google: 3 steps to better mobile conversion rates

October 7, 2016: Mobile surfers and shoppers are impatient. When sites or apps are slow to load, they’re quick to bail out and choose another site or another app. But it’s not just slow site performance that causes mobile users to abandon sessions: they’re also turned off by landing pages that are confusing, unfocused, or just plain complicated.

The fact that Google Analytics code runs on 30 to 50 million commercial web sites gives Google an enormous body of data about web traffic, conversions, cart abandonment rates, and bounce rates. When Google analyzed this data, it published some useful recommendations that webmasters need to take heed of:

1. Eliminate unnecessary steps to conversion. It’s long been known that that the longer an online form is, the fewer people complete it, and Google’s findings provide additional validation of this old truth. For Progressive Insurance, whose websites contain forms allowing people to get instant insurance quotes, condensing a 24-step online form into a five-step form yielded a 700 percent increase in conversion rates. Take a hard look at those forms on your website. While capturing lots of information about your prospects lets you more easily qualify them, asking too much of users will result in low form completion rates.

Use Google Analytics to determine your form abandonment rate; if it’s higher than acceptable, put up a new “lite” form page and test it against existing traffic. Google Content Experiments is a great tool that will allow you to perform this kind of A/B test with ease and minimal programming headaches. Just be advised that for low-traffic sites, you may need to run the experiments for several weeks before you accumulate enough data to constitute a statistically valid sample.

2. Make your call to action obvious. Many websites – like the proverbial camel – were designed by committees. Home pages especially are replete with multiple calls to action (“call us,” “join our newsletter,” “check out our special offers,” etc.) But the best performing landing pages are focused and should limit user actions to the most important conversion goal you’re trying to encourage.

Get your team to agree on the one – and only one – action for users to take from each landing page, make that call to action obvious, and bury less important CTAs in menus or eliminate them completely. This will reduce clutter and result in a faster, smoother user experience (and path to conversion). Again, if you’re doubtful about this course of action, run a Content Experiment to validate your hypothesis before making any change.

3. Improve site speed. It’s no secret that even large, industrial-strength web sites often suffer from mobile usability problems and site speed issues. Even e-commerce giant Amazon.com only scores 55 on Google’s Mobile Site Speed test, and Apple.com – one of the best, most usable sites on the web, pegs a laggardly 64 score. But Amazon and Apple probably don’t fret much about the fact that 40 percent of shoppers will only wait 3 seconds before they abandon a commercial site, because their fans are so loyal. But that’s a problem you need to worry about, and remedy however you can.

Unfortunately, improving site performance is often a big job, because of all the links in the performance chain, which range from the kind of hosting environment your site runs on to how exactly JavaScript is implemented on pages. You’re probably not going to be tackle these issues all at once (especially in Q4, which is probably the worst time to be doing a site overhaul), but you may be able to eke out some moderate site improvements by following Googles recommendations, and hacking away at any low-hanging fruit you can reach (for example, making sure that images on your site are compressed, a task for which the popular WordPress plug in, WP-Smush, is well-suited).