How to boost your registration conversion rate using Facebook

Alexander Sergeev

wrote this on Мар 19, 2015

Banner ads can be an effective way of generating traffic to your site. If you put a banner advert on an external site, it will lead users to your site. Visitors come to your homepage, take a look around and a small proportion will register on the site. The rest will move on, probably without a second thought.

The average conversion rate of visitors to registered users is pretty low, around 1-3% depending on the industry, but no more.

So how does the process differ when Facebook is involved? 

With the Facebook app, the registration process is as follows:

1. The user clicks a banner on Facebook.
2. The user is led to the app pagee, for an example see the link.
3. The user clicks the “Go to” button, which is almost invisible because of the abundance of media on the page.
4. But then a window appears where we request the user to grant us permission to access their profile.
5. Finally the miracle of conversion happens, the user authorizes your app and becomes a user of your site.

This method gives a similar conversion rate via Facebook as via a website.

In the case of Meetville, the conversion rate was 47%! That is, 47% of people who opened the window with the permissions, agreed to let the site access their profile, including their e-mail address. From here, we can use email marketing to try and turn the user into a client. The Meetville homepage converts visitors into users not only via banner adverts, it also features the “Connect to Facebook” button. Therefore, users reach the window asking for access to their profile via the “Connect to Facebook” button as well as via a search or banner advert like apps.facebook.com/<your_app> on Facebook.

In any case, the conversion rate is an order of magnitude greater, and this is due mainly to the fact that the user already trusts Facebook, and has already posted their personal data, opinions and photos on the network.

So, the conversion rate when users register via Facebook is bigger because the registration process on the site has been reduced to a request to access the user's profile. We are making a trade with the Facebook user, asking them to give us access to their profile, in return for seeing what our app looks like. If they don´t give us access, they won’t be able to see it. The conversion rate increases because of a mixture of curiosity, existing trust in Facebook and the ease with which a user can give you permission to access their profile.

So, the Facebook usability experts did a great job, they designed very good UI dialogs to request permissions. And as a result, we get this great conversion rate.

Inquisitive readers may be wondering if I have a website, but no app on Facebook, how can I get such great results? It’s simple:

1. Create an app on Facebook.
2. Link your site to the app.
3. Redirect the user to your site after they have registered for the app.
4. BINGO!

So, now, if a user registers for your app, you will automatically get access to their e-mail (which you can save to your database), as well as to their personal details such as date of birth, interests, likes, etc. Facebook converts users at a rate of around 50% to your site. In other words, every second Facebook user which comes across your app becomes your user.

More information on boosting your visitor to user conversion rates using Facebook is available via the following links:

• Login documentation.
• The “Login for Server-side Apps” guide.