What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of growing the percentage of website visitors, the CRO process involves understanding how users move on your site.
Conversion Rate Optimization is focused on persuading more of your website visitors to take the desired action you want them to do on a website.
CRO does evaluation for the site through Conducting qualitative research and user behavior analysis Conducting quantitative research Conducting competitive analysis Prioritizing problem areas on the site and creating a conversion roadmap for your website (what pages need to be fixed)Creating a testing hypothesis Creating new designs based on the testing hypothesis Conducting AB testing Analyzing the testing results.
Conversion rate optimization happens after the visit makes it to your site. This is different from conversion optimization for paid ads or SEO which focuses on who clicks through to your site from the organic search results, how many clicks you get, and which keywords are driving traffic.
The system to increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired actions of a web page is data-driven and focused on results researching, testing, and analyzing visitors’ behaviors on your website way of discovering more about your visitors and customers.
What is a conversion?
A conversion is a general term for a visitor to complete a site goal. Goals come in many shapes and sizes.
Two types of conversions exist macro conversions and micro conversions.
-A micro conversion.
means that a prospective customer has in some way engaged with your branding. The user might have signed up for your newsletter, watched your service’s explainer video, or followed you on social media.
-Macro conversions.
that’s when someone converts on a primary offer on your website. They might purchase a product, or subscribe to a service.
Micro conversions often lead to macro conversions because the user becomes more understanding of your company’s culture and your branding.
What is the Conversion Test?
Conversion Testing is the process of conducting an AB or multivariate test to increase the website conversion rate.
An iterative process by nature, CRO helps you in making assumptions about your website visitors and then testing these assumptions to measure how your market responds.
As a long-term process, CRO achieves sustainable, repeatable, and consistent increases in conversion rates through researching, testing, and analyzing visitors’ behaviors on your website.
A perfect CRO program increases your site’s revenue month to month, reaching significant cumulative annual growth.
CRO benefits.
Conversion rate optimization helps you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs. Conversion rate optimization looks to find the right customers for your business.
CRO lets you grow without running out of prospective customers and resources. Audiences aren’t infinite. By turning more browsers into buyers, you’ll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers.
When users dazzle on your website.
, they tend to stick around. CRO studies what works on your site. By doing what works and expanding on it, you’ll make a better user experience. Users who feel empowered by your site will engage with it more — and some may even become related to your branding.
Higher gain: Higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. By studying how to get the maximum of your acquisition efforts, you’ll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
Building confidence: For a user to share their credit card, email, or any sort of personal information, they have to genuinely trust the site. Your website is your number-one salesperson. Just like an internal sales team, your site needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to answer all of your customers’ questions.
How does Conversion Rate Optimization work?
-Start by selecting your conversion optimization data-gathering tools of choice and installing them on your website.
It’s better to start with having a little extra and stripping away tools if you decide they are redundant or unnecessary in the future.
There are many analytics tools out there, and you’ll have to decide which ones you like. The minimum of what you need at this stage is:
A basic user analytics tool like Google Analytics.
A conversion analytics tool like KISSMetrics or Mixpanel.
User interaction software (i.e., heatmaps) like CrazyEgg.
After you’ve installed them, take a little break and let them run for at least a few days to collect data.
Important: Having too much data is a much better problem than having insufficient data. It’s better to start with having a little extra and stripping away tools if you decide they are redundant or unnecessary in the future.
-Deciding How to Change Your Page.
If this is your first time optimizing anything on this page or site, chances are that it’s not converting even close to what it could be. You may have identified several issues that could be detracting from your conversion rate.
In general, there are 2 main options for testing a page. Pick one that’s appropriate before moving on.
- Test a completely different page: If you see several areas that could be improved, consider starting from scratch. It’s possible to get a drastically different conversion rate, which you can then use as a new foundation and start fine-tuning.
- Change one (or a few) elements: This involves A/B or multivariate split testing. If you already have a solid base, this is what you should be doing most of the time. You’re looking to identify one (or a few) problems, and then attempt to improve them. Note that multivariate testing involves testing more than one element at once, which means that the test will take longer to complete.
– Analyze and Identify Conversion Hurdles.
The purpose of this phase is to identify pages that have a high value in your funnel. This may mean that it’s a page that gets a lot of traffic but is early in your funnel (like a blog post) or a page that gets a small but steady stream of traffic and is late in your funnel (like a checkout page).
For smaller sites, it may be obvious which pages are the most valuable in your funnel. If not, you can use your intuition to pick a few that you feel are most valuable. This can work, or I wouldn’t include it here.
Calculate the value of a lead through each stage of your funnel. While it can get complicated, you essentially need to boil it down to revenue or profit per email address, per visit to a checkout page, or a similar metric.
Depending on your business, this can get pretty complex, so don’t be afraid of making a few assumptions if you can’t get exact numbers. Calculate the potential value of each page over a certain recent period and rank your pages in order of highest to lowest.
Now we’re going to pick one of these pages. Over time, you can test as many of these pages as you like, but for your first time in a CRO plan, keep it simple and pick one.
Analyze Your Page.
Remember phase 1? This is when that work pays off.
Start by looking at that page in all your tools. From your user analytics tools, pay special attention to metrics like:
Average time on page.
bounce rate (hard and soft).
conversion rate (at whatever stage in the funnel you’re at).
Important Note: Dig into each of these metrics. Not all conversions are created equally. For example, you may see that you get a lower email signup rate from search engine optimization visitors, but they purchase more from you later down in your funnel.
You want to identify the most valuable conversions and optimize those.
-Conversion test hypothesis.
This point is also one of the most important, this is typically a shorter and more fun phase than the two that precede.
Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is So Important?
It helps to more sales to a more profitable business.
Quick Measurable Results.
different from SEO which takes months to show results, CRO delivers quick results.
Each website and webpage has a goal, a purpose, or a reason for existing. Usually, the aim of a website or webpage is to assist the users in taking an action or converting. Or moving them down the funnel to do so. Sometimes web pages simply do not achieve these goals, and CRO is a service that can be leveraged to help your website convert at a higher rate and find out.
How users are using your site?
CRO is an integral part of advances in digital marketing.
From which you’ll be able to pinpoint what your users are looking for on your website. Where they are clicking, what issues they are having. And what information may be necessary for them to stay on your website. Or continue down the funnel. With a suitable eye on these data points.
you begin to get a more clear picture of how your website could convert better moving forward. Not just now, but long term.
-will also help build your brand into a streamlined and consistent asset. Don’t get left behind, focus on conversion rate optimization, and make it a part of your digital marketing strategy today.