BigAppCompany

Published on Nov 9, 2018

At its most fundamental, CRO means figuring out what users are looking for when they arrive at your site and then giving that to them. CRO takes many different forms, based on the KPI you’re trying to improve. Sometimes this involves making your call-to-action more apparent or placing it on a traffic- heavy (but under-optimized) page. At other times this means removing or relocating unnecessarily complicated or time-consuming steps from your conversion funnel, as the added friction can prevent a conversion from ever happening.

Examples of conversions

If you aren't already actively using conversion rate optimization for your online business, now is the time. Relatively simple fixes could make your conversions go higher, and CRO tools allow you to test what works and what doesn't with less risk of hurting your existing online presence. Instead of wondering what works to help increase your website's conversion rate, test your hypotheses so that you know, without any doubt, what works and what doesn't.

1. Macro-conversions:
   1. Purchasing a product from the site
   2. Requesting a quote
   3. Subscribing to a service
2. Micro-conversions:
   1. Signing up for email lists
   2. Creating an account
   3. Adding a product to the cart

Why should you care?

You should care about CRO for a few reasons. First, you are most likely paying for traffic to your site in one way or another, and a high conversion rate means a better return on that investment (ROI). It’s also much more cost-effective to convert a higher percentage of the visitors you already have than to attract more visitors. In addition to improving your ROI, optimization helps to defend against the limited attention span of your average visitor by giving them what they want.

• Higher conversion rate = better ROI
• More cost effective than finding more visitors
• Defends against limited patience of visitors

Conversion rate optimization has distinct benefits for SEO. These include:

1. Improved customer insights: Conversion rate optimization can help you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs. Conversion rate optimization looks at finding the right customers for your business.
2. Better ROI: Higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. By studying how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you'll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
3. Better scalability: While your audience size may not scale as your business grows, CRO lets you grow without running out of resources and prospective customers. Audiences aren't infinite. By turning more browsers into buyers, you'll be able to grow your business without running out of potential customers.
4. Better user experience: When users feel smart and sophisticated on your website, they tend to stick around. CRO studies what works on your site. By taking 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 might even become evangelists for your brand.
5. Enhanced trust: In order 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 sales person. Just like an internal sales team, your site needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to answer all of your customers' questions.

In order to optimize for conversion rates, you have to know where, what to optimize, and who to optimize for. This information is the cornerstone to successful CRO strategies.

Using analytics-based CRO can answer important questions about how users engage with your site. Quantitative analysis provides information like:

• Where people enter your site, i.e., which webpage they land on first
• Which features they engage with, i.e., where on a page or within your site do they spend their time
• What channel and referrer brought them in, i.e., where they found and clicked on a link to your site
• What devices and browsers they use
• Who your customers are (age, demographic, and interest)
• Where users abandon your conversion funnel, i.e., where or during what activity do users leave your site

This information will let you know where to focus your efforts. By putting your effort into the pages most engaged with and valuable to your users, you’ll see the largest impact.