3 Experts Show How to Get Started with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

For company websites, having an enormous amount of consistent traffic is awesome, but where’s the value exactly?

Traffic doesn’t always equate to getting a good return on investment (ROI). You can get lots of site visitors, but not all of them will take the specific action you desire. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) comes in.

Below, we’ve gathered insights from qualified experts that can help you best understand CRO, how to use it to optimize your website, and the advantages it can bring for your business. Check them out and see how easy and beneficial it is to optimize your website for conversions.

What is CRO?

1. The guys from Qualaroo gave a good definition of what CRO is and why you need it. According to them, CRO is the method of using analytics and user feedback to enhance the performance of your website. It can be used to optimize assets to drive key performance indicators (KPIs) that are crucial to your business, often related to acquiring new customers, leads, registrations, and more.

CRO Tips
CRO can be used to improve any metric on your website that’s important to your business–often called key performance indicators (KPIs)–that you’re trying to improve, but it’s often associated with acquiring new customers, registrations, downloads, etc. Put another way, it increases the percentage of website visitors who experience the “aha moment” (or the must-have user experience) that turns passive browsers into valuable conversions. ~Qualaroo

2. Backlinko identified CRO as the practice of improving your website to maximize the number of users that take a specific action or “conversion.” If you run an ecommerce site, the action you want your visitors to take is to purchase one of your products. Likewise, a user signing up for your email newsletter or a free trial is considered a conversion. It all depends on your goal or objective.

3. Finally, the folks over at Moz make CRO easier to wrap your head around with this straightforward definition:Conversion rate optimization is…

• Finding out why visitors aren’t converting

• Fixing it

• That’s it.

In a nutshell, CRO means identifying what your target audience is looking for when they visit your site and giving that to them. The higher conversion rate you get, the more successful your campaign becomes.

Below are some useful and efficient tips from these three experts. Feel free to explore this post to pick up some points you can apply in your conversion rate optimization strategy. Let’s get started!

Tips to Get Started with CRO

1. Set up your goals

Your CRO goal could be to boost your website’s overall revenue or improve the conversion performance of a particular page. Nevertheless, it’s important to set these goals before you start hypothesizing or working on experiments like A/B testing.

Identifying your goals and benchmarking your current performance makes it possible to gauge the effectiveness of each activity, which is critical because accurate attribution is a huge part of getting CRO right.

2. Outline your funnel with Google Analytics

Now that you’ve determined your goals and benchmarked your current performance, you can now start analyzing why your visitors aren’t taking the specific action you intend them to.

Google Analytics shows you where your conversions are strongest and weakest, including where you’re losing traffic, your bounce rate and exit rate percentages, the conversion rate contrast between different devices, and more.

You can get started by setting your initial goals and tracking your progress. Then you can start creating segments for the different types of audience profiles common to your website (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.).

3. Collect data

Quantitative data tells a big part of the story, but it may not be enough. If you want to thoroughly understand why users don’t convert, you can conduct user surveys, analyze chat logs, and perform user testing to help you find qualitative areas of improvement and relevant conversion opportunities.

When running surveys, build a good set of questions to determine whether your visitors aren’t converting due to usability issues (can’t buy) or objections (won’t buy). This method is very efficient because you get your answers straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

You can also use a tool that shows the heatmap data of your site to see how the majority of your visitors interact with your pages and what they usually ignore. Here’s an example from Backlinko of what that looks like:

4. Test

Now that we’ve gathered enough data, it’s time to come up with solutions and look for opportunities. You can start by testing your high-traffic pages, low-traffic pages, pages that convert well, and pages that don’t convert at all. Using the data you collected, you can compare the different elements of each page to identify what works best to drive action.

Test everything and do it often. If you want to know which banner, what button color, or which button placement works best for your users, testing different variations should be your bread and butter. Just remember to only test one variable at a time, unless you have the traffic volume for multivariate testing.

5. Gather and evaluate the results

Track, analyze, and learn from the results of your tests. If you’re using an A/B testing software, it can show you the results and let you know if you’ve reached significant numbers. If you get a big win, see if you can implement the solution elsewhere. Most importantly, document and learn from your losses.

6. Optimize your site design

Good web design isn’t all about making your site look pretty. It means delivering a good user experience, which can highly influence their actions. Here are some design optimization tips that support CRO:

• Optimize your CTA – Personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions. Ditch the generic CTAs and write strong, catchy ones.
• Use action-focused copy on your landing pages – Instead of saying “Our service helps your business increase revenue,” say what will happen when they use your service “Boost your revenue and stay ahead of your competitors.”
• Use directional cues to guide users – An arrow or image of an illustration looking at where you want users to click will probably make them follow, like CrazyEgg’s homepage below.

CRO for better ROI

If you’re struggling with the number of visits to your site, you can use CRO best practices to help bring those numbers up. However, know that it takes more than just testing call-to-action buttons to make these people convert. You need to be running the right tests, which means using your conversion objectives to develop the right hypotheses from the start.

CRO is an ongoing effort and no website is 100% optimized, but you have to start somewhere. With proper guidance like the those from these experts, you’ll improve your strategy in no time and with minimal mishaps. CRO can be a game-changer for your business. It’s time to get started!

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