You’ve got a ton of traffic coming to your website each month thanks to your strong digital marketing strategies, but you’re still not getting as many on-site purchases or qualified leads as you had hoped. Now what? Well, that’s where Conversion Rate Optimization comes in. By utilizing CRO strategies, you’re able to maximize engagement from your target audience and set your business up for long-term growth.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is optimizing your website based on user behavior in order to increase the likelihood that website visitors take a desired action on your website. That desired action, called a conversion, can be making a purchase, filling out a form, viewing key services pages on your website, etc. Anything that is a KPI for your business should be measured as a conversion.
Conversion rate = the number of times website visitors complete a goal / total number of website visitors.
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
The average conversion rate is around 1-4%. BUT, it’s critical to know that conversion rates vary between different industries. What is a great conversion rate in the home improvement industry could be a low conversion rate in the clothing industry. Looking at industry averages are a great benchmark or starting point, but it’s not always apples to apples even within the same industry. You’re not measuring conversions in the exact same way as even your closest competitors are, so don’t expect to see the exact same conversion rates.
Where to Start With Optimizations?
So, now you have a basic understanding of conversion rate optimization and its purpose. What next? A good place to begin is by analyzing your homepage, as this is likely a high-traffic page for your website. Start with identifying what you’re looking to experiment on. Collect data and analyze it. Once you have all the information you need to make informed changes, continue to make those updates to your website and re-run your tests to collect new data. By observing the new data and comparing against the original, you’re able to ensure that your changes did help the user experience (UX).
The most important factor to keep in mind with CRO is that it’s all about using data to make informed decisions. Each change you make should be backed up using qualitative measurements. Our favorite ways to collect that information is by using the following methods:
CRO Data Collection Methods
- Heatmaps – See how far down the page website visitors are scrolling and determine which parts of your website they are, or aren’t, engaging with.
- User Recordings – Watch videos of real users and see how they interact with your website.
- Surveys – Launch on-site feedback tools to get a better understanding of user actions and pain points.
You’re probably thinking, “How do I set up the tests you outlined above?” There are many options out there to help you collect user behavior data. Some, like Google Analytics, you may already be using, while others, like Hotjar give you new, easy-to-use tools to identify and fix key problem areas on your website.
CRO Tools
Below are a few tools you can use to analyze website data and performance:
- Google Analytics – Get in-depth data for your website.
- Hotjar – Create Heatmaps, User Recordings and Surveys to identify how users interact with your website.
- Microsoft Clarity – Set up Heatmaps and User Recordings and analyze the data in an easy-to-find dashboard.
- Unbounce – Great for A/B testing landing pages.
Don’t Forget About the Basics
While using the tools listed above will undoubtedly point out areas of improvement for your website, it’s essential to not overlook one of the most important aspects of UX: Site Speed. It’s estimated that 53% of people will only spend 3 seconds waiting for a website to load before they press the back button and move on to the next site. Is your website speed as fast as that? Use Google Page Speed Insights to measure how fast your webpages load. It’s free and it even gives valuable feedback on how exactly to improve your page speed.
How do CRO & SEO Work Together?
It’s true…SEO and CRO can work really well together when done correctly. SEO brings the traffic to your website and CRO helps turn that traffic into paying customers. On top of that, to run successful CRO tests you need traffic. In order to get traffic you need a strong SEO strategy. You get the idea.
Historically, CRO was all about making the most of your current traffic, rather than gaining new traffic. Now, Google’s recent Page Experience update is bridging the gap between the two. By improving the overall usability of your website, you’re able to maximize your website’s potential for your target audience and also increase your rankings on the search engine results page (SERP).
By tying your new CRO strategies into your existing SEO plan, you can ensure you’re delivering the best on-site experience to all of your website visitors, regardless if they are new or existing.
If you’re looking to better understand user behavior or increase conversion rates on your website, contact our team!