Everybody wants more visitors to their landing pages and website. However, what happens after people get to those pages is equally important.

Here is where CRO (conversion rates optimization) comes into play.

CRO can increase the effectiveness of your site traffic, and can dramatically lower your CPA (cost-per-acquisition). CRO is essential for all users of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or any other PPC platform.

This guide will explain what CRO is, and why it’s important for your business’ success.

Let’s get started.

What is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), is the science and art of increasing the number of website visitors that take the desired action.

You could choose from many options for this desired action:

• Purchase direct
• Email Signup
• Phone call
• Submission of the form
• Donation
• Clicking on a button
• Etc.

There are many desired actions on a website with different priority levels.

Each website should have a priority or objective around which it is designed.

• This is often a direct sale for product-based businesses.
• This is usually a submission of a lead form for service businesses.
• This might be an option for businesses that have a lengthy nurturing period.

In most cases, the main goal of Conversion rate Optimization experts is to increase website sales. This is usually achieved by making the customer journey easier and making it easier to understand the offer and take specific actions at each step of the journey.

The CRO expert is successful if total sales rise. This is the only objective that matters.

However, that’s only part of the story. To achieve the main goal, a customer journey must include many actions.

If your site’s goal is to sell a product then the customer journey might include:

1. Clicking on a button on the homepage will take them to the product pages
2. Click the “Add to Cart” button
3. Checkout
4. Complete the checkout process by entering the required information.
5. Finally, complete the purchase to close the transaction.

Each of these actions can be a potential tripping or bottleneck in overall sales.

• What if your homepage doesn’t work well in getting people to visit your product page?
• What if the button to “Add To Cart” isn’t working 5% of the time?
• Is your checkout process too slow and causes people to leave?

These are all things that can reduce your sales. A CRO specialist will look for these things when trying to increase sales.

CRO is focused on increasing site visitors, not increasing their number. This is what makes it different from other marketing strategies or growth strategies. CRO is about optimizing current traffic, increasing conversion rates into leads, sales, donors and subscribers, or any other desired goal.

Why is CRO so important?

CRO is essential for two reasons.

Sales are the first and most obvious reason.

It doesn’t matter how many visitors you have, a conversion rate below 0.00% is not going to get you any money.

Similar to the above, if you have 2.03% of your visitors purchasing from your site (the average eCommerce conversion rate), increasing this rate to 4% will double your sales.

This means that online businesses can see huge leaps in sales if they make small improvements to their conversion rates.

You can replace sales with any other goal if you don’t want to make sales. No matter what your goal is, you want to increase the number of visitors who take that action.

This second reason is slightly more complicated but equally intuitive. Traffic is costly, so CRO is crucial.

You know how costly it can be to use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or any other pay-per-click platform to drive traffic toward your website. CRO can help you convert more of your paid traffic, and maximize your ROAS (return-on-ad spend).

No matter how you channel traffic to your site, there will be significant costs. These costs tend to rise each year.

Websites and businesses in their initial three years usually have increased traffic as their priority. If you have only 5 visitors per month, a 100% conversion rate won’t be much help.

Once your business has established a few traffic channels, and you are receiving a reasonable number of monthly visitors to its website, CRO can be a cost-effective way to increase sales.

Take, for example:

Let’s suppose you have 100k monthly visitors. Their conversion rate is the industry-standard 2.03%.

You would like to increase your total sales by 50%

Which option will be more costly?

1. How to increase monthly visitors by 50k more visitors per month
2. A CRO specialist can improve your website and increase conversion rates from 2% to 3.3%.

It will usually cost a business less to hire a specialist CRO agency or agency than it would increase traffic dramatically.   

VentureBeat surveyed 2,938 users of CRO tools across 3.1M websites and found that websites using CRO with the aid of CRO tools (virtually all CRO campaigns employ CRO tools) have an average ROI of 223%.

Although large numbers like these won’t be enough to predict your success, they can see that CRO is a cost-effective option for those who choose it.

The same holds for PPC, where the average PPC conversion rate across all industries are 3.75%. You can increase your conversion rate to get a better return on your advertising spend.

Now that you understand the importance of CRO, let’s get into how it works.

What is the CRO Process?

We defined CRO as both an art form and a science. It’s a mix of science and art, just like most business, marketing, or eCommerce experts.

Let’s get a little deeper and show you how CRO works.

The CRO process consists of three components:

1. Website and Customer Analysis
2. Website Experimentation
3. Experiment Analysis, Implementation & Evolution

Let’s take a look at each one.

1. Website and Customer Analysis

CRO begins with an analysis of the site’s existing content and its visitors’ behavior. This is where the goal lies: to understand how visitors behave and why.

This stage involves evaluating quantitative and qualitative data. Many tools can be used to assist you in this process.

Referring to the opening example, you will see the homepage, product pages, and checkout process.

Analyzing user behavior would be the first step to determining where bottlenecks exist.

• Is the conversion rate for your homepage very low?
• Is the conversion rate for product pages very low?
• Is the bounce rate high at checkout?

Always look for outliers. For a large initial win, you want to find obvious problems that can be fixed. CRO becomes a lot more resource-intensive for smaller wins once we have gotten past the obvious, big problems.

If the homepage received warm traffic but converted click-throughs to product pages at only 2%, something is likely wrong. Next, identify the problem.

These are some ideas:

• User testing
• Evaluating customer feedback
• Test your user in real-time or by recording it.

You might discover a bug in your homepage that causes 20% of users to leave. This bug can be fixed to increase your conversion rate by 20%.

You might also find out from customer feedback or user testing that your homepage copywriting is confusing and unclear. A 50% increase in conversion rates can be achieved by rewriting the copy.

After the obvious problems have been fixed, it is time to look for weak areas that can be strengthened. The same process is used, except that instead of looking out for outliers you’re looking for areas with reasonable performance that can be improved.

Step 2 is now possible after you have identified the areas you wish to improve.

2. Website Experimentation

It’s easy to fix obvious problems. Then, you can enjoy the results. It is much more difficult to improve weak areas.

This is because users’ behavior can never be predicted. Even CRO professionals with more than 20 years of experience can’t predict the results of changes.

A veteran CRO specialist will be able to make better guesses than someone who is just starting, but they will also understand that guesses are only guesses. Instead of getting stuck on one approach to the problem, they will experiment with different approaches to overcome any unforeseen problems.

This is why you’re now in the “experimentation phase” of your website. This is more than just changing the code. Each change is a hypothesis that can be tested in a statistically significant and scientifically valid way.

This is the simplest version, or “A/B testing”, which allows you to test two pages against each other and then see what happens.

Let’s take, for example, your homepage copy converts at 10%. You feel it could be better. The issue is identified as a weak value proposition copy. This is how A/B testing would look.

1. To rewrite your value proposition, you hire a copywriter.
2. Software is used to present the original value proposition to half of the homepage visitors, and the new one to 50%.
3. The test is run for a predetermined time to account for time-based variation. You also want enough people to see the tests for statistical significance.
4. The results are analyzed and you decide what to do next.

A/B testing can be described as the simplest type of website experimentation. It is a simple comparison of one or more changes to the original.

A/B Testing

A/B testing could be as easy as changing the order of sections or a different image.

Website experiments such as multivariate testing, personalization, API-based and multi-platform testing all require greater complexity and higher levels of expertise.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing lets you test completely new landing page variations.

This type of testing reduces the testing time and helps you discover what works faster than single A/B split tests. The test may not be statistically significant right away, however, because you will be splitting traffic among three or more pages.

We are not done with testing. We are just beginning.

3. Experiment Analysis, Implementation & Evolution

After the first round of testing is complete, it’s time for analysis, implementation, and setting up the next round.

We are not able to provide statistics for A/B testing. However, let’s assume that 200 people view the original page, and 200 see the new one.

It is statistically significant that 20 percent of 200 people convert on the original homepage and 35 percent convert on the new one. You will likely replace the value proposition copy with the updated version.

Only 25 of 200 people convert to the new version. This means that you are only 79% sure it is better performing. There is a 21% chance the performance has been increased by chance. You should take one of these steps:

• Run the test again with some modifications to the value proposition
• For a long time and with a greater number of users, run the test as-is again
• Rewrite the value proposition completely and run the test again

Let’s now say that 35 of 200 converts have switched to the new version. This is a statistically significant increase. Now what? You now have more options.

• Try writing another value proposition to see if it can improve your performance.

• Rewrite the copy on the page.

• You might consider changing the offer to fit the more-profitable value proposition

• Try the value proposition changes on other pages of the website to see if they improve performance.

Contrary to popular blogs and case studies, website experimentation and CRO is not about one A/B test. Real results are achieved by a continuous process of testing and creating new versions over time.

A CRO expert with experience will be able to understand the process and how to implement it. They will realize that the goal of the optimization campaign is not to determine the best direction but to make use of all the data available to create a profitable one.

Key CRO Elements

Although CRO is not a universal solution, some elements have a greater impact on performance than others. These elements will guide you through the CRO process.

These are the most important elements you can optimize.

Site navigation

Navigation is crucial as functionality is your top priority.

The optimization process can vary depending on the source of your traffic and the conversion goal.

Organic traffic to your homepage might be bouncing around because it’s difficult for people to find what they are looking for. It’s your responsibility to make sure your website is easy to use and navigate, regardless of whether they’re looking to book an appointment, purchase a product, or learn more about your team.

However, no navigation may be the best option if you are using Google Ads for traffic to a landing page.

Copy

It takes a lot of skill to create a high-quality website copy or landing page.

Although persuasive copy is a popular topic, clarity is the most important aspect of copywriting. You don’t have to convince people or manipulate them if you have a great product or service. You just need to communicate clearly what your product/service does and how it fits into what they want.

You will normally have three types of copy: headlines and subheadlines.

Let’s take each one apart.

Headlines

• Communicate your offer as concisely as possible
• It must be large and easy-to-read

Subheadlines

• Highlight features and benefits to make skimming easier
• The primary headline should be supported
• Clear and concise

Content for the body

• Extend or explain your headlines and subheadlines
• Answers questions users might have
• It is clear and easy to read

Your conversion rates will be greatly affected by the clarity and testing of each copy type.

Formulas

Forms are the most important part of the lead generation space. It’s not surprising that optimizing forms can significantly improve conversion rates.

Form optimization can not only increase lead volume, but it can also improve lead quality.

Here are some different forms you can try:

• Form fields with more forms are required for long forms
• Forms with fewer fields (short forms)
• Forms with multiple steps (two or more steps)

CTA (Call to Action).

A call to action is the part that asks customers to act. It should, like all of your copy be clear.

CTA text is normally found on buttons or directly above forms.

Sites can have multiple CTAs because they must meet many customer needs. However, landing pages should focus on a single goal and only have one CTA. This keeps people from being distracted by the many options. They can either convert or leave.

Because your landing pages are centered around one CTA, testing other CTAs can make a big difference.

The layout of Landing Pages

Your landing pages’ design and organization play a major role in CRO. But there is too much to go into this post…

Page Speed

Remember how we spoke about the importance of functionality? Page speed plays an important role in functionality.

Conversion rates are affected by how long it takes for your websites to load. Walmart found that conversion rates increased by 2% for every one-second improvement in load times.

Regardless of any optimizations or tests you may have done, make sure to test the loading times of your website. It is important to make sure that your website and landing pages load at the speed of light.

Google’s page speed insight makes it simple to check how fast your website loads.

Our experience shows that your web hosting provider has the greatest impact on page speed. Your hosting provider should be viewed as a car. You could spend hours preparing a minivan for the race, but it won’t be a Ferrari. You can optimize image sizes and website caching, but your host will still slow down and cause load times to suffer.

Measurement of CRO Success

You might have read this far and concluded that CRO success is based on increased conversion rates.

As it turns out, CRO is more than just increasing conversion rates. It is also important to consider the quality of conversions.

Not all leads can be converted into sales. Some eCommerce sales may prove more profitable than others. It is important to realize that CRO success can be measured by more conversion rates and total conversions.

CRO, like all marketing efforts, should focus on increasing ROI (return on investment), as CRO success ultimately depends on growth and profitability.

This means that you should look at your CRO results in more than one way. You should not only improve conversion rates but also increase the value of each conversion.

Free shipping or slashing prices by 50% may increase conversion rates. But if you don’t make any money from those extra sales, it doesn’t help.

Take your time, be patient, plan your tests well, and make sure to check for quality every once in a while.

Common CRO mistakes

The most common error is not optimizing your landing pages. However, even for those who are experts there is still plenty of room for error.

The most common CRO offenses can be avoided.

Let’s look at the top four most common mistakes that we make.

Test The Wrong Things

Although it can seem daunting to make major changes to your landing pages, the consequences are rarely disastrous.

Sometimes, the biggest mistake is to make small and insignificant changes.

Your conversion rates won’t improve if you change the color of your CTA buttons or make your font bigger. These micro-tests are not a bad idea.

You will see more improvement and be able to reach your goals faster by performing larger tests, such as adding a multistep form, changing your headline, or reordering page sections.

Too many changes

It’s very difficult to determine which changes you made to your landing page to help or hurt each test if you do this.

You can take it one step at a time to help you continue on the path of continuous improvement.

Assumptions

It is easy to make assumptions about the performance of a landing page and skip the testing phase.

You shouldn’t though, as tests that we believe will win may lose.

Even if your branding has changed recently, you should still test all changes. Changes to the branding of landing pages can have a significant impact on their performance, although there is no guarantee that it will be positive.

Reactions to Knee Jerk

It doesn’t matter if you manually calculate conversion rates or use a landing page tool such as Unbounce, it’s thrilling when one of your tests outperforms the other. A conversion rate increase of 2% to 3% can mean additional sales of thousands of dollars,

A 2% increase in conversions could make a huge difference!

It can be tempting to choose the winner without enough data to make statistically significant decisions.

To ensure that your test results are valid, you will need a statistical significance score of between 90% and 95%. This level of assurance can make your conversions very short-lived.

Be patient, and wait for your results to reach 90%-95% before you pick a winner.

Conclusion

Today, traffic is not free.

Driving traffic isn’t going to get any cheaper. It will only get more expensive over the years. This means that every click will be more important than ever. Your PPC and SEO efforts will be a waste of your time and money if you don’t convert visitors.

A good CRO strategy will give you more traffic, no matter what your methods are.

The information in this article is only a small part of CRO. However, if you’re interested in learning more about it, we can help! To improve your conversion rates, give us a call or and get your free proposal.