What is CRO?
So what exactly is CRO? Basically, it is the method of using analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website. CRO can be used to improve any aspect of your website that’s important to your business. We here at Local Blitz call these key performance indicators (KPI). KPI’s are often associated with acquiring new customers, better CTR’s, downloads, etc. In short, a KPI increases the percentage of website visitors who experience the “eureka moment” that turns the average web browser into a valuable conversion.
CRO means figuring out what users are looking for. Then once you test and analyize KPI’s of your site, when traffic does arrive at your site, you know what to give your target audience. CRO can take many different forms based on the KPI you’re trying to improve. Sometimes this involves making your call-to-action (CTA) more apparent or placing it on a traffic-heavy page. Other times it may be removing or relocating unnecessarily complicated or time-consuming steps from your conversion funnel. Any uncessessary confusion can prevent a conversion from ever happening.
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. Not only does CRO improve your ROI, optimization helps to defend against the limited attention span of your average visitor by giving them what they want before they have to go looking for it.
When your website converts a visitor into a lead, conversion happens. It means when visitors take action to fulfill your website or landing pages goal your conversions are generated. The types of conversions depends on the goal of your website or landing page. If you are having e-commerce site then a visitor must proceed to order confirmation. For blog websites, conversions happen when visitors subscribe to the newsletter. Effective CRO may increase conversions by 300%. To calculate lead generation website success we need to calculate conversions. Higher numbers of website visitors do not always mean good conversions. Visitors must convert any of your website goals. Your website goals are to generate leads as much as possible. Overall conversions rate determines your website’s success.
It’s important to understand, however, that optimization is about getting more of the right kind of customers, and not just blindly optimizing the conversion rate of a given page or campaign. It won’t do any good if the people you’re acquiring are the wrong demographic for your business. It’s important to keep the focus on optimizing with the goal of finding more long term customers who will love your product and help you grow. Any other targeting efforts will just be a waste of your time and resources.
Whic is why multivariate testing, or A/B testing is so important. What is A/B testing? In very basic terms, you set up two different landing pages, each has a different element from the other. Perhaps one has a bright green call-to-action, the other has a slightly less garish colour. Your site presents one of these pages to half your traffic, and the less garish one to the other half.
Then you can then see whether or not a small change to a call-to-action (CTA) can make a difference to conversion. The button isn’t the only element that can be tested of course. Headlines, product copy, image size, layout, amount of text, fonts… If it’s an element on the page then it can be tested. If testing that element means a chance of increasing conversion, then it should definitely be done.
Multivariate testing just means splitting up your traffic towards multiple versions of the same page. For this your site requires a large amount of traffic in order to test the larger number of combinations successfully. Testing should never reach a stage of completion: even if you’re absolutely confident that CRO has been refined to the very limits, carry on… Who knows what minor tweak may squeeze out a few more conversions.
For four years in a row, A/B testing has remained the most used method for improving conversion rates, with two-thirds of companies surveyed by us saying they use it.
Constant testing doesn’t just mean a possible increase in conversion. It will also lead to a better user experience. Removing barriers, simplifying forms, clarifying navigation, all these things lead to an improved customer journey and therefore making your site a better place to browse.
The goal of CRO is not to manipulate visitors into converting. It’s to ease the journey of already interested or engaged visitors through your website until they’ve achieved the outcome they desired themselves.
If a user has searched for ‘blue Nikes’ and they’ve landed on your product page, chances are they want to purchase the product. It’s not bad to make it as simple or even enjoyable as possible. That customer will come back for future purchases and recommend you to other users if their journey was smooth and easy.
Feedback can be collected in a wide variety of ways, some more user-friendly than others, but it can all be used to improve the customer experience. Even if the improvement is just to stop showing them survey pop-ups all the time. One popular and less obtrusive method of doing this is the Net Promoter Score. This is a customer loyalty metric based on one direct question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?
The final NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors (those who are unhappy with your site) from the percentage of customers who are promoters (your most loyal enthusiasts). Promoters – Detractors = NPS. According to Forbes companies like Amazon and Costco operate with an NPS between 50-80% but the average venture has an NPS of only 5-10% or even negative.