What is CRO?

CRO-Conversion Rate Optimization

              CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. Whatever may be the ultimate goal of your website, a conversion is the successful completion of that action. CRO is the process of optimizing the site to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete a specific action.

Conversion Rate is a key metric in e-commerce, as it reveals the percentage of the sote's total traffic completing a specific goal. The higher the conversion rate, the better. 

Conversion Rate

Once you have defined what conversions you want to track, you can calculate the conversion rate.

Let's assume you regard a sale as your conversion. As long as you are tracking, the number of leads you get and of resulting sales(conversions), you can calculate your conversion rate-

$$Conversion rate = \frac{Total number of sales} {Number of leads} \times 100$

When you know what the value of a lead is, you can determine how many leads you need each month to sustain your business and how much should pay for advertising. This is true whatever you are using pay-per-click (PPC) or any offline advertising like mailers or print ads.

What is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimization is-

A strutured and systematic approach to improving the performance of the website.

Informed by insights-specially, analytics and user feedback.

Defined by the Website's unique objectives and needs(KPIs).

Taking the traffic that you already have and making the most of it.

What CRO is Not Conversion Rate Optimization is not-

Based on the guesses, hunches, what everyone else is doing.

Driven by the highest paid Person's opinion.

 About getting as many users as possible,

regardless of the quality or engagement.

Why do Companies Use CRO?

CRO plays an important role in improving the efficiency of critical processes. Here, we will discuss the most common areas where companies evaluate CRO.

A/B Testing - 

What is A/B testing? In basic terms, you set up two different landing pages, each has a different element from the other. Your site presents the 'A' version of these pages to half your traffic and the 'B' version to the remaining half. Then you can see whether or not a small change to a call-to-action (CTA) can make a difference in conversion rates.

CRO and A/B testing

                 CRO and some form of testing or experimentation (such as A/B testing or multivariate testing) tend to be linked together. While changes can be made to improve conversion without testing, many professionals engaged in CRO make changes they think will improve conversion, test these changes against the original (i.e., control), and then see if the changes actually do produce a life in the conversion rate.

                In addition, they also use the information from this behavioral experimentation to better understand the customer and come up with additional conversion optimization ideas.

               While CRO and testing have always been used in marketing and advertising, the practice is especially prevalent in digital marketing because it allows for quick and inexpensive changes, testing of those changes, and immediate, easily measurable results. (Not that all CRO digital changes are quick, cheap and easy. For example, a shopping cart or homepage redesign could be time-consuming and expensive. However, it can also improve results significantly.)

Customer Journey Analysis-

How did your customer progress from brand awareness to purchase?

Also often referred to as a Conversion Funnel.

Cart abandonmental Analysis-

Investigate the cause of not checking out, once the items have been added to a shopping cart.

Segmentation -

Segmentation shows approaches to the grouping prospects and customers to deliver more relevant communications and offers for the better response rates to these communications.

    In addition, CRO is used for copy optimization, online surveys and customer feedback.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Optimizing a website to improve conversions takes time and testing out different changes, so there isn’t one surefire tip for success: it depends on your website, your goals, and more. These tips are industry known best practices.

Think Like a Customer

To get customers to convert, think like one to better understand what drives some towards conversion and some away. If you’ve developed customer personas for your ideal target customer, consider what factors would influence their buying decision.

Check that any calls to action are clear and concise, and that landing pages are easy to navigate. Make it clear what the goal of the page is and work to improve user experience so that they are compelled to complete that goal.

Track Customer Journeys

                Tracking customer journeys can help you better understand the flow of your website and where it can be improved. Set up Google Analytics for your website if you haven’t already to see where traffic goes and what pages have a high bounce rate.

       Heat maps are also helpful to see what areas of a website page receive more clicks.

Test What Works

Perform A/B tests or multi-variable testing to see what elements on a website landing page are helping or hurting your conversion rate. A/B tests look at the difference in conversions when only one factor changes, while multi-variable testing looks at a few variables at once. Whether your website needs minor adjustments or more significant changes, testing can give helpful insight into what works best to improve conversions.

Run A Survey

Ask visitors directly what you can change about your website to improve their experience. Customer surveys offer different, human insights compared to web analytics and metrics. While they won’t be able to answer questions about conversions or technical fixes to your website, they can tell you more about their experience as a user that can help you understand how to improve your website pages.

CRO vs SEO

While both terms contain the word “optimization”, CRO and SEO are not the same. Many tend to confuse the two or misunderstand the difference.

In simple terms, SEO helps to optimize your website to drive traffic to it, while CRO optimizes your website for those visitors’ behavior once they are on your site. Both efforts ultimately attempt to improve the profitability of your website, but in very different ways.

CRO is all about customer experience on your website, so optimizing for conversions focuses on human behavior and considers what makes a person convert into a customer. SEO, on the other hand, is all about machine learning and works to optimize web pages to rank based on search engine algorithms, not based on user experience or human understanding.

What is Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors to a website or specific landing page that convert by performing some favorable action. Since not all visitors to your website will perform the desired action, whether it’s a purchase, sign up, form submission, etc., it’s helpful to track conversion rate to know what percentage of visits are successful.

How To Calculate Conversion Rate

There are a few different ways to calculate conversion rate depending on your business, the products or services you offer, and the type of conversion you are looking for. In general, conversion rate is calculated by dividing conversions on a page by total visitors to that page.

One factor that plays into how to calculate CRO is whether or not a visitor can convert more than once. Websites that sell multiple products or repeat services can have the same customer convert multiple times, while a website selling a long-term subscription of some sort can only convert each customer once upon signing them up.

When a user can convert multiple times, conversion rate is generally calculated by dividing the number of unique conversions by the total number of sessions on a website. By unique conversions, we mean each single conversion, regardless of whether the same user converts more than once.

If a user can only convert one time, conversion rate is usually calculated by dividing the number of unique conversions by the number of unique users visiting the website. In this case, the denominator is unique visitors, not total sessions, since each can only convert once regardless of how often they visit the page.

Why CRO Matters

Conversion rate optimization is vital to increase conversions and therefore profitability on your website. While you may think a webpage is performing just fine, imagine if a small change could improve your conversion rate. It usually takes more than a single small change, but optimizing your website for conversions is extremely important and worthwhile nonetheless.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Optimizing a website to improve conversions takes time and testing out different changes, so there isn’t one surefire tip for success: it depends on your website, your goals, and more. These tips are industry known best practices.

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