What Actually Is CRO?

So when it comes to digital marketing there’s a good chance you may have heard of the term CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation, but what really is it? And how does it work? Well, let us use this blog post to break it all down for you. So let’s start with what. Conversion Rate Optimisation is all about optimising your site so that it performs to the best of its ability when it comes to converting visitors into customers or service users. Not only is it one thing getting people to your site it’s another thing turning them into customers. In order to improve your Conversion Rate, you first need to understand why people are dropping off.

Collecting Data

There may be a number of reasons why a visitor isn’t converting into a paid customer. It’s difficult to understand customer behaviour without having context, but what you can do is collect data and make an informed decision.

Conversion Rate Optimisation is great in that it allows you to answer some of the how’s and why’s of a customers journey. With online tools such as HotJar, it enables you to look at how users are interacting with your site. Using the heat mapping tool it creates colour-coded content for you to look at and see the customers actions.

Heat mapping shows everything such as the number of clicks, how far people are scrolling and their navigation of the site. Not only does it break down how people are interacting with your site it also shows what devices they accessed your page using. By analysing the customers’ behaviour on your site you can start to understand conversion funnels and where people are dropping off your site. It also allows you to make changes to the website to improve the users’ journey around your page.

Implementation Strategies

In order to capitalise on the data that you’ve gathered, you’ve got to review the facts and see if you can spot trends or patterns that are consistent with a number of visitors. If you see that visitors are coming to your page, but aren’t filling in your ‘contact us’ form which is positioned at the bottom of the page. What do you do with this information? Make an alteration, put in a CTA or change the position of it. Small changes can have big impacts.

You’ve got all the information and it’s time to look at a method to help fix it. One of the best ways to try to fix this is by treating it like a science experiment, creating a hypothesis, predicting the results then completing the experiment and assessing the outcomes. Using a tool such as HotJar allows you to cut out the guess-work. There are a few ways you should learn about when it comes to testing your website.

A/B Testing

Using online tools such as Google Optimize you compare two versions of a webpage to determine which one is performing better. You set up two landing pages A) is the original site and B) is a variation of it. The visitors will then get split between these two sites and you can see which one performs better. This is great if you have a large amount of traffic coming to your site.

Multivariate testing

Very similar to A/B however this time it’s A/B/C/D testing. It allows you to test numerous different variations of your website at one time, by splitting your traffic across a greater number of page variants.

So CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is all about making sure that you’re turning your traffic into the maximum number of customers possible. If you’re needing help with this don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team of experts here…