The top-line goal of marketing teams everywhere is to encourage leads through the funnel, converting them from casual website visitors to loyal customers. While several concurrent strategies can help you accomplish this goal, one effective approach is thoughtful and strategic conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Here’s how CRO works, why it’s important, how to implement an effective strategy, and more. Plus, we’ll give you a glimpse into the future of CRO to help you plan ahead.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving a website, landing page, or marketing campaign to increase the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, requesting a demo, clicking on a CTA.
Before diving into conversion rate optimization, let’s cover the basics. A conversion happens when a website visitor completes your desired action — for example, a form fill, a purchase, or a signup. Website visitors who don’t convert are your company’s leads.
CRO vs. SEO
Conversion rate optimization and search engine optimization have a common goal: to drive more sales. However, the process of how CRO and SEO achieve that goal is different.
CRO involves convincing and converting website visitors into customers. It focuses on people who are already aware of your brand. By contrast, SEO involves improving your company’s visibility in search engines to generate more website traffic. While SEO efforts may target people familiar with your brand, they also target those who might not have heard of you, which helps broaden your audience.
Why is CRO Important?
With more conversions come more visibility and sales, which is why CRO is an essential marketing strategy for your business.
CRO involves taking thoughtful steps to convert more leads to customers. These steps may include creating and testing new website copy, updating landing pages, adding call-to-action buttons, or altering your website’s navigation to improve product visibility.
Conversion Rate Formula You Need to Know
The formula for calculating conversions from a landing page is fairly simple:
(Total number of conversions / Total number of visitors) * 100 = your conversion rate.
Remember how choosing the desired action you want to track is essential? Here’s where that comes into play: If your desired action is having a website visitor sign up for a trial, your landing page gets 1,500 visitors, and 50 of them sign up, your conversion rate is around 3.3%.
How to Improve Your Conversion Rates
The first step in analyzing your conversion rates is choosing the desired action you want to track. This could be the customer making a purchase, filling in a form, or signing up for a trial. Once you know your goal, you can find gaps or obstacles in the conversion path and adjust accordingly.
1. Research Your Audience and Their Behaviors
This is all about data. You must determine how visitors move through your website and what stops them from converting. For this, you’ll need to conduct qualitative and quantitative research.
Conduct Quantitative Research
Use a web analytics platform, such as Google Analytics, to gather your site metrics, including:
- Where visitors come from — for example, via an ad or social page.
- Which pages they visit most.
- Which pages they spend the most time on.
- Which devices they use to access your website.
- Which pages they leave your site from.
- How many pages they visit before leaving.
- Audience demographics — age, gender, location, interests, etc..
The work doesn’t stop there. Adding conversion tracking to your site is a critical step in the process. Many analytics platforms let you do this by adding a simple string of code to your conversion page. This will help you see how many people convert and understand where your best leads are coming from, which demographics they belong to, and their actions once they’ve landed on your website.
Quantitative analysis can teach you who your core customers are, what interests them most, and how they find your business. All of this insight can inform your future marketing efforts.
Conduct Qualitative Research
Next, add context to your quantitative metrics and flesh out the customer journey by gathering feedback about customers’ experiences.
Do this by using surveys distributed via email or through your website using platforms such as SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms. Ask customers:
- Why did they visit your site?
- What were they looking for?
- Did they find what they were looking for? If not, why?
- Was the experience intuitive or confusing? What made it so?
- Why did or didn’t they decide to convert?
- Why did they leave your site?
- Which issues were they looking for your products to solve? Did this match the messaging that they saw?
2. Audit Your Landing Page
Now, it’s time to cross-check your data with your landing page. For example, if people tend to leave your landing page before clicking on a product page or converting, your call to action might not be visible or enticing. Or if people accessed your landing page via smartphone, their mobile experience might not be ideal.
Using data as your guide, audit your landing page and find opportunities for improvement. Several tools can help, including Optimizely or Crazy Egg.
3. Optimize Your Landing Page
Once you’ve finished your analysis, it’s time to optimize. Some elements that you might want to focus on include:
- A compelling and visible call-to-action (CTA) button.
- An effective headline.
- Design and language that matches your ads.
- High-quality, relevant images — but not overly large, as they will slow your page speed.
- Simple, clear graphics and text.
- A user-friendly navigation bar.
- Customer testimonials.
- Fast loading time — try SpeedTest.net or Pingdom Website Speed Test.
- Mobile-friendliness — try Google Lighthouse.
The key is to remove friction from the conversion path, and focusing on some of the above can help you do so. Friction can increase visitor frustration. For example, Hubspot evaluated how slow load times impact visitors and conversion rates, and found that B2B sites with a 1-second load time had a conversion rate five times higher than sites that took 10 seconds to load.
4. Continue Optimizing With A/B Testing
The work doesn’t end there. Continue to experiment with different elements of your landing page through A/B testing, which involves creating two variations of an element and testing them with your audience to see which variation performs best. Use tools like ABTasty or Optimizely to run these tests.
For example, you could test a red call-to-action button versus a blue one to see which performs best. If the red button drives more conversions, you can keep it and move on to another variation. Alternatively, you can test the red against a third color to see if that one performs even better.
There are countless ways to tweak your landing page, but only run tests for one element at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know which variation yielded better results. Depending on the amount of traffic to a particular landing page, you may need to run your A/B tests slightly longer to reach a sample that will be statistically significant. Good A/B testing tools account for statistical significance.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Your CRO Efforts
Many common mistakes to avoid in your CRO efforts relate to the above process of analyzing and improving your conversion rates. Here are some pitfalls to be aware of:
- Not identifying a desired action.
- Insufficient quantitative or qualitative research.
- Failing to analyze or optimize your landing pages.
- Neglecting to perform A/B tests.
- Testing too many elements at once.
- Analyzing a sample of visitors that’s too large or small.
- Not reaching statistical significance.
- Incorrect test timing (for example, when there is unusual traffic due to a sale or special event).
Real-World Examples of Successful Conversion Rate Optimization
Focusing on effective CRO can be extremely worthwhile for your business, and these CRO case studies illustrate why.
Bonia
Luxury international fashion retailer Bonia turned to marketing company Omniconvert to help increase online sales. After surveying Bonia’s website visitors, Omiconvert discovered that 85% hadn’t found the products they wanted, among them wallets, watches, and bags. Why? Because these products weren’t showing up in the navigation bar.
With Omniconvert’s help, Bonia made a simple fix: They added these products to their navigation bar and increased the font size to make them more visible. Consequently, the click-through rate for these products increased by 28%, conversions rose 66%, and only 47% of visitors reported on a subsequent survey that they couldn’t find the products they wanted.
Kaya Skin Clinic
Kaya Skin Clinic noticed that its conversion rate was lower than the industry average. Keen to generate more online appointment bookings, the company ran landing-page tests and decided to make two changes. One was placing a call-to-action with the words “expert opinion” above the sign-up form. The other was to include social proof — a count of Facebook users who “liked” their business. The call to action increased sales by 22%, and the social integration saw sign-ups jump 70%.
Protalus
Footwear maker Protalus increased sales by 91% in just six months with CRO. Analytics and customer surveys encouraged the company to move its “free upgrade” offer to the top of the page, add celebrity testimonials, remove unnecessary code to reduce load time, and address customers’ pain points through testimonials and revised copy.
Going
Created for travelers on a Budget, Going helps people save on flights locally by sharing targeted deals. While Going has a free tier for users, it also offers premium services. The Going team recently partnered with Unbounce to A/B test two CTAs on a landing page promoting its services: “Sign up for free” for its free tier and “Trial for free” for its premium services. The shorter “trial for free” CTA resulted in a 104% month-over-month increase in initial premium signups.
These brands prove CRO isn’t intimidating, though it might initially feel that way. Remember that one simple landing page tweak can generate a major uptick in sales; you just have to pinpoint that change and make it happen.
The Future of Conversion Rate Optimization: Trends and Predictions
Moving forward, tried-and-true methods such as strong landing-page copy, social proof, and simple and intuitive design will continue to play a role in a strong CRO strategy. However, we predict that artificial intelligence (AI), among other technologies, will likely play an increasing role in the coming years.
AI enables marketers to wrangle and identify patterns in data more easily — even when there’s a lot of it. Used wisely, this technology could offer more insight into the behaviors of your website visitors, including how they interact with your landing pages. Beyond helping improve CRO on landing pages, AI may also help you tailor your email marketing strategy for different customers. Email marketers are already using AI to segment audiences more effectively and analyze how send times impact conversions, and we expect this trend to continue.
Key Takeaways
Done well, your CRO efforts, combined with an effective SEO strategy, can help you streamline your marketing funnel and drive sales. While there’s no one-size-fits-all way to do it — because every brand and audience is unique — you can take steps to ensure you’re getting the most from this process.
Check your analytics, survey your audience, scrutinize your landing page, continually test different designs and elements, and make incremental changes as needed. With these strategies to guide you, you’ll be primed to drive more value from your site and pave a path that leads customers to convert.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is conversion rate optimization worth it?
Conversion rate optimization can pay off, as it could drive more leads and sales for your business. However, it’s smart to be thoughtful about your strategy and use the right tools to implement it. Otherwise, your efforts — and valuable marketing dollars — could be wasted.
What is the formula for conversion rate?
To calculate your conversion rate, use this formula:
(Total number of conversions / Total number of visitors) * 100 = your conversion rate.
What is the difference between SEO and conversion optimization?
SEO focuses on boosting targeted organic traffic from search engines to your website. Conversion optimization focuses on getting your website visitors to take a desired action — for example, making a purchase or signing up for a mailing list, once they arrive.
