What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors who complete a website’s goal. You can think of CRO as an ongoing process that involves user research, data analysis, competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, usability testing, and A/B testing.
Conversion rate optimization is focused on persuading more of your website visitors to take the desired action you want them to take on a webpage, website, or within a campaign.
What is the Process for Conversion Rate Optimization?
The right conversion rate optimization process can provide incredible results, but you’ll be just as amazed by the process to achieve these results through the fact-based, data-driven scientific approach I will bring to you in this guide.
At a very high level, the CRO process involves:
- Conducting a heuristic evaluation for the site
- Conducting qualitative research and user behavior analysis
- Conducting quantitative research
- Conducting competitive analysis
- Prioritizing problem areas on the site and creating a conversion roadmap for your website (what pages need to be fixed)
- Determine problem areas on a website
- Analyze the page using the conversion framework
- Prioritize problems on a page
- Create a testing hypothesis
- Create new designs based on the testing hypothesis
- Conducting AB testing (or multivariate testing)
- Conduct a post-test analysis.
I’ve developed our CRO process known as SHIP – which stands for Scrutinize, Hypothesize, Implement, Propagate. Here is what the process looks like:
Let’s start with basic definitions for online conversion rate and conversion rate optimization.
What is Online Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on a website, during a time period. Any valuable engagement your visitors make may count as the desired action, as long as it fulfills your webpage’s goal. Remember, every page should have a primary goal.
You can choose to measure the number of visitors who:
- purchase a product
- sign up for a newsletter
- subscribe to a software
- hire a service
- download a free e-book
- fill out a ‘contact us form
- answer a survey
- give a feedback
- take any action a page is designed to encourage.
By measuring conversion rates, you find out if your pages are persuading visitors to take the action you want them to take on the page. The higher the conversion rates, the better your design and copy are reaching out to qualified prospects.
There are many goals, thus conversions rates, that you can track on your website.
If you are an ecommerce website, your website conversion rate is the number of monthly orders your receive divided by the number of visitors that come to your website.
At the same time, each page on your website has at least two conversion rates (if not more).
Let’s take your product pages on an ecommerce website, the goal of these pages it gets visitors to click on “the add to cart” button. And of course, the final goal is to get these visitors to place an order (convert on the website).
Another important thing to note is every website has micro and macro conversion rates.
Micro conversion rate: this refers to smaller engagements that can happen on a site. A newsletter sign-up or a click on the “aad to cart” button is a good example of a micro-conversion rate on an ecommerce website.
Macro conversion rate: this is the primary goal that you want your visitors to take on your website.