Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Increase the percentage of prospects who becomes customers, sales leads, subscribers, and more.
When website visitors performs a task you want them to, it’s a conversion. Do you want them to buy something? Subscribe to your emails? Request a quote? Whatever you want people to do on your site, when they do it – it’s a conversion.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is all about increasing conversions.
CRO is vital to the profitability of your business. It helps you get the highest value from of the traffic you’re getting. If your website get lots of traffic, but has poor conversion rates, the traffic is useless. By increasing conversions, your traffic value goes up. So does the return on your investment from all your marketing channels.
Conversion Optimization Is Science
Conversion rate optimization is a science. It involves testing website elements like text and images to measure their impact on conversions.
A/B Testing Button Text Example
Imagine you have a contact form on a Dog Grooming website. You want to increase the number of visitors who fill out and submit an inquiry form. The button on the form says ‘SUBMIT’. But being the scientific type, you wonder if changing that text would increase conversions.
So you create an A/B test. You serve the original ‘SUBMIT’ button to 50% of your visitors, and an alternate button that says ‘BOOK’ to the other 50%. Eventually, the test will prove people engage more with one of the two buttons. Once you know which is better, you can end the test, discard the loser, and promote the winner. You’ve just optimized a contact form for conversions!
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who take action and complete a task you want them to do on your site. Let’s say the main goal of your website is to generate sales leads via a contact form. If you have 100 visitors, and 14 fill out the form, your conversion rate is 14%.
Call To Action (CTA)
The primary user interface element (button, link) that asks a site guest to perform an action leading to a conversion. “Buy Now” buttons in a store and “Subscribe” button on a newsletter signup form are examples of different Calls to Action.
A/B Testing (Split Testing)
In A/B testing I compare the effectiveness of two versions of a web page, or a single web page element. For example, in an online store I would compare a CTA that says “Add To Cart” to one saying “Buy Now”. The A/B test compares one thing at a time until a clear winner is identified.
MultiVariate Testing
Multivariate testing compares how combining different page elements influences conversions. Such as different combinations of sales copy and images on a sales page. The variation that achieves a higher number of conversions gets used on the site.
Landing Page
A landing page is a web page designed to accomplish a single marketing goal. For example, a signup form for a newsletter. Landing pages can increase the number of sign-ups, sales, leads, or other goals you have for your site.
Heat Map / Click Map
I use many tools for conversion optimization. Heat maps are one of them. A heat map is a visual map that shows where and how people hover, scroll, and click on a web page. I not only use this data to discover new opportunities for conversion optimization.
