What is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation)?

When it comes to anyone involved in writing, creating, analytical reporting, marketing, publishing you will probably find you’re absolutely overloaded with things you MUST do to have the best strategy. Marketing has chopped and changed a lot of the years and we’ve found that simply driving traffic to the website is not enough. CRO is the bridge between drawing in traffic and turning them into customers.

What is CRO? 

Simply put, Conversion Rate Optimisation, is the task of finding what may be impacting the amount of people converting on your website, which can vary depending on the goals of your business and then putting steps in place to increase the rate (percentage), of visitors who convert (become leads/customers). 

To implement this you first need to understand what your current conversion rate is, to work this out we use this equation: 

Leads generated ÷ website traffic X100 =% Conversion rate.
(example – Leads: 5 ÷ Website traffic: 100 X100 = 5% Conversion Rate)

The average landing page conversion rate is 2.65%, with a high conversion rate generally sitting at 5.3% and the top conversion rates somewhere between 9-11%. Although this isn’t to say above 12% isn’t achievable for websites with high traffic, but for your average website achieving between 3-5% is the goal. 

CRO is not SEO

CRO commonly gets confused with SEO. (Too many acronyms, right?) 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – Optimising your website for search engines (Google, Bing etc.) to help you rank higher in the search results and ultimately gaining more website traffic. 

CRO (conversion rate optimisation) –  Optimising your website to increase the amount of visitors, that convert (whatever that looks like for your business). 

Both of these are massively important for your marketing strategy, as optimising your website to the nines for conversions, is wasted energy if you aren’t driving the traffic. Even if you did achieve a 5% conversion rate, that means a lot less when only 5 people are seeing your website. SEO is a fundamental part of marketing to ensure your website is seen and drawing in organic traffic. 

Why it’s important 

So, your SEO is on top form, you’re drawing in tons of traffic with your ad campaign, but you aren’t getting any leads? That’s when you need CRO. Understanding the intentions and behaviour of your visitors and optimising the journey on your website to encourage them to go ahead with your desired actions. 

This can vary business to business, generally, we will look at conversions as being a form fill, or purchase, a phone call or a resource download etc. So, if you are driving thousands to your website, but only get 1 form fill every month, implementing a CRO strategy will look at what may be causing this behaviour and help you fix it = more leads and more sales.

It’s not always necessary 

This is going to seem contradictory straight off the bat, but the reason it is not always necessary is that not every page needs to convert. There is no point spending hours upon hours only optimising your account page or blog page, if you’ve never seen a conversion from there. Sometimes, a page is just that. By looking at your key conversion areas, you can optimise these specifically to improve upon the already successfully converting pages. 

CRO (and a little bit of UX) best practices

1. Be data driven
   These days there is literally no excuse to make a decision without the data to back it up. This applies to everything but specifically CRO. Using core tools such as Analytics and heat map software will give you accurate information about how and what visitors are doing on your website and therefore how to improve it. 
   
2. Be the customer
   A common problem that many companies face is trying to separate themselves from the website decisions. (e.g. “I don’t care, I want this page”). It’s paramount to the success of your website, that you take yourself completely out the picture and become the person on your website (I say person, because you aren’t trying to please everyone, keep one specific person, your ideal customer, in mind, it’s them that you want to convert). Remember you already know your business/service/website/offer, but a new visitor will not. Is it clear? Look again. 
   
3. Be strategic
   Despite your best efforts, if you decide to revamp your CRO strategy and go all guns blazing, changing everything you may 1) see results but not be able to identify what actually caused the positive change 2) may negatively impact your results. Be strategic in everything you do, pinpoint key areas for improvement and work on them one by one and monitor the results of each change. 

Not got time to refresh your marketing strategy? Our in-house team of SEO, PPC, CRO & UX and content specialists can help revamp your current strategy and turn those bouncing website visitors into quality leads.