A Quick Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

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Conversions, Sales, or Leads are some of the primary objectives for any marketing or SEO campaign. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of using analytics and user feedback to improve the overall user experience from the start to finish of any transaction or goal completion.

In this post, we will discuss the 5-step process for conversion rate optimization.

Step 1 – Data Collection

In this step, we will gather data about the company, the website, and most importantly, its customers.

Company:

  • Why does the company exist? Know about the company’s culture, objectives, and processes.
  • What are the goals of the company? What are the main conversion goals and micro-conversions (those that contribute to bigger goals)?
  • What are unique selling propositions (USPs) of the company? What makes the company different in comparison to competitors who are selling similar products or services?
  • What are common objections? It is time to talk to people in the organization (outside of the marketing team) such as the custom support team, and ask them about common issues that customers usually complain about.

Website:

  • What is the sales process? Review the sales funnel and each step to complete a particular transaction. List out common drop-off points (where customers exit) in the sales funnel.
  • What is current traffic breakdown? Include the amount of traffic, the source of traffic, what are some common demographics, and what technology (desktop/tablets/phones) the current visitors are using.

Customers:

  • What are the biggest objections that customers have? List the issues stopping customers from buying. Include customer surveys to get feedback.

Step 2 – List Hypotheses

Based on the information collected in Step 1, now we need to decide what and how we want to test. The best way is to start with common customer objections and analyze issues causing customers to step back from buying, or completing a transaction. Some other common hypotheses can be found through:

  • Customers feedback on your helpdesk
  • What are the different types of people who visit your site (demographics, interests report from Google Analytics)
  • List the top performing and worst performing pages on your website and try to compare both sets.

Step 3 – Test Your Hypotheses

After listing out all the hypotheses, now it’s time to test whatever we have assumed. In this step we will perform an A/B testing to see the outcome of different designs or other changes on the website. Based on the different results, we will select the best performing designs for the different sections of the website.

Step 4 – Implement Design

Once we have our top performing test designs or changes, we will start implementing these changes on the live site and monitor the outcome from these changes for a longer period of time.

Step 5 – Review

In this step, we will review the performance for all the hypotheses and changes implemented on the website. Some key goals for this step are:

  • Know whether a hypothesis was correct or not
  • If it was correct, roll out widely
  • If it wasn’t correct, what did we learn?
  • On to the next test

This should assist you with improving your website conversion rate. If you need more guidance in optimizing your CRO please feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to provide an analysis of your website.