Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO for short) is a process of making changes to a web page with the aim of increasing the number of conversions you get from that page. Let’s break it up.
Conversion
A conversion can be any measurable action that you want website visitors to make. Including:
- buy something,
- make a call,
- fill in an enquiry form,
- download a file or program,
- click through to a certain page on a site,
- visit more than a certain number of pages on the site, or
- spend more than a certain amount of time on the site.
Most types of conversion you can measure using your analytics program like Google Analytics. Apart from making a call which you can measure using call tracking and by displaying different phone numbers on different pages.
Rate
Conversion rate is usually measured as a percentage. If you have 100 visitors and 10 take the desired action then your conversion rate is 10%. The more accurately you want to know what your conversion rate is the more visitors and conversions you will need. Especially if your conversion rate is low e.g. 0.5%. People often make the mistake of seeing maybe 100 visitors and 1 conversion and assuming their conversion rate is 1%. It is like rolling a dice once and saying “this dice always lands on 6”. You can use formula based on the normal distribution curve that will tell you how accurate your conversion rate is. For example to be 95% certain that your conversion rate is around 3% you would probably need 500 visitors and 15 conversions.
Optimisation
Improving your conversion rate requires testing different changes to your website and then seeing what effect they have on your conversion rate. It can include changing the colours, font, layout and actual content of your page. Different pages may be more effective for different sources of traffic e.g. someone who searched for your product on Google may convert better on 1 page than someone who clicked on a facebook ad and vice versa for another page.
How Do You Go About Conversion Rate Optimisation?
There are standard practices you can implement that will almost always improve your conversion rate. Once you have implemented these and measured what effect they have had you can move on to testing different changes to see if they improve your conversion rate.
Stand Practice
Standard practices include removing anything that isn’t relevant including if possible links to other services that aren’t relevant to what the person is searching for. Having contact details and important “calls to action” in a contrasting colour such as red is another popular practice.
Removing any wording that doesn’t help encourage the visitor to take the desired actual also helps. Adding a compelling offer and clear call to action increases conversion rate too.
Testing
You can test different offers to see which convert best such as different discounts, money back guarantees, free reports or free initial consultations.
You can reword all the copy or try making it more relevant to the visitor, their location, their traffic source, what keywords they used or more relevant to how they found the page e.g. “Discount For Email Subscribers” on a page that you email a link to.
Different colours and layouts can be tested. You can test using a video, especially for new products or services that require a lot of explaining before a person is ready to make a purchasing decision.
You can test using different formats for testimonials such as including the full name of the person who left the testimony or format them so they look like they were left via LinkedIn or Facebook. You can also use different combinations of testimonies to see if that makes a difference.
You can test different layouts for different devices i.e. desktop, tablet and mobile. Typically you would show less content on the mobile version of the site if possible and make the page narrow so the visitor is less likely to have to scroll sideways.
You can test different prices to see what difference that makes and different versions or packages of your product if that is possible.
As you can see there are many areas you can test and different ways types of conversions you can measure. Making CRO a vast and interesting subject.
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