CRO is the process of optimising your site or landing page towards conversions. Find out more about how to identify if your site needs the CRO treatment.
If you've never heard of CRO, now is your chance to find out what it can do for your website. CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation and, simply put, it’s the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
Usually, conversions such as these will lead to sales and added revenue, so it's essential to identify ways to improve the process. Sometimes, users might be struggling to checkout and this could be down to website bugs or something deeper. The process of CRO is to understand the problem by looking at the data and to come up with solutions to fix this, improve, and making converting easier for users.
CRO is a user-focused web development format. While your goal may be to achieve more conversions, CRO itself is all about your users, their experience, and how it can be improved. The better your users' experience, the more likely it is that you’ll get better results.
Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors, then multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.
This calculation is super valuable! Websites operate in 1% - 4% range, however this can differ from site to site and can be higher or lower. Here at ClickThrough, our clients often have different ranges and we help them to achieve better conversion rates according to their own benchmarks. We use our own best practices, and look at their data, to let that dictate what might need to change to achieve better results.
But, as we can see most companies aren’t happy with their conversion rate! Companies are usually looking at ways to try and combat their low conversion rates, but may not be aware of CRO as a service. As well as being a valuable stand-alone investment, a great thing about CRO is how complementary it is for other services such as SEO, DPM and Amazon marketing, and how it can make any of these go further. ClickThrough offers a range of services that make sites perform better, and CRO is just one of them!
There are a few different things that can be done as part of a CRO retainer to improve conversion rate on a site. A CRO project usually won't focus on an entire site at once, and will instead focus on key areas that could be driving more conversions.
1. Homepage
Homepages are prime candidates for CRO. In addition to making a first impression on visitors, the homepage is also an opportunity to retain those visitors and guide them further into your website. The homepage is the main page of any website, so it’s always recommended to make sure you stand out from others! CRO can certainly help decide what works and what maybe wouldn’t work as a first impression.
2. Pricing Page
A website's pricing page can be the make-or-break point for many website visitors. CRO can help a pricing page convert visitors into customers by modifying the pricing intervals (e.g. price-per-year vs. price-per-month), describing the product features associated with each price, and including a phone number for visitors to call for a price quote. These changes are simple, but can yield massive rewards.
3. Blogs
You may not realise this, but a blog is a massive conversion opportunity for a website. In addition to publishing thoughtful and helpful content about your industry, a blog can use CRO to convert readers into leads. This process often includes adding calls-to-action (CTA) throughout an article which users may use to click for different actions. While our SEO experts can run SEO audits on blogs in order to increase organic traffic, we're able to work alongside them to ensure these visitors convert once they've reached your site.
4. Landing Pages
Landing pages are inherently designed for people to take an action. An event landing page, for example, can be optimized with a video of last year's event to encourage visitors to register this year. And if a landing page is being used to share a free resource with visitors, it can be optimized with preview content from that resource to encourage visitors to download it. These are really useful, and we develop these for our current clients!
Landing pages are also an integral part of paid media campaigns. If you're running PPC, Display or Paid Social advertising, achieving a high CTR and low conversion rate, CRO could be the answer in achieving a return on your investment.
We know that CRO works because we've seen clients' conversions soar as a result of CRO techniques. Mattress company Otty gained a 350% return on their investment in CRO, recouped within just 5 weeks of the changes going live.
As part of CRO, we also use rigorous testing to safely predict outcomes of our projects. Periodical A/B testing is used throughout the CRO process, to ensure we're always choosing the option that will drive real-life conversions.
So, if you are looking to try and understand CRO more or want to get started then of course we are here to help along with many other companies. I hope this small blog gave you a little taster on what CRO actually is!
If you'd like to hear more, you can get in touch with me and the CRO team to discuss how CRO will benefit your business.