What the Heck is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) involves making changes to your website in order to better accomplish its intended purpose.
- If your site relies on ad revenue, CRO helps you maximize pageviews in order to increase impressions
- If your site is selling a widget, CRO helps you make more sales
- If you want people to download a trial version of your software, CRO increase the number of downloads
CRO should not be confused with search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM). These efforts are intended to generate more traffic to a website. CRO does not generate more traffic, it does more with existing traffic. Before conversion rate optimization, an e-commerce site might average one sale for every 100 visitors. After optimization, this same site might get two sales for every hundred visits. Often times, this type of optimization is more cost effective than trying to double traffic to accomplish the same result.
How Does it Work?
It starts with defining goals. You'd be surprised how many website owners have trouble explaining why their website exists. Clearly defining conversion goals lays the foundation for all further efforts. Properly tracking visitor habits is the next step in optimizing a site for conversions. We've shown you how to set up tracking using Google Analytics in a previous article. From there, we generate a custom report called "Quality of Sources". This identifies what sources of traffic are most likely to result in conversions. This is where we can start to evaluate the effectiveness of SEO, SEM, and advertising campaigns. The next step involves reviewing the website to make sure it delivers on promise it used to attract traffic. For example, if a banner ad might be better directed to a specific landing page, rather than the homepage. Perhaps the campaign should have its own landing page. Maybe the ad needs to be re-written. The process repeats itself until the site can no longer be optimized.
Is it Necessary?
CRO is not necessary for a website that has no conversion goals or conversion goals that aren't trackable. For example, a site with a goal to make people laugh might not benefit for CRO. For everyone else, the answer is a resounding yes! CRO gets straight to the bottom line and improves the goals that really matter.
Where Do I Start?
Fill out the form on this page and in the description mention you want a free 20 min CRO consultation.