Conversion Rate Optimisation (also referred to as Conversion Optimisation or simply as CRO) is the process of optimising your conversion metrics using a variety of techniques.
It’s a way to take an intelligent approach to landing page optimisation and website usability improvements, using methods like A/B testing and heatmaps based on real user session recordings.
By implementing sensible improvements, backed by data and analysis, you can reduce your bounce rate, increase your dwell time, and ultimately generate more sales via your ecommerce website.
This detailed guide will tell you all you need to know about Conversion Rate Optimisation, from initial funnel analysis and heatmaps right through to increased lead generation and raised revenues.
‘Conversion Rate’ is the percentage of visitors to your website who complete a desired action. On ecommerce websites, that might mean placing an order. But it might also include sending you their contact details or even downloading a document.
‘Conversion Rate Optimisation’ simply means improving this number. You usually will not reach a conversion rate of 100%, but through a combination of page speed optimisation, improved calls to action (CTA) optimisation, and better trust signals, you can get it as high as possible.
Businesses often focus their marketing efforts on increasing search volume and website visitors. With CRO, you don’t need more visitors, because you instead maximise your earning potential from the visitors you already have.
This is ideal if your website already receives substantial traffic, but is not achieving the revenues you hope for. Alternatively, if you are not yet receiving enough visitors via search, social media or direct traffic, CRO can work alongside other methods to build a highly engaged and profitable audience.
The basic formula to calculate conversion rate is:
Conversion rate = (Number of conversions / Total visitors) x 100
As the number of conversions increases, the ratio of conversions to total visits approaches 1, which in turn means the conversion rate tends towards 100%.
It’s worth noting that a conversion rate of over 100% is possible, if you count multiple conversions by the same visitor in your data.
Let’s look at some key elements of conversion optimisation that should be considered during any CRO campaign:
Website usability ensures good customer experience, using principles like mobile-friendly design and intuitive navigation to guide prospects towards making a conversion.
Good web design is always worth it. Your search rankings will improve, visitors will stay for longer on your site and you’ll leave them with a positive perception of your brand, all while maximising your conversion rate.
CTA optimisation makes sure that your landing pages are signalling to your visitors the different ways in which they can convert, whether that’s by making a purchase, giving you their contact details, following your socials, downloading a document, or getting in touch with you directly.
A CTA doesn’t have to be text. It can be in the form of a button, an embedded contact form or a banner image. Don’t neglect the potential of a well-designed CTA, both in terms of the wording and/or graphics used, but also its placement on the page, which should be tested thoroughly.
Landing page optimisation can be an effective route towards improving lead generation. Try different text, page lengths, eye-catching headlines and visually impressive images.
A/B testing (where you test two different versions of the page to see which works best) can reveal the most effective design and content. This should engage visitors more successfully, reducing your website’s bounce rate and persuading more prospects to convert.
Page speed optimisation serves several purposes. Google has been using page load speed as a factor in search rankings for a number of years now. Faster-loading pages also naturally reduce your bounce rate by preventing users from navigating away because a page is slow to load.
All of this makes page load speed a critical factor in CRO. Use tools like Semrush to analyse your loading speed and/or check Google’s own PageSpeed Insights report for practical suggestions on how to make your pages load faster.
Trust signals like customer reviews, testimonials and third-party certifications can all play a big part in online lead generation. Encourage positive reviews on your own website, third-party sites like Trustpilot, and on Google itself.
Social media is a good way to build trust – and you don’t need to stick to just discussing your business. Brands like KFC have established themselves as a presence on socials by sharing a variety of original content in different formats, and by interacting with customers in a light-hearted way.
Improving conversion metrics comes from understanding your website analytics data. Data-driven CRO naturally works better, because it is based on studying the very actions you are trying to alter.
There are many ways to study user behaviour. Funnel analysis is one way to detect the flow of visitors through your website and to guide them from the initial landing page through to your contact message box or order form.
Session recordings give even more detailed insight. You can combine this with heatmaps based on page clicks, or even on eye-tracking of willing participants, to see exactly which areas of each page are working well.
Google Analytics integrates a lot of user behaviour analysis into its reports, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on how your audience is interacting with your content. Website heatmaps tool Hotjar is another good option and claims to be “the next best thing to sitting beside someone browsing your site”.
A/B testing compares the performance of two different versions of the same page. In some instances, you might want to use multivariate testing instead, which changes the content or design in several ways at a time.
Multivariate testing is good for more complex design adjustments. For example, a fashion retailer might use it to decide whether to show the search box on the shopping cart page immediately before checkout, or when to reduce the size of the main mega dropdown menu.
Tracking the journey of individual users through your website is known as conversion funnel analysis. A ‘funnel’ is a defined route a user might take from arriving to your website through to conversion.
Examples can include:
You can have multiple funnels. For instance, while your primary goal might be to increase order volume and value, you should still keep secondary goals like email newsletter registrations in mind as a way to grow your customer base.
It’s often assumed that when discussing CRO, the sole aim is to increase ecommerce sales. While that can be true, it’s not always the case. Not all industries have physical goods to sell, and some generate their revenues from content alone.
Let’s look at how conversion optimisation differs depending on whether you run an ecommerce website, a service business or a content platform.
We’ve already mentioned some of the best optimisation techniques for ecommerce websites.
These can include:
You shouldn’t neglect the ‘workhorse’ pages of an ecommerce website. Unique, optimised product descriptions and even shopping cart optimisation can lead to an increase in completed purchases and higher revenues.
As we’ve already seen, conversion optimisation doesn’t have to mean turning landing page traffic into e-commerce sales. Funnel analysis can have multiple goals, especially in service-oriented industries like SaaS.
Instead of aiming for direct sales, your Lead generation for SaaS businesses could involve encouraging users to request a demo or consultation or sign up for a trial.
Content-driven websites such as blogs and reviews are a great example of when increasing page views can be the end goal in and of itself.
Page views is an important metric for content websites. It can generate more paid ad impressions and/or give you a more impressive traffic total to put in your sponsor information pack.
CTA optimisation is a useful tool here, as you deploy persuasive calls to action, backed by page content that follows Google’s EEAT principles, and ‘lead magnets’ such as whitepapers and downloadable PDFs to help you capture readers’ contact details.
There is no point in optimising your conversion rate if you don’t measure the result. Tracking your conversion metrics shows you if your efforts have been successful, as well as giving you valuable data to decide what to optimise next.
There are three key conversion metrics you should track in every CRO campaign:
You can use third-party tools like Hotjar, HubSpot and Google Analytics to track your success. Your content management system (CMS) may also have built-in tracking for some core metrics.
If you want to continue to improve your stats, you’ll need to continue to optimise your content, website usability and page load speeds.
Repeated A/B testing (and multivariate testing, on more complex websites) is key to making informed decisions about what works for your audience.
This kind of organic optimisation can yield substantial dividends over time, as the gains you make early in your CRO campaign start to stack up incrementally and exponentially.
Let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions about conversion rate optimisation.
‘Good’ conversion rates can vary depending on your industry and your goal. A small, highly engaged audience might give you a high conversion rate, but a much larger audience with a lower conversion rate could generate more revenues.
For ecommerce, a conversion rate of around 2-5% is often regarded as ‘good’. But it depends on what you want to achieve – if your existing rate is 0.5%, increasing that to just 1% would represent a 100% growth in the actual volume of conversions.
Remember too that conversion rates of over 100% are theoretically possible, if you count each individual conversion separately when the same customer completes multiple funnel goals.
CRO is an organic growth method. You need time to conduct detailed, logical A/B testing, accumulate sufficient data to carry out rigorous analysis, and then to build on those conclusions as you iterate the process many times over.
All of this is a good thing. Incremental gains will start to add up over the lifetime of your CRO campaign, and will persist for some time once you stop optimising or put your focus on other aspects of your website and content.
Simple changes can be made faster (e.g. A/B testing can be carried out more quickly than complex multivariate testing) but sometimes you need that complexity – and the time it takes to collect data – to identify the little tweaks and finishing touches that might otherwise be missed.
All commercial websites can benefit from CRO, regardless of the types of conversion you hope to generate.
As we’ve seen in this guide, there are several main kinds of websites, including:
Your website might fall into more than one of these categories, for example you might have an ecommerce site that sells physical hardware AND SaaS services AND downloadable whitepapers.
CRO is the universal tool to improve your conversion rates across all of those different areas. If you can define it as a goal for the purposes of funnel analysis, then you can raise your completion rate via CRO.
Third-party tools can generate tracking data for your CRO campaigns, making it easier to test the effectiveness of different versions of your content, and to see exactly what your conversion rate actually is.
Some of the leading tools for CRO optimisation are:
Until late 2023, Google Optimize (also known as Google Website Optimizer) was a relatively simple tool for small business webmasters to carry out basic A/B testing and even some multivariate analysis.
Google Optimize has since been bundled into Google Marketing Platform, an integrated platform that brings together other Google products like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, for even better visibility of your visitor data and your performance on Google SERPs.
If you use Google Analytics, it’s definitely worth exploring Google Search Console and tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, as using them together can give you a much more detailed understanding about your website design, your content, and what needs to be improved.
Hotjar is a website heatmap tracking tool that can work alongside platforms like Google Analytics to yield more detailed data. Described as ‘behaviour analytics software’, there are free and paid premium versions to help you see how visitors interact with your pages.
The greater granularity of Hotjar’s data means that you not only track your bounce rate, but can see exactly what page elements are being ignored (or are not working at all) so you can focus on optimising those parts of the page – and you can use that data alongside Analytics to correlate your conclusions and make more confident decisions about how to proceed
It’s good to ‘double up’ on your analytics data in this way, because getting the same trend on two distinct third-party platforms is a sure sign that it’s a genuine result and not just a coincidence.
Optimizely makes it easier to conduct A/B and multivariate testing, toggle new design features on and off with a single click, and offer personalised versions of your website to visitors (e.g. a ‘welcome back’ message to returning customers).
It was founded in 2010 by Google alumni Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, so again, it has some convincing credentials if you like to tie your CRO campaigns to the search engine with the biggest market share.
Optimizely has a choice of pricing plans for each feature set – basically a small business or large enterprise option – so although there’s no free version, you should find there’s a plan to suit the size of your organisation
Digital Marketing, Our News
16th October, 2024
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