CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is a discipline and methodology oriented to the continuous improvement of conversion rates, commercial and business efficiency in our campaigns through the analysis of the user experience and its points of improvement.
If the conversion rate of a website is 2%, through CRO we will try to understand what is happening in the remaining 98% in order to provide valid solutions supported by data to implement.
What are we going to convert: sales, downloads, registrations, calls, chats…
Which ratios are improved: conversion rate, average order amount, number of products, purchase frequency, cost savings by validating ideas…
Which parts are optimized: home page, landing pages, product page, payment process, blog, newsletter, APP… practically EVERYTHING.
Let’s start with these phrases that support this discipline:
The methodology assures us that we will be able to propose things in an optimal way. If it doesn’t work, it will teach us to notice it. We must assume that we are going to make a mistake. The good thing is to realize it and propose a new path to find a correct solution.
Analysis phase (CRO audit)
We analyze the content, design, offer and usability of your website to detect continuous improvements in the profitability of the business
Hypothesis and priorities:
Roadmap of experiments, priority matrix (impact/effort), copy of our contents. In addition we apply the buyer person and implement the real value proposition for our potential customers.
Test
Depending on the project and experiment we will apply different types of test: A/B, multivariate, split test or multipage.
Results:
Each experiment will give us a type of result: negative, neutral or positive. The goal is to find as many positive experiments as possible
We try to make this phase as objective as possible. We need to find “improvable” things (trying to find out why).
In this process, we can find enemies within the company, who go against us by being responsible for everything “improvable”. To avoid that, we focus on relying on data and tools that support each and every thing we try to improve or bring to light.
We can work in three areas:
Business Analysis
Convene a workshop to understand each other first (understanding the company’s business model)
The more information about the company, the more we can detect how to make money, and the sooner we will be able to detect those specific things that will generate a great impact on results. We need to know how everything works, even many times better than the people working in the company itself.
We must carry out an analysis of the client’s business to understand their digital model -> What are their objectives to achieve.
Data analysis (quantitative) What happens?
We must have a digital analysis tool correctly configured, since it will be our starting point to obtain information.
Source: cardinalpath.com
From here we will begin to understand what happens on the website, if the investment in traffic they make is profitable. At the same time, we can make segmented conversion funnels where we can detect leakage points.
What does the user do on my website?
Behavioral analysis (qualitative) Why does it happen?
After data analysis…
Tools: hotjar, crazyegg…
Heat maps (where users move, can give us information of areas of greater or lesser interest)
Click maps (where users click)
There are many techniques to improve in CRO.
A complete analysis requires a proper understanding of the business, available quantitative data and the behavior of customers or potential customers.
Everything we get out of this phase must be 100% objective.
This is the first subjective phase. Some things that can be improved have already been detected, and someone must remedy them.
Any proposal is welcome. We will then validate whether it works or not, but we should not rule out anything at the outset.
Open mind.
Roadmap of experiments
We must list everything we can think of, indicating:
At first glance in one place, we can get relatively fast 80-90 points to test.
Now let’s see how we set those priorities in the roadmap.
CRO priority matrix (impact VS effort)
The priority matrix is a tool that allows the selection of options based on the weighting and application of criteria, in our case:
From this, we extract 4 zones:
We always start with quick wins, to gain the client’s trust. At the same time, we have to put in motion major projects. As soon as we start some majors projects, we must also parallelize some fills ins, to get some quick things out.
How to measure
Of each solution proposed, we must see how to assess whether it is better or worse than what we have proposed.
Many tests can give neutral or negative results. If most of them are like this, we must know how to identify why (through KPIs) and turn the tests around to propose them again, modified taking into account all these data.
Main KPIs:
Secondary KPIs
There are many projects that know these two facts:
What happens in the middle of this very long process? They don’t know.
This is where we can start testing. Experiment. If at this point, we skip all the previous… we will agree that the probability of failure is exponential.
Types of tests
CRO Tools
CRO tools for research
Tools
Solutions
Let’s see an example of A/B testing, where we can see how much traffic has entered the experiment, how many people it has converted, and what the conversion rate is.
The conversion is always a relative data, it is not of the complete website, but simply of the area we are analyzing.
Improving the conversion is always done little by little, it is not usually a matter of very large percentages, but it is really noticed in the accumulated positive tests.
Reliability of a test: depending on the traffic you have had, the time of the experiment and how constant it is. There are experiments that never become reliable, we must decide when to stop it (neutral test). Some payment tools give us the degree of reliability, although it is always better to analyze the trend and decide for ourselves.
Graph: evolution of the original and new conversion %. As we see, the difference remains, so it is clear that it is reliable, since it remains without overlap from the first moment.
The overlap can not always be due to the fact that the change does not work, but to external factors such as the price of our competition at that particular time. We must know how to wait and give the test a chance before stopping it in a hurry.
Types of results
We must implement a clear methodology for analyzing results.
The ideal is to do CRO in projects that already have a certain volume of traffic. And from here, the worse they convert, the better to turn CRO actions into vital project needs.
If they also have little capacity to invest more in channels such as Adwords, they become a perfect project.
Today, CRO is a field full of possibilities in all types of companies. For small sites (1000 – 5000 visits per month) we can do things, but they will take many months to give us results, or we will have to take more risks to make decisions that are not 100% contrasted.
A CRO project appears after a need to improve business objectives. For an active project to improve its sales, we have 2 possibilities:
Problem: to make it easier, let’s imagine that we improve traffic with PPC traffic to 0.5 / click (something average and that will be different according to the business, in many occasions much higher).
0.5 Euro x 500,000 visits = 250,000
We spent an extra 250,000 euros to make a profit of 50,000 euros, i.e. we lost 200,000 euros of profit directly.
With this, we see clearly that it is not only useful to sell more. The profitability of the project is vital to have it always present.
How are tests usually performed on most websites?
Usual CRO test
Probability of success: 10%.
Most of the time, the tests are done based on wrong premises, testing things like
Are we sure we need to make any changes like that on our website? Maybe that’s not what’s working particularly for us. Let’s experiment… but carefully.
Tests based on real problems
Probability of success: 77%.
To detect these tests, it is essential to implement a professional methodology, which we base on 4 steps.
As a cross-cutting discipline, the CRO team is generally made up of
Therefore, we could say something like CRO = web analytics + UX and AI + user voice + market research + copywriting
We will detect deficiencies and problems that are impairing conversion on your website.
Improving the speed of your website will help create a better user experience and therefore improve your conversion.
Analyzing the qualitative and quantitative part of a website is part of any CRO consultancy.
It helps you analyze and improve the conversion rate of your website in order to improve the profitability of your business.
Conversion Rate Optimization
