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What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and How To Do It Right?

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and How To Do It Right?
What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and How To Do It Right?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a digital marketing strategy for businesses to achieve higher profitability and user engagement from their online presence. This article will explore CRO, why and when businesses need it, the processes involved, and how to measure its success.

What is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a strategic process aimed at increasing the percentage of website visitors who take specific, desired actions. These actions are called “conversions” because the business wants the site visitors to perform them. These actions could vary widely, from purchasing a product to signing up for a newsletter, filling out forms, or downloading resources. The purpose of CRO is to ensure that more users are performing the desired actions than they are doing now.

At its heart, CRO focuses on understanding how users interact with your website and optimizing their experience to enhance this conversion rate. The conversion rate is calculated using the simple formula:

Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions Over a Period / Total Site Visitors Over the Same Period) × 100

For example, if 500 visitors enter your website within a specific week and 25 make a purchase, your weekly conversion rate stands at 5% ((25/100) x 100). The objective of CRO lies in its primary aim: to enhance this percentage and ultimately maximize the value of your existing traffic.

Why Do You Need CRO?

Every business with an online presence can benefit from CRO, but the timing and need for CRO vary depending on their goals and challenges. Here are some reasons you may need to consider CRO for your business.

  • Increased ROI: CRO ensures businesses extract the maximum value from their existing traffic by converting more visitors into customers. It reduces dependency on costly acquisition campaigns like paid ads.
  • Improved User Experience: CRO focuses on identifying user pain points and optimizing the journey to address those. Happier users are more likely to return and recommend the site.
  • Competitive Edge: A streamlined, conversion-focused website outperforms competitors, especially in crowded markets.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: CRO relies on analytics and user feedback to ensure optimization efforts are based on facts rather than guesswork.
  • Global Reach: For businesses with international aspirations, CRO ensures that cultural and behavioral nuances are considered, helping to maximize conversions in diverse markets.

When Do You Need CRO?

Businesses should consider CRO at critical milestones of their digital journey or when facing challenges with their existing online presence. For example, a comprehensive CRO may be needed when:

  • A website is experiencing technical issues such as high page load times, unexpected errors during form submissions or purchases, suboptimal navigation, a large number of broken links, and browser incompatibility issues.
  • A website is failing to convert users even though it functions perfectly and attracts traffic. This could be due to a user registration process requiring too many steps, a purchaser being prompted to buy extra products during shopping cart checkouts, etc. CRO can identify these issues and implement solutions.
  • A website has been redesigned with new structures, elements, and tools. CRO provides the opportunity to test and optimize new elements and ensure they perform better than the old ones.
  • Launching campaigns for a new product or service. For example, before investing heavily in paid ads, a CRO exercise can examine and optimize the effectiveness of a landing page or entire new site areas related to that product or service.
  • A business is experiencing flatlined, plateaued user acquisition on its website. This could be due to old, outdated content, a lack of call-to-actions, and many other factors. The CRO can unlock additional user acquisition opportunities by identifying content that’s no longer useful or difficult to navigate.

What Types of CROs are there?

CRO exercises can involve different parts of the user’s digital journey to conversion. Depending on the focus, there can be four types of CRO:

  • Technical CRO fixes technical issues, such as slow load times, broken links, or compatibility problems, that may hinder conversions.
  • On-site CRO improves website elements like navigation, forms, product pages, and checkout processes.
  • Off-site CRO optimizes external touchpoints, such as email campaigns, social media ads, and landing pages, to drive qualified traffic.
  • A behavioral CRO leverages user psychology and behavior pattern research to influence conversion. For example, adding urgency with “Limited Time Offer” banners or providing 10% off on the first purchase for mailing list subscriptions.

How to Implement CRO?

CRO is a multidisciplinary process that combines analytics, design, psychology, and user experience (UX). On a high level, its workflow involves the following:

Setting Goals

At the start of the CRO project, the team should identify one, or at most, two SMART goals. Without such guardrails, a project can easily exceed time and budget and reduce management’s trust in the initiative. Some examples of CRO SMART goals can be: 

  • Increase newsletter signups by 20% within three months.
  • Reduce cart abandonment by 15% over six weeks.
  • Improve mobile conversions by 10% in two months.

Funnel Analysis

Once the goal is set, the next step is to map the customer journey path to that conversion and identify current or potential drop-off points. 

Taking the cart abandonment example above, where the team wants to reduce the cart abandonment rate by 15% over six weeks, it may identify that a typical purchaser journey involves the following:

Initial site visit > Product catalog browsing > Shopping cart review > User registration > Checkout. 

The funnel analysis may premise that displaying a newsletter sign-up form on product pages within two seconds of entry is causing a high bounce rate. Similarly, not showing the included tax on the checkout page could cause users to abandon their carts because their expected total price and the displayed price differ. 

User Behavior Analysis

With a broad understanding of where conversion may be getting affected, it’s time to know precisely how and where it gets lost. Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg can reveal how users interact with a website and identify bottlenecks and opportunities. Visual representations of user activity in heatmaps, like clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements, can help understand what’s capturing attention and what’s not. In our example case, it may be revealed that users spend more time on the checkout page near the total cost section and then abandon their carts.

On- and Off-site Optimization

At this stage, the actual optimization phase will begin. Depending on the results of all the previous analyses, this phase can involve a few or many steps to make the conversion effective. Here are some examples:

  • Creating short, relevant, and clear content for each funnel page.
  • Displaying personalized, tailored content for different audience segments.
  • Highlight benefits, features, and comparisons on product pages.
  • Include high-rated customer reviews, testimonials, and security badges to build trust.
  • Making menus more intuitive and simple for easy navigation.
  • Reducing scroll and load times of critical pages by removing unnecessary images and videos.
  • Improving mobile device user experience through fewer screens, buttons, and scrolls.
  • Reducing the number of fields in forms.
  • Adopting persuasive call to action (CTA) through contrasting colors and actionable text and placing those at multiple points of the funnel.
  • Optimizing the overall site structure by removing old content and merging and splitting sections of the site.
  • Changing the placement of headings and banners using dynamic, personalised page titles, adding SEO-friendly meta descriptions and keywords, and removing bad backlinks.
  • Optimizing landing pages to ensure key takeaways are “above the fold”.
  • Sending abandon cart emails that encourage users to complete transactions,or requesting them to fill in short surveys.
  • Running organic social media campaigns to point to the top of the funnel.

In general, companies can expect some quick wins through the following best practices:

  • Understanding audience behavior through data.
  • Focussing on user experience (UX).
  • Prioritizing mobile optimization.
  • Using compelling CTAs.
  • Simplifying forms and checkout processes.
  • Leveraging social proof.
  • Increasing site speed.
  • A/B testing regularly.

Testing CRO Changes

This involves checking how the site is doing against defined parameters and, if necessary, doing further optimizations. Some of the metrics to test against can be:

  • Conversion Rate: This is the primary metric. It tracks the changes in the percentage of visitors completing the desired action (“conversion”). The team must first define what will be considered a “conversion” to test conversion. The conversion rate should be checked at the beginning of the exercise and then at the end to compare the results. 
  • Bounce Rate: A declining bounce rate often indicates improved engagement and relevance of content.
  • Average Session Duration: Increasing time spent on-site or on specific pages suggests users find the content more engaging.
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR): A higher CTR indicates success in capturing attention and prompting actions from CTAs, email links, or ads.
  • Revenue Per Visitor (RPV): This metric evaluates how much revenue each visitor generates, tying CRO directly to profitability.

Other metrics can also exist, such as those associated with landing pages, multi-channel funnels, or e-commerce.

Another essential thing to consider is A/B testing. This involves testing two versions of a page or element to see which version is attracting more visitors or helping more conversions. Automated A/B testing tools can present different versions of the page or element to two distinct groups of users. For instance, does a red “Buy Now” button convert more than a green one? Does a short product description at the top of the funnel page result in more users adding that product to the cart? Based on the result, the team can decide which version to keep.

Tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics can help measure such metrics.

Final Words

Investing in Conversion Rate Optimization is not just a smart move; it’s essential for businesses striving for continuing success in the digital realm. As you implement various strategies and types of CRO, remember that it’s not a one-time task but an ongoing process of refinement and improvement. You also need to know how to measure success. By understanding user behavior, addressing pain points, and continually refining the online experience, organizations can significantly improve visitors to customers. 

Here at ProDataSkills, we not only build customers new websites but also help them unlock the hidden potential of their existing web presence through conversion rate optimization (CRO). Contact us to learn more about our CRO services.

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How To Turn Complex Technical Subjects Into Winning Content

Photo by Fabian Irsara on Unsplash

What’s the difference between awesome and average website content? For most IT and technology businesses (in fact, for any business), it’s how it’s written. 

No-brainer, right? You must consider your audience, provide all the relevant information in a logical story-telling structure, use a friendly tone and active voice, optimize for SEO, keep the length optimal, etc., etc…

You are absolutely spot on. But here’s the ultimate secret recipe if you are writing on IT or tech topics. Use PLAIN ENGLISH.

So, what’s plain English? Plain English is just that: plain. You don’t use any jargons. You don’t fluff around with complicated words and long-winded sentences. You go straight to the point with as little text as feasible. At the same time, you don’t make it so terse or watered down that it doesn’t make sense. It’s communication at its finest if you ask us.

Want some examples? Here’s one sentence:

“Without centralized source control of infrastructure configuration tracking, it’s difficult to adhere to security & compliance requirements.”

How about we write it like this:

“You can’t guarantee security compliance without source-controlling your infrastructure configuration code.“

6 words less. That’s because source control is a centralized system for keeping your code in one place.

Another example:

“In a production environment, running each component of the stack by itself is recommended to ensure that you have replicas and a HA setup on essential elements like the backend and processors.“

33 words, one long sentence. Let’s edit this:

“We recommend running each stack component separately in production environments. This lets you create replicas of critical components like the backend and the processor for high availability.“

2 sentences, six words less. You get the picture.

So, forget those big words people need to look up in the dictionary. Get rid of those long sentences that baffle your readers. Break down those paragraphs that seem to go on and on forever. This is what we mean by plain English: it’s direct, conversational language. Use it to explain your concepts, how-tos, and call-to-actions.

Why is Tech-writing in Plain English So Important?

The short answer is that people understand clear messages. Remember that everyone receives communication differently. What might be crystal clear for one person can make absolutely no sense for another. For tech writing, that’s even truer. I could be a database specialist and never heard of Kubernetes. If your article is about running database instances on Kubernetes clusters, you need to remember that your readers—database engineers and DBAs—may not be familiar with the technology. So it’s best you provide some intro or at least a link to a page the reader can go to have an intro on Kubernetes.

By using plain English, you will save your reader time. And time is money. Ask yourself, what do you want from your tech blogs? The widest possible reach and readers coming back for more, no? And that’s what talking in simple terms gives you.

Top Tips for Tech Writing in Plain English

So, here are our tips for you:

Ensure your message follows a logical path. Write an article outline first, and think about how you will present your story. Every content has three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Decide what you will talk about in each section. Here at ProDataSkills, we spend countless hours creating content outlines and honing them. In fact, this is one of the reasons our content is so successful. As authors create the outline for a story, they know exactly what they will write about, and our clients know what the story will look like. It helps authors do the initial research and know more about the topic.

Remember who your audience is. Do they respond to formal tones or slightly relaxed lingo? You could be writing a blog for a techie, and your language could be relaxed. But then, the whitepaper you are writing could be meant for C-level people, and you want a more neutral (note how I didn’t say “formal”) tone there. The trick is to strike a balance between the two. You can’t be mixing “users don’t” and “users do not” in the same article. You can’t have a mixture of neutral and casual tones together.

Talk to the reader using easy conversational-style sentences. This goes whether you are using a neutral or a casual tone. One of the best ways to do this is to stick with an active voice and then shorten that active voice even further.

For example, rather than saying,

“For observability to work, it’s required to send application logs, metrics, and traces to a monitoring tool.”

You can start with,

“You must send application logs, metrics, and traces to a monitoring tool for observability.”

And then further shorten it to,

“A good monitoring tool will use application logs, metrics, and traces for observability.”

When introducing or explaining a concept, start with the “WHY”. Why do you need this? What problem does it solve? Why are modern enterprises adopting this trend? And then use real-life examples. Nothing beats it. For example,

“Unlike its previous versions, so-and-so technology works like this-and-that now. Most businesses are adopting the new method because it helps churn out more effective software code without manual testing. In the traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), companies spent a lot of time and resources manually testing application code. Thanks to this new version of the technology, they can allocate those resources to further enhance the application.”

Once you have introduced or mentioned something, don’t go and explain it again down the article. Stop using “as we mentioned before” or “as you saw before”. Your readers are intelligent people, you don’t need to remind them.

Don’t use jargon – you’ll alienate readers if you’re too heavy-handed with complicated industry terms or even less-used English words (e.g., “our conjecture is…”). Similarly, avoid using unnecessary superlatives (e.g., “tremendous effect”, “fantastic solution”).

Final Words

A few years ago, even an AI robot took instructions in plain English to learn how to play a video game. It shows that humans and robots respond more positively to simple communication.

We’re proud to say we’ve built our business using this concept. We turn complex technical subjects into winning content and do this by using simplicity. Here at Professional Data Skills, every piece of content we create goes through extensive quality checks, reviews, and edits to ensure the message is succinct. Our clients love us for the quality we provide. You can check a few samples of our work here.

Get in touch with us to let us help you with your technical content needs or to learn more about winning formulas.

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