What is CRO?
Conversion rate optimisation, commonly known as CRO is the process of improving leads or sales. The common misconception with conversion rate optimisation is that the answers all lie in ads, mainly because this where money is being spent on a monthly basis and how you measure your return on ad spend or ROAS. From my experience, I can tell you that optimising your ads can help, but don’t stop there. You need to step away and look at the bigger picture.
To optimise ads efficiency, you will also need to optimise your website. This will generally be through improved messaging and a tighter user experience. This can increase the number of people filling out forms or adding to their baskets.
Does page speed effect CRO?
The next step is to make sure your website is loading quickly for your users or customers. Customers who leave before the page loads will have a negative impact on your conversion rate and your search rankings. It’s a common misconception that page speed is just a box ticking exercise for SEO but it is much more than that, it’s a crucial part of the user journey. Every second the user has to wait and think might lead to them to leaving the website altogether.
Does design affect CRO?
In short, yes. If your pages are badly laid out with content in inefficient places and poorly signposted call to actions this will affect conversion rates significantly. Low-quality websites also give a negative and wary impression to the user, especially if you are expected to enter personal details or credit card information. You need to put yourself in the customer’s position and think about what is important on the page and how to convey that to the user. A really big part of this to consider is mobile. With most websites being responsive for tablet and mobile devices it is often massively overlooked. This is a big mistake because more and more people are using phones, tablets and even smartwatches to view content and you need to cater for that audience and think about their experience.
A/B split testing for CRO
Once you are happy with the ads, page speed and design, it doesn’t stop there. You need to constantly improve on what is there by leveraging things like A/B split testing. This allows you to monitor what works best and you can base your decisions going forward on that data. For this you can have a developer set up test or use tools like Google Optimise.
How can you monitor CRO?
The easiest way to monitor conversion rate optimisation is to use Google Analytics. This will allow you to visualise data easily. If you tag events throughout the process then you can expand on that further by using conversion funnels.
Heatmap tools like Hotjar can also give you live screen recordings of users on the site. Much like traditional user testing but without verbal interaction or feedback from the users.
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