Marketers focus heavily on driving traffic towards websites with SEO efforts and social media, but what happens once visitors start landing on your website? How does this traffic convert to leads, and what can you do as a marketer to improve conversions?
Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you understand what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is, and how it can help your company.
Conversion refers to completing a site goal. Site goals are website actions that align with the overall webpage objective. Different businesses set different kinds of site goals. Website conversions or site goals fall into two categories:
Website conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a site goal successfully.
In this equation, conversions can be anything. You ought to know precisely what you’re working towards, and what constitutes a micro- or macro-conversion. The exact way to calculate your conversion rate may vary from business to business, and page to page.
Let’s take the example of an e-commerce website. Your micro-conversions here might be the visitor staying on the page, clicking on the products, browsing through your catalog, and adding products to their wish list or shopping cart. These tiny conversions guide your visitor towards a macro-conversion—making a purchase (the final transaction). Out of 20,000 visitors, perhaps 2000 purchased something. Following the above formula, your conversion rate would be 20%.
Unfortunately, that’s not enough information. Defining a purchase as a conversion in this example doesn’t account for revenue, since it treats visitors who bought something for $1 or $100 the same way. To fully understand what’s happening on your site, you need to put other metrics in place and gather a lot of data.
The success of your CRO program depends on how detailed you get with your data collection and analysis.
Understanding the existing data is crucial for improving your conversion rate. This will enable you to make an objective decision on what to optimize, and the best ways to do it. If you're not using data to guide you through the process, you’re only validating whims and biases.
Here are some different methods used for conversion optimization:
This method uses an objective approach to measure actionable user behavior on your website. To get started with quantitative conversion optimization, begin collecting data using web analytics tools. With this method, you can find out information like:
Which are the most and least visited pages on your website?
What's the entrance path of visitors to your website?
How much time do visitors spend on specific pages?
What's the bounce rate of the site and particular pages?
How many visitors convert?
What's the visitor profile (demographics and interests)?
What devices and browsers do they use?
Which pages do they exit from?
What channels brought them to the site
This information will let you identify your most valuable users and help prioritize pages that need optimization.
This method is a subjective approach to understanding user experience, pain points, and hesitations. Start by identifying your ideal customer and keeping their needs in mind, as you frame questions to collect more data.
You can get started with qualitative CRO using customer surveys, interviews, user testing, net promoter score (NPS), customer support tickets, session replays, chat logs, polls, and feedback. Using this form of analysis, you can find answers to questions such as:
What are the most common reasons customers visit your website?
What are the pain points they're trying to address using your products or services?
What do they think about your products or services compared to competitors? Is there anything specific (features, pricing, support, etc.) that they look for?
What was their experience like after they bought your products or services?
Would they recommend you to a friend? If yes, how would they describe your product?
While quantitative data provides you information about what's working and what's not on your website, the picture is still incomplete. This is where qualitative analysis fits in. It helps you understand why users are not converting to your website, and how they perceive your brand.
CRO is all about following a process. Certain practices can take you off track in the conversion process, such as:
Ignoring data and executing based on your assumptions, guesses, and gut feelings
Doing something because your competition has done it
Taking others' opinions and biases into account
CRO is data-driven and research-oriented. You shouldn't leave room for guesswork and uninformed decisions.
Marketers report an average return on investment of 223% on CRO tools. This shows that an effective conversion rate strategy can set you up for big wins, not only for your website but also for the entire marketing funnel. Here are some of the benefits:
Improving your website’s conversion rate starts with researching current visitor behavior, identifying what visitors are looking for, and evaluating how well your website matches up. When you fix the issues they face, your visitors will find your site easier to navigate. Their engagement will improve, and so will their chances of converting. So, ideally what you are improving with CRO is the visitor's experience, as well as the conversion rate.
The CRO process is like ongoing customer research. You will learn about your customers’ behavior and the messaging that appeals to them. This information can help you understand the ideal customer persona for your business, and ensure you acquire the right kind of customers.
CRO enables you to make the most of your website traffic. Higher conversion rates mean that you will gain more leads, subscribers, or customers from the same number of visitors.
Conversion rate optimization is about evaluating every part of your site. To improve your conversion rates, you’ll need to look at the way visitors interact with various elements of your web pages. You may want to gather data on these elements using A/B testing (more on that below). Here are some key factors to consider:
A good place to start with CRO is by looking at your copy. If your copy is confusing, lackluster, or not persuasive enough, this may negatively impact your conversion rates. Ask yourself these questions when evaluating your website copy:
Is the copy well-written and error-free?
Does it follow copywriting best practices?
Some popular copywriting formulas are problem-agitate-solution (PAS) and attention-interest-desire-action (AIDA), among others.
Consider trying out these formulas during your A/B tests.
Is it clear and understandable?
Some marketers recommend writing at an eighth-grade reading level.
Is it written in your “brand voice” (humorous, serious, calm, etc.), and is it tailored to your target audience?
The design of your landing page can have a big impact on conversion rate. This includes everything from button placement and calls-to-action to font size—using readable fonts can make your copy more impactful.
Even something as simple as your page colors can influence how people interact with your site. Did you know that according to color psychology, blue is considered more reliable and dependable, while red drives action and urgency?
Screenshot from Apple.com
Getting a user to fill out a form can be its own micro-conversion, whether they’re using the form to request a quote, download a lead magnet, or subscribe to a newsletter. Making it easy to submit the form can help you improve your conversion rate.
Here’s what you should consider:
Is the form’s purpose clear?
Does the form look appealing and trustworthy?
Is there any reason why the user might get an error message when trying to use the form?
Are there too many unnecessary “required” fields that the user may not be able to complete?
Does the form accept special characters (for example, if the user has an accent or hyphen in its name?)
Does the form have a great copy and a strong call-to-action?
Screenshot from NYTimes.com
"Call-to-action” are phrases that encourage your customers to take any action, such as “submit” or “contact us”. You’ll often see call-to-action on buttons, which may be found in different areas of your site. When optimizing your call-to-action, you can experiment with copy, button color, or placement on the webpage, among other variables.
Finally, don’t forget to consider the way customers navigate your website. This can be a more important factor in conversions than you may think.
Make sure your site is easy to navigate and that customers can find what they’re looking for. You can do user testing to gain insights on this—have customers try to perform certain actions on your website, and then report back to you how their experience was and if they ran into any issues. This is a great way to find broken links, unclear instructions, or other “blockers” in your funnel.
Think about your site’s technical capabilities, too. If your site is slow to load, this can impact user experience and may even affect your SEO. To improve your site’s speed, try compressing large images and videos, using a page-speed plugin, and removing unnecessary redirects.
Screenshot from Designerhire.com
You might wonder if other companies like yours use conversion rate optimization. The answer is a definitive “yes”. There are plenty of business success stories out there that show what companies have done to improve their conversion rates.
When it comes to the world’s largest and most successful companies, many have teams working on CRO, as well as related fields like user experience and SEO. That’s why these companies tend to have highly usable and effective websites. Below, we’ll give three examples of large companies in different industries, and explain what makes their websites work well.
Uber’s users visit their website for a number of different reasons. Maybe they want to get a ride, order from UberEats, or sign up to drive with Uber. Uber makes sure to send their users to the right place right away by using simple, short copy and easy-to-understand icons.
One technique that Amazon uses to make more sales through their website is “upselling”. When you’re shopping for products, they make sure you get to see other similar products that you might like, too. Their algorithm recommends products that are related or frequently bought together.
Booking.com uses a few different principles to optimize their conversions: fear of missing out (FOMO), the scarcity principle, and color theory. If you look at Booking.com’s website, they use red text to convey a sense of urgency, showing users that certain properties are popular and likely to sell out soon. They’ll describe how many times the property has been booked in the past few hours:
Show that other properties in the same location are selling quickly:
And show that certain types of rooms are being booked out:
So maybe you’re convinced that conversion rate optimization is a great way to get the most from your website, and you’re ready to get started with it. The question is, when’s the right time to begin thinking about CRO?
The best and easiest answer is ASAP! Ideally, you’ll want to incorporate data, testing, and CRO best practices when you create your website, and whenever you send out marketing materials (like email newsletters or Facebook ads).
When it comes to your website, though, deciding when exactly to make changes can be difficult. Changes require site maintenance, which means your website might have to be down for a while. This can be disruptive to your business.
That’s why some experts recommend doing conversion rate optimization during a site migration. Since you’ll be making changes to your website anyway, this is a great opportunity to examine what’s working and what’s not. You can create multiple wireframes and prototypes, employing user research and testing to see which ones are the most easy-to-use and effective.
To build a CRO strategy, you’ll need to first brush up on your CRO knowledge and then create and execute a plan. Here are the steps you should follow:
The first place to start with conversion rate optimization is to understand what the sales funnel is, and what it looks like.
Here are the steps in the sales funnel:
Awareness
Discovery
Evaluation
Intent
Conversion
Why do you need to understand these steps to create a CRO program? Because every time a customer converts, they go through a process. Before they take that final step of buying your product, they first have to know what it is, understand what it can do for them, compare it with competitors, and decide to make a purchase.
Once you’ve understood the sales funnel, the next step is to read up on specific CRO techniques you can use. We’ll talk more about these techniques in the next section. Some of them, like A/B testing and color psychology, have already been mentioned.
Remember to consider both quantitative and qualitative methods of conversion rate optimization. Applying best practices selectively or testing only some elements might improve your conversions temporarily, but it won’t be as effective as coming up with a comprehensive CRO plan.
Ideally, CRO should be integrated into your overall marketing plan. It should be something you revisit quarterly, bi-annually, or annually on your website, and even more frequently in your ads and newsletters.
After you’ve decided which techniques to use, create a plan for your CRO program.
Your plan should include:
Finally, the last step is to put your plan into action. This means:
Running tests and doing user research: This first step is all about gathering data. Plan an appropriate time to do your tests. If you are doing user research, think about how you’ll get in contact with users—will you simply reach out by phone or email, or use a third-party testing service? How big do you want your sample size to be?
Analyzing your data and drawing conclusions: Once you’ve gathered your data, you’ll need to take a look at it and decide how you want to act on it. With quantitative testing (like A/B tests), this process is fairly simple—obviously, you’ll want to use the higher-performing version of the marketing materials you tested. With qualitative testing, things can get a little bit more complicated. If some users dislike your website’s color scheme while others do like it, whose opinion should you follow? In this case, you’ll have to use your judgment to decide what to do with the results you have.
Putting your conclusions into practice by making changes: While making changes is the final step of the process, your journey with CRO is not over just yet. You’ll want to verify that your changes really are producing the desired results. If so, you still need to make sure the positive trend is sustained over time.
With CRO increasingly becoming a focus area, new research and findings continue to surface. You shouldn’t necessarily jump into applying these on your website. Any corrective action should be based on data and visitor feedback. However, here are some basic techniques that you can try to optimize your website’s conversion rates.
A lead magnet is an incentive for website visitors to give you their email address or other contact details. This might mean, for example, offering a content piece—such as an ebook, whitepaper, or checklist—as a free download. Relevant and carefully thought-out lead magnets help you convert more of your regular readers into leads and customers. You can place lead magnets within blog posts or use pop-ups, slide-in boxes, or dropdowns to showcase them.
You can improve conversions by adding a chat functionality on your top-converting pages or critical pages like pricing and checkout. Live chat lets you engage with visitors in real-time to nudge them into conversion and provide more value. It increases the likelihood of them taking action, instead of staying inactive on the page or leaving.
Even with your best optimization efforts, there will always be visitors who exit your website without converting. With a little advertising budget, you can use retargeting to bring them back to your site. You can run campaigns based on cookie settings, and bring back website visitors with retargeting ads.
You'll always have a set of blog posts consistently outperforming the others. You could use these posts by improving their call-to-actions, or adding page banners. These blogs can also be used to drive more traffic to other pages.
Heatmaps help you see how all your visitors interact with your website. You can understand how a visitor has scrolled through your page, where they clicked, and how deep in the page they went. With this information, you can optimize your pages for more clicks and higher scroll depth.
One of the most tried-and-true recommended CRO techniques is A/B testing. With A/B testing, you can create different versions of the same page and experiment with which version works better for your audience. This will help you understand your audience better. In the next section, we’ll talk more about A/B testing and its essentials.
A/B testing lets you compare two or more variants of a page by showing them to a similar audience. You can then implement the one with a better conversion rate.
Website conversion optimization is an objective process, which means you’ll need to think through all the details of your testing beforehand. Start with a well-formed hypothesis to prioritize testing opportunities.
You might be wondering what the pros keep in mind when they’re doing CRO marketing. Are there any best practices you should know about? Remember that CRO is a mindset. It’s about more than just A/B testing, user testing, or color theory. CRO is about understanding your users’ psychology and the way they think. If you haven’t already, consider creating personas showing your ideal users and their interests, characteristics, and pain points.
Besides psychology, the other main element to CRO marketing is using data and a scientific approach. Testing, heatmaps, website analytics, and other methods provide you with lots of data, but the question is what you do with that data. Consider creating data visualizations and graphs to understand the bigger picture of what’s happening on your website. Sophisticated analytics tools can provide you with deep insights to help you make better decisions.
As with any new skill, when you’re learning about CRO for the first time, you may be concerned about making mistakes. Here are five common mistakes newbies sometimes make when getting started with CRO, and how to avoid them.
Seasonality is a real thing, and running tests during unusual periods can lead to skewed results. In particular, you’ll want to avoid times when people often go on vacation (such as August or late December).
If you work in a seasonal industry, it’s even more important to pay attention to when you run your tests. For example, here is a graph of Google search results for the term “ski equipment” in 2020:
Notice how it peaks during the winter season? Now, compare that with the search trend for “outdoor pools”:
It’s important to note that CRO is an ongoing process, and isn’t something you can simply “do” one time and be finished. Your CRO efforts should be continuous over time, since your business, industry, and customer base might change.
Have a look at the Amazon.com homepage back in 1999:
Versus in 2021:
Notice the difference? Nearly everything has changed, from the design and layout to the colors, site copy, and page structure. That’s because Amazon has been continuously updating their CRO, marketing, and web design strategy over the years.
Another CRO mistake is using a sample size that is too small during user testing. Since it can be difficult to get in touch with users and convince them to participate in a test, it may be tempting just to ask a few users for their opinion. The problem is that the smaller your sample size is, the less likely it is that the results are statistically significant.
So, how big should your sample size be? According to the Nielsen Norman Group, you should have at least five users in a qualitative study and 20 users in a quantitative study. You’ll notice that the number is quite different for the two kinds of studies. That’s because although smaller groups are less likely to be statistically significant, their insights can still be valuable for your research.
Another classic CRO mistake would be associating the whole field with just a single type of testing. Equating CRO to A/B testing is like equating UX to wireframing or SEO to keyword research. Those techniques are a part of the field, but they don’t make up the big picture.
To thoroughly understand CRO, you’ll need to understand digital marketing in general. This includes user psychology, research methods, and the marketing funnel.
Finally, the last thing to avoid in CRO is making assumptions. There’s inevitably some subjectivity involved in conversion rate optimization, and you’ll probably be selecting your preferred colors, designs, and copy at certain points in the process. The idea is not to eliminate subjectivity entirely—it’s to always test and pay attention to what the data says.
If a certain version of your landing page, newsletter, or ad performs better than your preferred version, it’s important to ask yourself why. Are some features making your preferred version difficult to use? Is there something in the new version that’s attractive to customers? When done right, CRO should be a scientific process that provides you with these insights.
There are many conversion rate optimization software tools currently on the market. To choose the best one for you, think about the type of tests you want to run, the functionalities you need, and your budget. You should also look at reviews and case studies when deciding what software to invest in.
Freshmarketer helps marketing teams deliver more personalized customer experiences at every touchpoint across their lifecycle. Get insights into your audience’s behavior and engagement to create unique buyer experiences. Freshmarketer helps you get the most from your conversion rate optimization strategy. Here are just some of the things you can do with it:
Analyze your visitors’ behavior with heatmaps, session replay, and funnel analysis
Use A/B testing and split testing to see what works best on your website
Personalize your website for different visitors
Gather feedback from customers with polls
Capture leads and understand form abandonment with Web Forms
Hotjar is a heat mapping and analytics tool for conversion rate optimization. With Hotjar, you can easily create heatmaps and collect user feedback on your website.
Heatmap.com is a real-time analytics tool, focusing on (you guessed it) heatmaps, and only heatmaps. This augmented reality tool can be installed on your website via a Javascript tag.
Optimizely lets you create and test variations on your website or mobile app. Designed for marketers, product managers, and developers, it lets you personalize your marketing campaigns and run A/B tests.
Marketing giants Hubspot and Kissmetrics offer a free kit to help you get started with A/B testing. The kit includes guidelines for effective A/B testing, information about what variables to test and how to run split tests, a simple significance calculator, and a template to help you organize your tests.
Along with heatmaps, Hotjar also allows you to make session recordings on your website. If you’re wondering what a “session recording” is, it’s a recording of real actions taken by visitors as they navigate through your site. You can use Hotjar to see a user’s clicks, taps, scrolls, and mouse movement in an anonymized format.
Mouseflow is another tool that allows you to produce session recordings from real users. The tool also includes other functionalities, like heatmaps, funnels, and forms.
While including heatmaps, session recording, and A/B testing functionalities, Inspectlet also offers form analytics insights. Using the tool, you can understand engagement rate, hesitation, form validation fail rate, and more. You can also see how many visitors make it through each stage of your funnel.
Contentsquare offers form analysis, as well as other analytics features like heatmaps and session replay. The software can help you detect friction in your funnel, and can be set up without using custom tags.
Conversion rate optimization is a part of digital marketing. When digital marketers create websites, apps, newsletters, and advertisements, they optimize them using CRO, SEO, and UX best practices. We’ll talk more about SEO and UX in the next few sections.
CRO should be a part of any digital marketing strategy. When you invest in digital marketing, you want it to be as effective as possible. CRO lets you move beyond doing what “looks good” or what your competitors are doing and instead make decisions about your marketing budget using data. Remember to always test your marketing collateral, and make sure the design and copy are top-notch.
While CRO and SEO are related, they are not the same. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about increasing relevant traffic to your website by improving your organic search rankings. It has a direct impact on who comes on your page. CRO, on the other hand, focuses on increasing conversions from your existing traffic, and directly impacts who enters your conversion funnel.
Because many website owners choose to work on SEO and CRO together, these two fields often impact each other. For example, when you improve your page copy after A/B testing around a particular keyword, it might impact your SEO rankings. If conversion-optimized copy performs better than SEO-optimized copy, you may need to think of a way to balance these two important concerns as part of your strategy. Both CRO and SEO can help you improve your marketing funnel. Combining the powers of both brings higher returns.
We’ve already spoken a bit about how conversion rate optimization relates to user experience (UX). Like SEO, UX is closely related to CRO.
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, user experience “encompasses all aspects of the end-user interaction with [a] company, its services, and its products”. Generally, user experience is just about how your customers perceive you and your product. But this term is often specifically used to talk about how customers interact with a website or app.
Optimizing for UX means using research, data, and best practices to improve your website, making it easier and more enjoyable to use.
User experience and CRO are two sides of the same coin. Often, when you optimize for conversions, you’ll end up optimizing for user experience as well. For example, if a broken link on your website is preventing users from adding items to their shopping cart, fixing the problem will likely increase your conversions. It will also improve your UX, preventing customers from becoming frustrated that they can’t add items to the cart.
However, there will be other times when UX and CRO objectives seem to conflict. For example, maybe adding misleading copy or design to your website leads to an increase in sign-ups, as customers accidentally click the “sign up” button. While this might increase your conversion rate, it is also bad for the user experience, since users will develop a negative impression of your website and company.
You’ll probably find that CRO tactics that are bad for user experience don’t actually end up improving conversion rates in the long run. Frustrating or misleading your users might lead them to convert in the short term, but it will affect their opinion of your brand and likely prevent them from buying from you in the future. This is why you should always try to make sure your CRO program is user-friendly.
Here are some UX principles to keep in mind when optimizing for conversion rate:
Always consider the customer
Be straightforward and transparent
Focus on long-term brand value and macro-conversions
When in doubt, ask your users through testing and surveys
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