In the digital marketing world, a lot of acronyms are thrown around for different aspects to gauge a business and its online performance. If you are a business owner and getting into digital marketing for the first time, you will hear things like CPL, ROAS, CPA, PPC, GMB.
Although they are important, one acronym has become increasingly important over the last couple of years. Conversion Rate Optimization (Also known as CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website.
Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking “add to cart,” signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link. Conversion Rate Optimization is the bread and butter of the digital marketing world. Even the smallest changes can have a significant impact on how users interact with your website.
CRO for a website is making sure that the consumer can make purchases easier or convert faster by making changes to the flow and experience on the site.
If there are too many steps between them and the action you want them to take, they’ll just leave. When you optimize your website for easy conversion, you’re taking steps to figure out what is preventing users from doing what you want and implementing changes.
This blog will provide you with an overview of CRO. If you want to learn what conversion rate optimization is, how to get started and how it will help your business, read on.
What is a conversion?
Before we can get started on optimizing your website traffic and conversions, we must first understand what a conversion is.
A conversion is when a user visits a website and makes contact with a business or brand. Not all conversions are the same in terms of their weight of it, but here are some common examples of conversions on a website:
- Fill out a form on the website
- Clicking on the phone number to call
- Subscribe to a newsletter
- Download a document gated by form fill
- Make a purchase on an eCommerce website
- Add to cart on the website
Understanding which conversions mean the most to you as a business will shape what you are focused on and how you set up your business.
For example, if you are an eCommerce business, your main focus will be “add to carts” or purchases on the website. For an eCommerce company, someone filling out a form or calling for more information may mean less in terms of business opportunities.
Now that we understand conversions, let's talk about how a conversion rate is calculated.
What is a conversion rate?
A conversion rate is a simple calculation that can be done by looking at your traffic and contact numbers. The Conversion rate is your conversions on your website divided by the number of traffic you are getting. Lets say you had 50 conversions on your website out of the 1000 visits you got to your website so your conversion rate is 5%.
As a business owner, you will always ask yourself, what is a good conversion rate? Typically a good conversion rate is any number between 1-4%. Now, this does vary, and different industries have different metrics of success, but this article from Wordstream gives a good idea per vertical you work in based on Google ads.
We now understand what a conversion is and how to calculate conversion rates, we can now look at what conversion rate optimization is, and it will help your online presence.
Conversion Rate Optimization And How To Apply It
As mentioned earlier, conversion rate optimization is all about improving the rate at which website users complete desired actions, including website fills, phone calls and purchases.
The best way to implement conversion rate optimization strategies is to do constant tweaking on different aspects of the site and collect data to make changes based on the behaviour.
Some of the common tweaks or optimization a business will focus on are:
- Creating and tweaking call to actions: This includes changing the location of the call to action, the colour of the call to action or the words used.For example, over a month, you can change the colour and the words on a button to see which combinations of colours and phrasing have the best results.
- Content Changes - One of the more common changes is changing, improving or expanding the on-page content to see if the page drives more people to complete the desired action.
- Sales Funnel Optimization - For eCommerce this is essential to getting people to contact you faster or shaving off one or two clicks to make a purchase.An example of sales funnel is if someone adds an item to their cart, the person is taken to the cart menu or “items you may also be interested in” for the item they picked
In order to gauge success is to make changes and report on the changes and take what you learn and improve it. Many businesses will run tweaks in parallel with A/B testing and see what wins based on the data.
For example, here at TechWyse, we use landing pages frequently for Google Ads and will run them simultaneously to a service page on the website. Over a month, we will compare the two pages and see which one and how we can improve it further.
The idea is that every month we will be making tweaks every month and making improvements to get better and better.
Wrapping it Up
Although this was simply an introduction to conversion rate optimization and how to turn website visits into conversions, we hope that it helped explain and simplify this topic for you.
This sector of digital marketing is essential to every business, and requires a thorough understanding of your company's KPIs and goals.
Without understanding which metrics are important to your business, you’ll never be able to truly optimize your website to convert users at a preferred rate. If your website isn’t seeing the conversions you’d like it to, get in touch with a TechWyse expert today.
We can discuss the finer points of CRO and create a plan to optimize your conversions going forward. Get in touch with us here or call us at 866.208.3095.
