What is CRO and Why it Matters
Let’s set the scene: you’ve launched your new website, you’re so happy with the design and you just can’t wait for those results to start pouring in. So you wait, and you wait…. And wait; what? Why aren’t I making any sales when I have plenty of traffic coming to my website? Why am I spending so much on my ads and seeing no ROI?
On the flipside if your conversion rate is 10%, even the slightest uplift in traffic will result in a predictable amount of revenue uplift.
For example, let’s say you get 10,000 sessions per month, at a 10% conversion rate. This means you’ll be converting 1,000 users into clients per month. Let’s say your per lead value is $50 – that means you’re making $50,000 a month.
Now let’s increase your traffic by 20% by running some ads to your website. You can predict that you’ll now make an extra $10,000 per month by sending more traffic to your website, because you put effort into increasing your conversion rate before you put money into ads to build up your traffic (we’re currently building a calculator for this so that you can calculate your conversion uplift and how much money that will make for your business, we’ll come back and insert a link when we’re done).
I had to outline some examples above before I dive into more about CRO because sometimes statistics speak louder than words. Just one of the reasons why our love language is data!
Okay, let’s dive in…
Let’s break down the components of CRO and what’s usually included as an industry standard:
Now let’s add the UX services we throw into the mix to get a comprehensive overview of what makes your customers tick:
These are the areas we usually test or look to improve when giving your website a conversion face-lift:
Here are some examples of tests we’d run on our sister agency Agora, who offers business growth and marketing services. In this example, we’ve added in some example hypotheses drawn from our hypothetical “audit”. Keep in mind we’d typically create these tests off the back of an analysis of user behaviour, such as heat mapping or user testing.
Observation: Users responded better to candid team photos during our user testing as it made them more trusting of the brand.
Hypothesis: Changing the imagery to more candid photos will increase the conversion rate on the Contact page by invoking trust in the Agora team.
Observation: In discussion with the users, we found that the term business growth experts better described the services offered by Agora than marketing.
Hypothesis: Changing the wording to reflect their new service positioning and making it more actionable by changing contact to ‘book a discovery call’ will increase the conversion rate.
Observation: Users seems to like pink more (me too!)
Hypothesis: Changing the CTA colour to pink will increase the form conversion rate.
Firstly, because each one helps us get one step closer to understanding what your clients want out of your website, and how to create the perfect website for their experience.
AND
Consider you’re spending your time and money implementing things that you don’t test first. You’ll end up with a website consisting of the 70% of tests that were either negative or didn’t actually do anything. That sounds like a waste of money to me…
But, what if every time you made a permanent improvement to your website you could already tell ahead of time how much of a positive impact it’s going to have on your website?
That’s why CRO matters.
