As a business owner, how do you differentiate the number of visitors to your site, compared to those going through taking the desired action?
Whether that be buying a product or inquiring about a service, knowing how your site visitors behave can seem like a mystery. That’s where Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) comes into play.
CRO is the process behind optimising your website to increase conversions. Let’s take a look at how it all works.
Table of Contents
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
This is the methodical process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who perform a desired action or convert; for example, filling out a form or buying a product/service.
Conversion Rate Optimisation involves understanding how users move through your website, what actions they take and what’s stopping them from completing your goals.
How do I calculate my conversion rate?
If you’re unsure what your conversion rate is, it’s quite simple to calculate. Take the total number of conversions you have and divide it by the total number of visitors to your site. Then, multiply the result by 100. You’ll be left with your conversion rate as a percentage.
For example, if you have 80,000 visitors to your site and you’ve made 2,000 conversions, your conversion rate will be 2.5%. In simpler terms, check out our calculation below:
The benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation
Improving the conversion rate on your website, not only will it make more money for your business and increase revenue but can also support other marketing channels and development teams.
Most importantly, CRO can aid Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by helping improve search rankings with specific phrases important to conversion. This could be through improving copywriting on the landing pages to make it more relevant to the user or by improving the desktop and mobile navigations.
Conversion rate optimisation can also help support with PPC activities. A Modo25 study found that the landing page experience (LPE) was the greatest factor in Google Ads Quality scores and therefore crucial to CRO.
By using personalisation to support PPC activity, we can make landing pages more relevant to search terms and the user to help aid in conversion. This might simply be changing the image or headline.
User experience
First and foremost, conversion rate optimisation explores what is working on your website and the areas that require improvement.
By understanding what works and making the necessary changes, you’ll create a better user experience for your audience, and they will be more likely to take the desired action and then potentially return as a returning customer.
Improved return on investment (ROI)
With CRO, you are making the most of the resources you already have, and to achieve a higher conversion rate doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spend more money.
By studying how to get the most out of your acquisition efforts, you’ll get more conversions without having to spend more trying to bring in potential new customers.
Customer insights
Conversion rate optimisation enables you to better understand your key audience and assess what sort of language and communication your audience prefers.
Analysing the user journey also identifies the right target audience for your business, in order to reduce the wrong sort of users visiting your site.
CRO best practices
Be mobile first
In our research, we have found the average website receives over 55% of all traffic from mobile devices, therefore improving the look and feel of your landing pages on mobile devices is the most crucial factor in conversion rate optimisation.
Look through the devices that your customers are on with the screen report secondary dimension in Google Analytics or GA4. If you can, purchasing these devices and experiencing the website through them will considerably improve the conversion rate on your website.
Utilise trust metrics
When you’re about to purchase an expensive holiday, do you end up looking through the reviews of the hotel? Users typically look for confirmation that we’ve made a good decision with our purchase and the best way to confirm this is through reviews.
Using a tool such as Trustpilot, Feefo or G2, confirms that you’ve made a good decision, as you’re in good company and therefore encourages the conversion. We have found that adding social proof to your website can improve conversions by approximately 11%.
Improve the overall experience for the user
You can improve your conversion rate without even A/B testing, as some small changes will drastically improve your conversions. Looking into elements such as readability – can I view all text on the website (the most common is white text on images) or even changing the call-to-actions to contrast and stand out will help to get users to engage and ultimately convert.
Another key element to improving the experience for users is page speed – this is the core reason why users bounce from websites. Simply put, the faster your website the better it will typically convert.
How do I get started with conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?
A good experimentation team is built on three core fundamentals; analysis, design and development. All three areas are equally as important in a successful CRO program.
Website analysis
Website analysis is the first part of the experimentation process and helps the business to understand what is wrong with the website and where we can improve.
Design process and planning
The design process will bring both analysts, business priorities and key stakeholders’ ideas to life. Your design team and development team can help with the continuous wave of amends and reduce external costs for the business.
Development and optimisation
The cornerstone of any experimentation team is a strong developer who needs to be able to bring the experiment to life, including A/B testing on websites.
Copywriting and SEO
A good content writer is crucial to a CRO team and being able to engage and captivate your audience, as well as altering your tone of voice to each brand that you represent.
If you’re looking for support with your digital marketing, our team will be more than happy to help. Get in touch by sending us an email to team@modo25.com
