CRO

Conversion rate optimisation is a very underrated yet key channel in the digital marketing mix: its aim is to improve a website’s user journey and impact the likelihood of conversions.

To achieve a higher conversion rate and growth in revenue, you need to find out what changes work and what do not work, and implement the changes accordingly.

Amazon is the most successful example of a company driven by CRO and a test & learn mentality. For Amazon, optimization is an ongoing process; they test every area of their website. That is how they came up with some ground-breaking improvements over the years, such as the 1-Click button for ordering which was a game changer. (read more here)

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of people that take action on your website. CRO improves conversion by findings the most effective user experience that drives users to action through experimentation.

Why is CRO important?

  • CRO allows you to test hypotheses and understand their impact. It has a plethora of benefits:
  • Traffic < Conversions: You can spend resources, time and budget on driving more traffic to your site, but if that traffic isn’t converting, it’s a missed opportunity.
  • Get more out of your existing users: you could be getting a lot more revenue or conversions from your existing users without having to spend resources on driving more traffic.
  • Retain users: sites typically convert well because they make their users happy – happy users are more likely to come back to your site and convert again. They’re also more likely to recommend your site, share it, link to it, and leave positive reviews.
  • You can do it everywhere: from your email newsletters to increase clicks, to your checkout pages to reduce funnel dropouts, CRO possibilities are vast.

How to develop an CRO strategy

The five steps outlined below are the ones I carry out when approaching CRO for my clients:

CRO & SEO

Given the fact that Google is shifting its SEO focus on content and user experience, CRO becomes more important than ever! That is why, having competence on both channels becomes a priority for any website that is keen to get their digital marketing right.
Google rating guidelines directly talk about the importance of offering a good user experience, especially on mobile sites which are now used by Google for mobile-first indexing. In addition, let’s not forget about page speed is a direct ranking factor since 2018. Other elements, such readability of a webpage copy and high-quality visual assets (videos and images) directly impact the user journey, having a direct effect on SEO.
CRO & SEO are very much complementary and should work hand in hand.

FAQs on CRO:

Most frequent questions and answers
Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who have a single-page visit on your website. This means that they land on your website and do nothing on the page they entered, ending up leaving without having visited any other page.

If one of your KPIs is for users to view multiple pages when they visit your website, then bounce rate could be an important metric to evaluate.

However, there are many instances where a high bounce rate does not mean you are doing something wrong. If you have a single-page website, or a blog platform within your website, single-page sessions are quite normal, due to the nature of such configuration. Nonetheless, there is always something you can do from a CRO point of view to try and take a high bounce rate

Mobile-first indexing means that search engines use the mobile of websites for indexing and ranking. Mobile-first indexing has been Google’s default option since July 2019. Prior to this change, Google used the desktop versions rather than its mobile counterpart. Webmasters are notified in Search Console of the date when their site moved to mobile-first indexing.