Definition:
CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is the practice of increasing sales and leads of a website, without necessarily increasing the number of visitors to the website. By optimizing or improving the web conversion rate, you can get more people to perform more actions without having to invest more money in increasing traffic to the website.
Conversion rate optimization
The CRO seeks to increase the percentage of website visitors who perform a specific action (often submitting a web form, making a purchase, subscribing for a trial, etc.) by using alternate versions of test pages. In this way, companies are able to generate more leads or sales without having to invest more money in website traffic and thus increase their return on marketing investment and overall profitability.
Conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who complete a goal set by the site owner. Some testing methods used are creating a landing page, A/B testing or monitoring which headlines, content, images and other elements help convert more visitors into customers through heat maps.
How does the CRO work?
The process to optimize the conversion rate of a web page should follow the following phases:
- Page analysis. It is important to have previously selected the tools and metrics to be used.
- Definition of the objectives we want to achieve.
- Formulation of a hypothesis.
- Creation of an improvement plan.
- Implementation of this plan and testing.
- Analysis of the results.
Ways to optimize conversion
There are several approaches to conversion optimization,with two main schools of thought prevalent in recent years. One of these schools focuses more on testing to figure out the best way to increase conversion rates for a website, campaign, or landing page. The other school is more committed to the preliminary testing phase of the optimization process.
In this second approach, optimizing the company is going to invest a considerable amount of time in understanding the audience and then creating a targeted message that appeals to the particular audience. Only then would it be willing to implement testing mechanisms to increase conversion rates.
CRO and SEO
You can’t start a CRO process without considering SEO. These are two concepts of online marketing that must be worked in parallel to improve the conversion rate of a website because, although increasing traffic is not the main objective of the CRO, having a wider audience to launch the A/B tests will always return more reliable results.
The main benefits of SEO in this case are summarized in the following:
- Providing a good user experience and ensuring a longer stay will be rewarded by search engines.
- Having a well-structured page with quality content favors conversion.
- Keeping the website updated with new and interesting content benefits relevance, which also translates into conversions.