A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization is when you try to get more people to complete a meaningful action during the customer journey.

What counts as a meaningful action will depend on your goals and the customer journey stage you’re dealing with.

For instance, let’s take the example of a landing page that asks people to enter their details in exchange for a whitepaper. In this instance, a meaningful action might be getting people to enter their details when they hit this page.

Therefore, if you’re doing CRO work on this landing page, you’ll try to increase the percentage of people that provide their details.

CRO is a good thing because it helps you generate more customers without having to spend more money. For example, suppose you’re using PPC ads to drive traffic to a landing page.

You might find that you have to spend $100 to generate ten signups. Well, with the help of CRO, you might instead be able to generate 20 qualified leads after spending $100.

This means you now make more money from your marketing budget, thereby allowing for a more profitable business model.

If you want to succeed with CRO, it’s a good idea to focus on making one change during each ‘stage of testing.’

For instance, suppose you’re trying to optimize a landing page that has a header, an image, and a button. When doing CRO work, you should only adjust one of these elements at a given time.

In doing so, it’ll be a lot easier to determine what leads to an improvement or reduction in results. You can then use this knowledge when you’re optimizing other parts of the customer journey.

Now, doing things this way can take more time, and it does require some discipline. But, if you want to end up with a clean data set that provides clear conclusions, this is the best way to do things.

Performing CRO tests can be complicated, but thankfully, there are many software suites that make the task easy.

Most of these software suites give you access to a simple ‘visual editor’ that allows you to perform tests. Using this editor, you can select the elements found on a webpage, and you can then adjust them any way you want to.

So, you can click on a button and change its size, shape, and color without having to mess around with any code.

That said, you will need to tinker with some code if you want to ‘install’ these solutions.

However, this isn’t that hard to do, as you just need to embed some JavaScript code onto the pages you want to optimize. If your website runs on WordPress, you can install a plugin that’ll help you embed this code.

Besides these visual editor tools, you may also want to invest in ‘session replay’ tools.

Such tools will record website visits, thereby allowing you to see how people interact with your site. You can then use these recordings to identify potential sticking points in regards to website usability.

Note that session replay tools have many use cases outside of what we’ve covered above. If you have questions about these potential use cases, you can get answers here.

A lot of the time, CRO comes down to studying data and then makes changes based on what you find.

Following this, you need to set up tracking tools, so you’re able to capture data that you can later analyze. If you want to install these tools, you’ll need to embed some code into your site, as with the examples mentioned earlier.

The tracking tools you use will depend on the kind of marketing activities you’re doing.

For example, if you just have a simple blog, you might be okay with installing something basic like Google Analytics. Yet, if you’re running Facebook Ads, you should install the Facebook Pixel.

That’s because if you install this pixel, you can see which ads are producing conversions. You can then use this data to optimize your ad campaigns and the landing pages associated with these ads.

As you begin to take CRO more seriously, you’ll probably read some resources that teach you how to perform tests. These resources will often list some best practices you should follow whenever you’re running a CRO experiment.

While these best practices can be helpful, you shouldn’t be afraid to go against them from time to time. In doing so, you may discover strategies that other people aren’t aware of, and thus you may gain an edge over your competitors.

Of course, if you’re going to go against these best practices, you may also experience a sharp decrease in conversions. However, it’s worth taking this risk when you consider the potential upside.

Will You Take CRO Seriously?

If you take conversion rate optimization seriously, you can improve the profitability of your business.

It’s important to remember CRO is a skill, and so it might take a while before you’re able to produce some good CRO tests. Due to this, you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself if it takes a long time to improve conversions.

You just need to make sure you’re performing a test each and every day. If you do that, you should eventually create a test that’ll deliver brilliant results.

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