Understanding Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.

At a very high level, the CRO process involves:

• Conducting qualitative research and user behavior analysis
• Conducting quantitative research
• Conducting a heuristic evaluation for the site
• Conducting competitive analysis
• Prioritizing problem areas on the site and creating a conversion roadmap for your website (what pages need to be fixed)
• Creating new designs based on the testing hypothesis
• Conducting AB testing (or multivariate testing)
• Creating a testing hypothesis
• Analyzing the testing results

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on a website, during a time period. Any valuable engagement your visitors make may count as a desired action, as long as it fulfills your webpage’s goal. Remember, every page should have a primary goal.

Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total number of Visitors) *100

• Conversion rates differ wildly depending on the conversion goal (ad clicks, checkout completions, newsletter signups, etc.)
• Most people don’t share their conversion data publicly anyway.
• Every website, page, and audience is different.

There is no actual, ultimate industry figure you can rely on or compare yourself against with 100% confidence. Obsessing over an average percentage figure, and trying to squeeze as many conversions as possible just to stay in line with it, is not the best way to think about conversion rate optimization. Once again, you’re better off focusing on developing an in-depth understanding of what actually matters to your users, so you can give it to them and then, conversions will naturally follow.

Product pages have two conversion goals:

• Macro conversion rate for product pages is total orders for the website divided by the number of visitors who visit the product pages.
• Micro conversion rate for product pages is total clicks on the “add to cart” button divided by the number of visitors who visit the product pages.

The same concept applies if you are SaaS website. Your website conversion rate is the total number of monthly subscriptions divided by the total website monthly visitors. The SaaS pricing page, where you list the different plans for your product, has two conversion rates:

• SaaS pricing page macro conversion rate: total number of visitors who “subscribe” divided by the number of visitors who visit the pricing page.
• SaaS pricing page micro conversion rate: total number of visitors to click on the “subscribe” button on the page divided by the number of visitors who visit the pricing page.

Conversion Testing is the process of conducting an AB or multivariate test to increase the website conversion rate.

An iterative process by nature, CRO helps you in making assumptions about your website visitors and then testing these assumptions to measure how your market actually responds.

As a long-term process, CRO achieves sustainable, repeatable, and consistent increases on conversion rates through researching, testing, and analyzing visitors’ behaviors on your website. A good CRO program increases your site’s revenue month to month, reaching significant cumulative annual growth.