what is CRO?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a term used in marketing to designate the process that a marketing team carries out to increase the audience on a website or social network.

CRO is a set of technologies and tools to drive more website visitors and brand customers. The goal of conversion rate optimisation is to increase the percentage of website visitors who take a specific action by methodically testing the barriers of an alternative page or process and improving page load speed. By doing so, companies can generate more leads or sales without spending more money on website traffic, which increases marketing ROI and overall profitability.

Statistical significance helps to understand that test results are not just random. Thanks to CRO analysis, many companies are already improving their online sales results as well as their turnover figures.

how is the Conversion Ratio calculated?

The Conversion Rate is the percentage of users who perform an activity within the website, such as a purchase or download action. Although it can be other actions, such as completing a form, subscribing, reading a blog article... The conversion rate or ratio of a website is the percentage we obtain by dividing the number of goals achieved by the total number of visits to the site. In other words, it is a measure of the success of a website. As we see, it is calculated by dividing the number of leads (who perform the action), match the number of visits to the website and multiplying it by 100, so that it is a percentage.

A CRO can help with the transition, to increase the presence of our brand on the Internet and improve our SEO, as well as our ROI. Although, we are not only talking about more sales, we find different types of conversions: for example, you can select sales or leads. Conversion rate optimisation tries to increase the conversion rate even if the traffic remains constant.

The higher the conversion rate, the better the sales results. That has to be our goal, so we ask ourselves: what can I do to change my conversion rate?

how to optimise the conversion rate?

• Identify and analyse the problem: the failure may be in a premature abandonment of our website by users or a high bounce rate. Analyse which are the most visited pages from the organic channel -being the channel that usually represents a higher percentage of traffic to the page- and review your metrics. If, for example, you detect that you have a low conversion on the mobile channel and, in addition, most of the visits to the website come from this type of device, you will have to optimise the page thinking about this factor. Pay attention to the design: is the offer clear, is it understood that it is an offer, is it invasive and can cause rejection? You must be critical with your strategy.

• Detection of areas for improvement: what should you do with the information from the analysis? CRO offers you qualitative and quantitative information with which you can establish tables of extremely interesting objectives to improve the conversion of your website. In this phase you will have to ask yourself: does this landing page respond to what the user thought they were going to find, do my designs work, do they respond to my forms? Four keys for improvement could be: Inform about the privacy policy:

1. Inform about the privacy policy.
2. Avoid long forms or forms with unnecessary questions.
3. Announce the desired time and effort for the activity.
4. Avoid distractions and aim for simplicity.

• Testing our hypothesis: if we have already raised a possible hypothesis, it is important to test and contrast it to check if it is correct or if we have not considered the right hypothesis.

• Offer a solution: if our hypothesis turns out to be correct, it is time to offer a solution. If we know what the problem is, but we do nothing to solve it, then we cannot solve anything. It is necessary to offer alternatives to our failures. If we have a design problem, we must change and remodel our aesthetics, if the problem is one of communication, we will have to modify our way of relating to customers or a change in the wording of the messages or web. We recommend you:

1. Create adaptable designs.
2. Add high quality images and videos.
3. Offer promotions and discounts.
4. Other customer experiences and positive stories.
5. Provide free resources.
6. Get the word out to your customers or suppliers.
7. Update your blog and/or social networks.
8. Improve readability.

• Analysis of the results achieved: after implementing the improvements, it is necessary to check if they are effective, i.e. if we have managed to increase the conversion rate using the most appropriate indicators. Recalculate the CRO and make a comparison between the current results and the previous ones.

• Implementation of a continuous improvement cycle: we recommend not to close the project after some errors have been discovered and corrected, but to start a continuous improvement cycle to identify other errors or points of improvement.

Of course, the main benefit of optimising your conversion rate is that customers take a specific action on your site instead of abandoning it, usually a visitor making a purchase. However, there are other benefits of having an improved website that optimises conversion rates, such as getting new customers; reducing your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); improving your return on investment (ROI); and getting links to your website.

Finally, remember that every user is different and that navigation is different for different people, it is important to test what works for you and what doesn't and adapt to the user's needs. Listening to your users and making improvements based on them will increase your ROI. Conversion optimisation is a process of continuous improvement that will give you better results as time goes on and your strategy improves.