What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of identifying, testing and improving areas of your website which are preventing visitors from converting.

A conversion is whatever action you want your website visitors to take, this could be:

  • Purchasing a product or service
  • Purchasing a higher value product or service
  • Signing up for an email newsletter
  • Downloading a white paper
  • Getting in touch.

Why is conversion rate optimisation important?

CRO can help increase the performance of your website, converting more traffic, reducing your acquisition costs and increasing your profits.

There are many examples of successful conversion rate optimisation, here are just a few:

  • The Best Western Swan Hotel Wells website had an outdated design and didn’t work on mobiles or tables. Cognique designed and developed a new responsive website that led to 108 extra bookings over the course of a few months.
  • The Weather Channel saw a 225% in sign ups to its premium service after decluttering its homepage.
  • Nature Air increased their flight bookings by 531% when they added a more prominent ‘Book a flight’ button to their page.
  • Figleaves saw a 35% increase in conversions after adding customer reviews to product pages.

The right type of visitors

An important part of conversion rate optimisation is ensuring your website is converting the ‘right type’ of visitors. These are visitors who most closely match your target customer, and there’s a number of reasons for this:

  • Visitors that are well matched to your product or service are likely to be happier with their purchase and become a repeat customer. On the flip side, visitors who are not looking for exactly what you have to offer may feel dissatisfied and leave a negative review.
  • Visitors that have a positive experience on your website are more likely to return.
  • Visitors that match the profile of your ideal customer are more likely to spend more, and fewer conversions but at higher values may bring more revenue to your business.

How to get started with CRO

When we work with our clients on Conversion Rate Optimisation, we start by understanding what they want to achieve with their website. Once clear objectives are in place, we then analyse its existing performance to establish a baseline.

Next we will create a plan of potential improvements. For example, your analytics may show people are clicking ‘Buy’ but abandoning their purchase when prompted to sign up for an account. In this case we may remove the need to create an account before purchasing.

Finally, we measure performance of these changes. There’s a variety of ways to test the impact of changes, including:

  • Split testing or A/B testing – Split testing, often called A/B testing, involves testing two versions of a web page to see if there is a difference in conversion. This could involve testing two different layouts of a page, or just tweaking individual elements such as copy, buttons or images.
  • Multivariate Testing (MVT) – Similar to split testing, multivariate testing involves testing different combinations of elements of your page to find out which combination is most successful.
  • User testing –  Real users complete tasks on your website, allowing us to see first hand what changes would increase conversions.

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Our industry expert

Nigel Reece

Managing Director

Standing at the helm of Cognique, Nige is a strong believer in the value of professional networking and strong business relationships. He also still finds time to exercise his creative muscles, designing attention-grabbing brand guidelines and concept boards for our clients.

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