5 Points To Keep In Mind About CRO
5 Points To Keep In Mind About CRO
First things first, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym 'CRO', it stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation, i.e. how to increase the rate at which visitors to your website turn into buyers, subscribers or fresh leads.
This definition alone shows the importance of this metric: which business wouldn’t want a better hit rate on interested prospects? Furthermore, if a large portion of your website traffic is purchased via paid advertising, making sure that you get a good return on your investment is rather crucial.
Whether you have already undertaken CRO for your business or you are thinking about it, here are five points to keep in mind around conversion rate optimisation:
1. A business can never stay still
When it comes to optimisation, there is always room for improvement, be it simply because markets and consumer preferences are constantly evolving. Technology may change too, as well as how customers want to buy from and communicate with you.
Ask yourself – and your customers if possible – whether your website structure and the journey you want your visitors to take are clear, and whether processes are simple and reasonably short. When visitors find what they are looking for easily, quickly understand it's value and can complete a purchase in a few screens, they will be more likely to convert and come back to you for repeat business.
So don't get complacent that what you used to do worked like a charm and still does, form a few theories for how you might improve your conversion rates and put them to the test, it can't hurt!
2. Better conversion rates lower customer acquisition costs
As we saw previously, CRO aims at capitalising on existing traffic, which means that you will, hopefully, get more customers without spending any additional money on traffic generation.
It will therefore directly increase your return on investment in the long term through reducing the cost of acquiring new customers. While it is, in itself, good news, this is also an argument that financial departments will love, should they be less than enthusiastic about investing in CRO.
3. PPC advertising costs will increase
Like it or not, if you are generating traffic from paid channels, one thing is for certain - on popular platforms, over time your costs per click will increase. This is due to the ever rising popularity of these platforms and competition in the ad auctions.
As a result, your conversion rates may stay consistent but you are now paying more for each click and so your acquisition costs will rise with it. Aside from doing your best to keep CPCs to a minimum or leverage new channels, in order to maintain a stable customer acquisition cost (CAC), you will need to increase your conversion rates and this is where CRO works a charm.
4. You don’t need to be perfect, just better
We often get asked to provide industry conversion rates to be used as benchmark comparisons in CRO campaigns. The issue with this is that every website is so different and so too are the conversions that they track, making comparisons fairly meaningless (with the exception of purchase tracking on ecommerce sites).
Our approach is to forget about what is happening elsewhere, the bottom line is we want to improve YOUR conversion rate. So focus on that and see if you can make continual gains, that's all that matters.
5. It settles in house disagreements
Probably our favourite reason, often we see conflicting opinions about how to edit a homepage or that this widget needs to be here or there and progress stalls because no-one can agree. Well why not test it?
With CRO we can offer up two different versions of a page simultaneously with a 50/50 split to website traffic. Let that run for a while and see which one performs best, that's your answer, just let the numbers do the talking as your boss probably won't like hearing "I told you so!".
Related: Tips for easy wins to boost conversions
Need a hand? This Side Up is an agency with a 360˚ understanding of all the elements that contribute to a website’s success. With great experience in delivering success through CRO, we can deliver and execute a comprehensive strategy for your business.