What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Digital marketing is more or less just continuously doing your best to appeal to your audience. Finding out what makes people tick and what makes them act is central to the practice. As much as psychology is an element inherent within every marketing technique, it is perhaps never more evident than in Conversion Rate Optimisation, or CRO.

To define conversion rate optimisation is to totally understand an audience. It means that you understand what interests them, draws them in, and what finalises their decisions. Simply put, CRO is the art of getting your customers to take an action that you want them to.

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Conversion Rate Core Concepts

The acquisition and retention of customers is the lifeblood of any business, as it’s through customers that income is generated. This is why conversion rate is so integrally interesting, regardless of what stage your business is in, or what industry.

When we talk about “conversion rate optimisation,” what we’re actually talking about is the process of optimising your website or e-store to generate more conversions. A “conversion” is whenever a customer follows through with a desired action, such as making a sale or signing up to a mailing list. Practising CRO means that you develop a better understanding of your customers, how they function, and what cements their decision to either convert or bounce from your site. These analytics can then be used to help you with future promotions etc.

There are two distinct types of conversion, Micro and Macro:

Micro Conversions – these are top-to-middle conversions. These conversions focus on smaller actions with less value, but a huge potential for Return on Investment. Actions within this category of conversion include subscribing to a newsletter or mailing list, putting products in a cart, or making accounts.

Macro Conversions – bottom of the marketing funnel conversions. This type focuses on what customers do once they have heard of you, become interested in your brand, and come to your website. Macro conversions include buying an item, sending a quote request, or actually contacting your business. These conversions are what you work towards, as they have immediate, measurable value.

Your conversion rate is a percentage that represents how many conversions out of your audience are being made. If you have 100 customers and 50 of them buy something, then your conversion rate is 50%. Not bad, but it could always be higher.

This is why CRO is so important. It simultaneously attracts customers and increases revenue for your company, two things which the expansion and longevity of your company is reliant on.

The Conversion Rate Optimisation Process

Every tool in digital marketing has a process. The steps to optimise for search engines for instance, is quite different to conversion based optimisation. This is because the end result is made to appeal to different parts of human activity. SEO is made for discovery, CRO is made to encourage people to make a decision.

To this end the first thing that needs doing is to research your audience, as well as your competitors that boast a high conversion rate. The first step in doing this is to look at CRO campaigns from the past and see what worked well. In particular, pay attention to the following:

• Calls to Action (CTAs/C2As): the part of an advertisement that prompts customers to carry out an action.
• Copy: the text on the website or content piece that informs the customer.
• Images: designed to evoke ideas within the mind of the customer of what’s achievable if they carry out the conversion.
• Offers: meant to make the conversion appear not only appealing but also convenient.
• Colours: to affect a customer’s emotions.

While examining these elements, make sure that you’re using examples taken from your relative industry. Some industries benefit from individualistic or highly differing aesthetics and phrasing. Others require a little more uniformity in order to ensnare customers.

Once you have this data, experiment with its form, wording, design, palette, etc. and narrow your choices down to two options. Form groups of people selected from your target market, and show them the options you’ve selected from each category, asking which version would be more likely to secure their conversion and noting the answers. This process is called A/B testing. Whichever version wins the A/B test is the version that should progress to your final content or copy.

Most marketing agencies will utilise some variation on this basic process, however when it comes to CRO, the internet is a treasure trove of information, and most CRO campaigns on the web serve as perfect analytical fodder for your own conversion rate optimisation process.

What is the Best CRO Tool on the Internet?

Of course, CRO testing and implementation isn’t the end. Most marketing processes, if not all are an ongoing battle of statistics. The more you get involved in marketing the more you will realise that very little about it is cut-and-dry. It is an ongoing cycle of research-trial-application-success/failure-repeat.

Therefore it’s highly unlikely that your first CRO campaign will be your last, or even that you’ll see initial success and then just give up. Because of the nature of marketing it requires ongoing analysis and examination. To help with this, there are a series of tools that marketers will use in order to assist with the process of analysing the campaigns they put in place and tweaking them to get better results.

Google Analytics is currently one of the most, if not the most popular web analytics tools globally. It is packed with useful CRO features, including tracking conversions, see what pages on your website are the most popular, as well as tracking the user’s journey through your website.

Another popular tool from Google is the aptly-named Google Optimise, which as the name suggests is an application designed specifically for the testing and optimisation of your website. The tool allows users to conduct various tests and personalise their website in order to appeal for specific types of users or markets.

Hotjar is a tool that provides data on how users interact with your website, and in turn how it’s affecting your conversion rate. It provides heatmaps for your website, a tool which tracks user activity and then creates a graphic that represents where the majority of customer attention and activity is. This includes where customers click, where their cursers move, and how far down the page they scroll. Hotjar also takes screen recordings, and has other behaviour analysis tools.

VWO Testing allows users to create and run A/B tests, as well as run other types of experimentation and analyse the results of them.

The Conversion Rate Optimisation Services Melbourne Trusts

Most marketing agencies will offer some form of CRO services, but very few can beat those offered by Traffic Radius. We are a Melbourne-based marketing company with international reach and hundreds of clients. We have a stellar team of experienced and well-trained marketing personnel, and our CRO services have helped many businesses become what they are today. If you’d like to engage our services, simply contact us here and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible, otherwise you can call us on 1300 870 901.