What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action, for example, the desired action can be completing a web form, purchasing a product, or signing up for a service. To get the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors. All that’s left is to multiply the result by 100 to get the percentage.
There are macro and micro conversions. Micro conversions are smaller activities such as signing up for email lists, creating an account, or adding a product to the cart. They usually take place before a user completes a macro conversion like purchasing a product from the site, requesting a quote, or subscribing to a service.
What is conversion rate optimization?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves improving your website and content to increase conversion rates. A high conversion rate usually means that a website is effective, well-designed, and appealing to your target audience. CRO also requires data on how users find your site, what actions they perform, and if there’s something that prevents them from completing your goals.
It’s important to emphasize that CRO happens after the visitor makes it to your site. That’s intrinsically different from conversion optimization for SEO or paid ads.
CRO Calculations
There are commonly used formulas that are providing a better understanding of where you stand at any point in time regarding the conversion rate. Three commonly used formulas are: Calculation 1: Conversion Rate Like we already explained to calculate your conversion rate, you must divide your number of conversions by your number of visitors and then multiple that number by 100 to get the percentage. Calculation 2: New Customers If you want to calculate your number of new customers, you should divide your net revenue goal by your average sales price. Calculation 3: Lead Goal To calculate your lead goal, take your number of new customers, and divide it by your lead-to-customer close rate percentage. For example, let’s say there’s a website that has 10,000 visitors per month. It generates 100 leads and subsequently 10 customers each month, so it would have a 1% visitor-to-lead conversion.
Why Is CRO Good for SEO?
Even though it’s not directly related to attracting organic website traffic or ranking on SERP, conversion rate optimization has clear benefits for SEO, such as:
Better customer insights. CRO can help you understand your key audience and learn how to respond to their needs. Conversion rate optimization is looking to find the right customer for your business.
Improved ROI. You can get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers by learning how to get the most of your acquisition efforts.
CRO gives you better scalability. If you keep turning browsers into buyers, you can grow your business without running out of potential customers. The point is that CRO lets you grow without spending all your resources or losing prospective customers.
Good user experience. CRO teaches you what works on your site, realizing that you can work and expanding on it, which will give a better user experience.
Increased Trust. Your visitors need to have genuine trust in your website, in order to share their credit card information or any other personal information. Your site always needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to give all the answers that your customers need and want.
Successful Optimization
To make this optimization successful you need to gather data, you need to know what to optimize and who to optimize for. Don’t make decisions based on your instincts and assumptions!
Quantitative Data Analysis is a method that produces data by measuring how people behave on your site. You can start with a web analytics method such as Google Analytics and add tracking for your conversions.
Using analytics-based CRO will tell you all you need to know about how users engage with your site. This method provides information like:
Where people enter your site, on which webpage they land on first.
Where on a page they spend they spend their time.
What channel brought them in.
What kind of devices and browsers do they use.
Where or during what activity user decides to leave your site.
Once you know how users interact with your site, you can also look into the “why” behind their decisions. Here, you need the help of a people-focused method also known as qualitative data analysis. This method is more subjective and it helps you to identify who is your ideal user. You can collect this data with on-site surveys, user testing, and satisfaction surveys.
Qualitative analysis helps optimize the conversions by providing detailed information about users behavior like:
Why did they decide to visit your site? What part of your page or product appealed to them?
What do they think makes you different from competitors?
What words do they use to describe your services or products? How exactly would they describe your product or service to someone else?
With all of this, you can get a much better understanding of the pages on your site, and you get an opportunity to optimize and engage the audience you’d like to target. Spend time on gathering and analyzing information because it will pay off in the long run.