CPC, PPC, CTR, SEO, SEM...the list goes on. With all these digital marketing acronyms you might be thinking, do I now need to know about CRO?
The short answer is yes.
Let’s say your business has just developed the best social ad content in the world, along with an even more amazing SEO and Google Ads campaign, all geared towards driving qualified users to your website. Great!
Unfortunately, you notice that despite all the increased traffic and the impressive social engagement numbers, the people visiting your site aren’t seeing you achieve your original goal – they aren’t converting.
Traffic acquisition is only one half of the marketing equation. You still need to give your users a reason to stay and then transform them from interested prospects to customers. A conversion isn’t necessarily a purchase, it could be submitting an enquiry form or clicking on a phone number, or even a subscription to a newsletter, all of which help progress a user to a customer.
CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of optimising your website experience to maximise the number of people to take a desired action (conversion). In more simpler terms, CRO is all about increasing the number of website visitors who will become customers and making your marketing more successful.
What is the CRO process?
CRO is a comprehensive process that uses in-depth data from a range of tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data such as web and click analytics, heat maps, surveys, user recordings and competitive analysis. The data is then analysed to form hypotheses in regards to landing page design, website copy, calls to action, speed, navigation, forms and more. These hypotheses are then put into A/B tests before drawing any actionable conclusions and making updates.
The process is data-driven and focused on researching and testing. There is no guesswork and no magic.
Is it the same as SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is focused on increasing traffic to a website by optimising the website so people can find your business when searching on a search engine like Google.
CRO focuses on increasing the number of conversions from the traffic that is already present. This also means that you don’t have to have a lot of website traffic to benefit from CRO. Even low-traffic websites can improve their conversion rates with CRO tweaks.
Why is CRO important?
Alright, this all sounds exciting, but we’re running on limited budget and resources. How valuable is running a CRO campaign for my business?
If you’re interested in generating more sales or leads, or if you want to get the best return on investment from all your other digital marketing activities, look no further. You will see incremental business returns, increased customer lifetime value, lower cost per sale/lead and even improved SEO.
If you’re still not convinced, you will also learn more about your customers’ behaviour and their motivations. This will help you create better data-driven customer personas and customer journey maps that can be used across other areas in the business.
At Threesides, we’ve built our CRO process in understanding our client’s customers and business objectives, by balancing insights and strategy to help meet their goals. If you’re interested in converting your web traffic into more leads and sales, get in touch.
Photo by Launchpresso on Unsplash
