Many marketers focus on acquiring traffic but then fail to check what happens to those visitors when they land on your website. That’s where conversion rate optimisation (CRO) comes in. With CRO, we convert visitors into leads and customers. We look at your visitors, your website, and your objectives, and then we see what we need to do to get them to convert.
I manage the CRO service at Vertical Leap in Portsmouth, where we’ve created a scalable, data-led solution. We use your performance data to pinpoint which parts of your website aren’t working. We hypothesise improvements that will help increase conversions, and then we A/B test those theories.
Things to consider
Data and analytics – It’s easy to look at your website and say ‘it’d look nicer if I changed x.’ A good CRO service won’t base decisions on hunches and instinct, and will make sure every decision is led by data. Every CRO campaign should start with basic checks to ensure all your tracking is set up and that you are receiving the data you need to make informed decisions.
Personas – Does your Google Analytics suggest that different groups of users behave in different ways? Do you have different personas for each objective?
User journeys – How do user journeys change for different personas? Are version leaving conversion paths to seek out information that should have been shown on the pages they’ve already viewed?
Site performance – Are specific parts of your website underperforming? Do you have high bounce rates? Do you have low views per session indicating short user journeys? Are visitors not spending long enough on your website?
Heatmapping – Having pinpointed problematic pages, use heatmapping to see what your visitors are clicking on, how far through pages your visitors are scrolling, and if they’re leaving before they see important messaging, trust signals and signposting.
Experiments – Once you’ve theorised the changes you need to make, set up A/B experiments to test your theories.
Useful tools
- Google Analytics – the industry standard for measuring how your website performs. Google Analytics 4 now features vastly improved ways of mapping user journeys and exploring performance data.
- Google Data Studio and Power BI – Data visualisation software that makes it easy to sift through all your data, find underperforming areas and report progress.
- HotJar and Microsoft Clarity – Tools for viewing heatmaps to see how visitors scroll and what they click on. You can also make visitor recordings to investigate exactly how your website is used.
- Google Optimize – A/B testing software from Google. Google Optimize is being sunset in September 2023, but Google promises to integrate more features directly into Google Analytics 4. Optimizely is likely to continue is the industry standard.
