Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the practice of improving website conversions by increasing the number of users who take a specific action on a website. These actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a phone number or link.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the practice of improving website conversions by increasing the number of users who take a specific action on a website. These actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a phone number or link.
Simply put, the practice of Conversion Rate Optimisation specifically focuses on improving website conversions. We have had a lot of clients who have come to us with reasonably healthy website traffic numbers, yet their conversions are minimal.
Depending on the type of website you have, i.e. ecommerce or otherwise, average website conversion rates vary. However, just for the sake of the exercise, if you took what would be considered a relatively high 5% conversion rate, you’re effectively accepting the fact that 95% of the visitors to your site are not engaging at all.
Imagine that statistic if you had a retail shop or cafe, in that out of every 100 people that come into your store, only 5 of those customers make a purchase? You’d go broke. We need to have this logic front and centre when we are talking about your website also.
You might have heard the phrase: “Traffic is vanity whereas conversions are sanity”. This is so important to remember when it comes to having a truly effective website. It just means that you can have all the traffic to your website that you want but if no one takes an action, i.e. they convert, all that traffic is for naught.
As per above your conversion rate is just the percentage of those people who visit your website and take a desired action. You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number that actually convert by the number of people that came to your website. For the sake of keeping it simple here, we are just talking about overall website visitors and those converting, but you can also measure the conversion rate on a page by page basis.
This January 2021 update is from Growcode E-commerce 2021 market data that compares conversions by sector. The wide variation in conversion by sector is clear here, showing the importance of comparing to similar sectors where possible.
Sports and Recreation
Arts & Crafts
Baby & Child
Cars & Motorcycling
Electrical & Commercial Equipment
Fashion Clothing & Accessories
Food & Drink
Health & Wellbeing
Home Accessories & Giftware
Kitchen & Home Appliances
Pet Care
| 0.00% |
| 1.00% | 2.00% | 3.00% | 4.00% | 5.00% |
There are common misconceptions that Conversion Rate Optimisation is just about CTA’s (call to actions) on the page, or changing the colour on an action button. Yes these are included in the CRO process, but these are just parts of the overall picture. We 100% agree with Hotjar, one of the leading CRO tools, where they found there are three things you need to know to get a full overview of your website so you can optimise it efficiently:
Understand where you are now and where you want to go.
Digilari Media will work with you to ascertain the true current status of your website, or particular page you are targeting.
This will give us a good understanding as to how current website visitors are navigating your website. It’ll show us where they are coming onto the site and where they are jumping off, plus all the things they did in between whilst they were there.
By using one of the leading heat-mapping software tools we will be able to see, in real time, how your website visitors navigate your site. It shows where their mouse moves across the site, where they clicked on, how fast they did this and a whole raft of other insights that will go on to assist us in developing the most effective CRO campaign for you.
Depending on the level of traffic to your website, we will provide you with an initial report of our findings and what our recommendations would be. If you have a lot of traffic coming to your site we can provide this report to you within 4-6 weeks, whereas if the monthly traffic to your site is less than 2000 per month, we may require 8 - 12 weeks before we can provide any robust insights.
Using this report we will undergo a CRO Strategy session which covers off the findings in more detail along with gaining a better understanding of your business goals and objectives that you have in and around the CRO campaign.
Now we have agreement on how things are now, and where we want to get to, we just need to agree on the level of CRO activity required.
We’ll be having quite a few discussions, you’ll be seeing a lot of things going on and you’ll get a detailed monthly report to review. We will also start to see the fruits of our labours in your increased conversion rates.
If you’d like to get started asap, here’s a tool Hotjar have been kind enough to provide a template plan to help get the initial CRO process underway.
Template Credits: Hotjar
