Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is about optimizing a particular web page (landing page) in order to generate more conversions. Examples of “conversions” are e.g. a completed purchase in an online store, sending a contact form or email, downloading an app, watching a video, or viewing a PDF.
Why Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) at all?
To bring visitors to your own website, whether through (expensive) advertising or search engine optimization is helpful. But this alone is often not enough to achieve the expected results.
People who visit your website, but do not make a purchase, use your contact form, or ring you up, depending on what conversions are relevant to your business, are of relatively little use.
How to increase your conversion rate?
In principle, the aim is to make the visitor’s path to your conversion(s) as easy and unproblematic as possible, to guide him (visually?), to provide him with the optimal information when and where he needs it and last but not least, also to touch him emotionally.
This includes, among others the following:
- To address your customer in a target audience-specific way: What does my customer want to know? How detailed? Comprehensibility
- Clear and unambiguous presentation of your USP’s (Unique Selling Propositions)
- Graphical or visual guidance of your visitor to your conversion
- Eliminate barriers and distractions that prevent the visitor from converting
- Use of appropriate action calls (Call-2-Actions)
CRO: The activity with the greatest leverage effect!
This is generally true when you “conversion-optimize” a landing page for the first time. Then the leverage effect is regularly impressively high. The conversion rate then can often be increased by 20%, 40% or much more.
Example: The conversion rate (percentage of visitors who also buys something) in an online shop is 1.2%. If the CRO can be lifted from 1.2 to 1.8%, an increase of 50% has been achieved. In other words, the landing page generates an average of 50% more deals or sales.
A/B Testing
How to determine if a particular landing page now works better or not?
One of the strengths of online marketing is that you can make decisions based on objective data and do not have to rely on any gut feelings.
For this purpose we are going to use “A/B testing”. With A/B testing two (or more) versions of an existing landing page are delivered simultaneously to the user. Which version of the landing page will be delivered to whom is at random and controlled by a cookie. If a user gets to see version A of the test then it will always (recurring visit) see this version. To decide which version works better the conversion rates of the two version are going to be measured and compared. After a while (enough traffic/visitors) the results become statistically relevant and can be seen as “objective”.