Paid Media, Earned Media, Owned Media … now it’s time for CRO!
Get to know the humble yet mighty CRO through these simple questions:
- What is CRO?
CRO stands for “Conversion Rate Optimization” which is a combination of art and science to help you better understand your website visitors with the aim to convert them into customers.
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- Why invest in CRO?
If you’ve invested huge chunks on ads, social media and other channels to bring in traffic to your website but see little to no sales, most likely there is a problem somewhere on your website. The idea is then to put the effort to discover what went wrong when your web audiences land on your website and identify where they are dropping off from the conversion funnel.
- How CRO helps increase sales?
Let’s take a look at a sample scenario. Suppose you enter an online e-commerce website, and you’ve spent a good 15 seconds scanning the whole page for a “buy” or “pay” button. To no avail, you would simply close the browser. Going through the CRO process would then be about investigating which web components could be better placed, what elements attract the visitors to stay on the website or which factors best lead them to do the desired action, like buying your items!
- How it works?
The very first step involves identifying a problem or opportunity for your website and landing pages which could be simply done via web analytics. Next is to decide what type of test you want to perform or whether a simple survey or quick fix would do the job. In the case you decide to run some web testing, the most common and recommended to begin with is A/B testing.
- How Does A/B Testing work?
In the case of A/B testing, the website’s traffic would be split into groups of equal sizes, for instance 50-50%. The first group would then see version A of your website with the second group would see version B. It is recommended to run the test for at least a month to gather enough test data for more accurate results. Based on the test set-up, you could see which website version works better at attracting and engaging your audience.
- What can be tested?
Anything you can think of. You can play with the words, change the theme color, use different photos, move the button, adjust the checkout process and amend various parts of the website. Here’s a quick example: If you are running an ecommerce website, which phrase do you think is better at urging people to buy “Last item in stock” versus “Last chance to buy”. Yes, you may have the answer but it never hurts to test.
- What if I’d like to test more than 2 versions?
No problem! You can run tests for versions A to Z if you want. But let’s keep it real; a maximum of 4 versions is probably better. A/B testing is a live test, which means your real audience would see some difference. If you ran over 20 versions at the same time; this will confuse your audience and jeopardize the accuracy of the test. The more versions you run, the smaller the test groups.
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In a nutshell, through website testing, you would gain invaluable insights about your website visitors. Feel free to talk to one of our experts to learn more about how conversion rate optimization works.
