How Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Works?

How Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Works? – CRO Testing Tips

We have a great research work over here in Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia, we have seminars about the concept of CRO.Thanks to funkada sdn bhd for providing the opportunity of researching, testing and applying CRO new research theory techniques in Malaysia and south east Asian countries. we are also thankful for Kalim Khan (khanztuto) for sharing his research and expertise. 

Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of ensuring that the visitors on your website are directed towards a particular task that you want them to perform. However, simply directing a visitor to a task is not conversion rate optimization, which essentially indicates that there is more than meets the eye as far as this process is concerned. When executed seamlessly, the process of CRO can help you to increase your revenue and your professional goals by enabling you to manifest your intentions in the digital space. Are you ready to learn the art of digital manifestation?

To explain this, let us re-visit a common behavior we all exhibit. Have you observed your habit of visiting at least a dozen websites before finally opting to shop from the one that appealed to you the most? The reason for the appeal can vary widely, from web design, ease of navigation, content, to prices and shopping cart experience as far as e-commerce websites are concerned. So, if we go back and look at the entire thought process behind this behavior, we would realize that conversion rate, i.e., converting a visitor into a dedicated customer, is one of the most critical parameters that determine the success of a website or app.

Conversion rate optimization is about understanding and subsequently, influencing the pattern and behavior of the visitors on a particular page app. It is about trying to get the visitors to perform the actions that you have set as your goals. These actions can vary from aspects such as liking a page, registering on your website, subscribing to the mailing list, downloading an app, becoming a paid member, ordering a particular product, etc.

How Does Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Works?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is similar to practicing a martial art or training yourself for that back-flip that you always wanted to do. It starts with intense study, where you learn from successful cases of conversion and understand the behavioral patterns that successful website owners took advantage of. After doing your research, you can start your own experimentation by looking at the feedback that your website receives from its visitors. Prior to this, you can start using analytics to understands which elements need to be changed and altered on your website to ensure that of visitors do not have a hard time becoming full-time customers.

A crucial point to understand here is that the objective of Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is not about increasing the traffic, rather increase the number of visitors who ultimately become loyal customers.

How is Conversion Rate Optimization Measured?

In order to measure the effectiveness of the conversion rate optimization techniques, advanced big data analytics is a preferred tool. The effectiveness is measured in terms of several metrics. Some of them are as follows:

• Total Conversions – It is the total number of visitor who performed the desired action, be it, making a purchase, or, clicking the desired link.

• Conversion Rate – Simply speaking, it is the percentage of visitors who performed desired action. It is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors.

• Bounce Rate – This represents the percentage of people who could not find the desired information they needed from your site. This figure is measured by calculating the number of visitors who left your website without performing any action or without even exploring it for more than 4-5 minutes. This number should be as low as possible if you want to move towards a high conversion website.

• Average Time on Site – This metric measures the level of engagement of a visitor. It measures the average duration that a visitor spends on your website. The higher the average time spent on the website, better the prospect of achieving higher conversion rates.

• Average Page Views – This is also an engagement measurement metric. This number essentially signifies the number of pages a visitor traveled to on your website before exiting it. The higher the number, the more engaging your website is.

Why is Conversion Important?

Well, that is the easiest thing to understand. Obviously, without conversion, there would hardly be any revenue, and, your goals would remain a distant dream.

What are the Benefits of Conversion rate optimization (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimization is beneficial in following ways:

• A high conversion rate means a better return on investment (ROI).
• CRO also helps in getting the right customers and in focusing on their needs
• CRO can further help in return on investment (ROI) by reducing advertisement costs
• CRO is a powerful tool for ensuring focus on elements such as landing page optimization and website optimization in general
• It lowers customer acquisition costs

How can one achieve high degrees of Conversion Rate Optimization?

CRO involves fixing a strategy and consequently defining a hypothesis and a structure to test the hypothesis. Prior to this, the focus is shifted towards implementing the structure, and then measuring the performance through the same. Based on the reports or feedback garnered through the testing process, changes are made in the backend code and the process is repeated till fruition. The below image explains what a detailed CRO actually looks like.

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Four Reasons for You to Use Call Tracking for Boosting Your CRO Efforts

Most online marketing companies boast about delivering great results to their clients due to their cutting edge strategies, creative skills, versatility and their brand’s personality that sets them apart from their competitors. Even as the online marketing industry is turning towards mobile search, phone calls still play a significant role in the conversion rate optimization (CRO) process. There are some industry experts who believe that can make better measure the success of their call tracking efforts.

These days, call tracking software can provide online marketing firms as much insight into phone calls as compared to mouse-clicks and online forms. This means you can tell exactly what both online and offline marketing channels are making phones ring, and focus on the marketing that works best. Many well-established marketing firms point out that marketing attribution as the key aspect that helps service providers to retain more clients. Here are the reasons why your marketing team should include call tracking in your CRO efforts.

Phone Calls can Enhance Your Leads Attribution

Your client has no reason to invest their money and time in your company if start an online marketing campaign without tracking as much of the user’s search behavior and online interactions as you can. Also, just gathering clicks and conversion data on your online marketing campaigns is not enough. Here you could attribute a phone call inquiry to your company’s marketing activity and for that you can utilize any reliable call tracking software available on the market. You need to remember that majority of the call tracking software is designed especially for marketing and advertising firms. A call tracking software that records user interactions will draw together a complete overview of the user journey. Within the report you prepared you can see which marketing source driven the phone call whether this was offline or online things. And if the marketing was an online source, then you will see which pages they viewed right up until they dialed your number.

Accessing Real-time Marketing Campaign Data

For the sake of your client, you need to find the most useful information from the vast quantity of data generated from call tracking. Most call tracking software is designed to make its user easy to access useful information efficiently. If your client wants to access the software themselves, then the software developer will facilitate this by letting your client log in to a dashboard with their own branding and personalized reports. Call tracking also lets you record calls and play them back for qualitative feedbacks, even though quantitative data get you so far. If the receiving phone calls are not generating enough revenue, then call playback allows you to listen in on the calls and determine where sales are being lost. This allows your managers to address any issues in the sales message quickly.

Minimizing Wasteful Spending

You can use that spend for more effective marketing campaigns by analyzing your inbound phones for identifying which of your marketing efforts are not generating enough ROI. The granularity of phone call data allows your marketing team to find those landing pages that that drives majority calls, and the keywords that are driving customers to those web pages. This is how call tracking enables you to focus on investing in platforms that are providing their returns, so you do not have to make any assumptions. One of the key metrics to use is the cost-per-response and it tells you instantly whether you are getting the return you need, or whether you should revisit or cut marketing that do not promise results.

Integrating with Web Analytics

For maximizing your conversion efforts, you can integrate call tracking software with your current web analytics, monitoring and CRM software. The analytical combination of phone calls and online inquiries provides you a more complete picture of your marketing from the first interaction to converting the sale.

Online marketing firms can use call tracking software to consistently outperform the market as they have access to the full lead picture. Not only you proves your clients that you are generating quality leads, but it also shows how much revenue you are added to their end result.

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The Technology world is literally unpredictable and at the same time staying ahead of the game purely depends on how smart you work to fulfill the attributes of success. In fact, regarding the Conversion Rate Optimization, its acceptance comes with your spontaneity in evolving the website following the flicking consumer behavior.

Want to Change your Website Destiny: Follow these Tips

1) Evaluate your own website

This can be done with the help of Google Analytics that tracks down the website traffic. It gives you a better insight on your website performance and even helps in grabbing vague visitor data like region, frequency of use, the device used, etc. According to the studies, in the upcoming year’s user segmentation becomes more critical because of the increased rate in cross- device activity, and so user tracking becomes unavoidable. Another advantage of website evaluation is that it helps to you to spot the pages in the website that is having higher exit rate. This conveys you the idea that something is failing in the website for meeting user requirement and so solving out the issue glorifies the purpose of conversion optimization strategy.

2) Analyzing the Visitor’s Requirements

Once you have spotted out the weaker side of the website you can step into the next level of deeper analysis. Here you can explore the areas that are obstructing the user from further movement on the particular web page. This part of the task can be made simpler by employing certain tools like form analyzer, scroll maps etc.

To be more specific the purpose of these tools includes:

• Pointing out particular elements of the webpage that is dispiriting your website visitors
• Spotting the elements that are obstructing the user from the actual purpose or causing deviation from the main content.
• Analyzing the scroll and click behavior within different visitors of your webpage
• Finding out specific fields in the forms that are leading the visitors in declining the web forms

3) Effective Use of Surveys

This can be the best way of getting feedbacks from the visitors of your website. The real time surveys can be considered as spontaneous and genuine responses from the visitor’s while they are actively using your websites. The surveys can be optimized further by displaying it on particular segments of the webpage, that is suppose if the user rejects an application the survey can be activated for collecting the reason for abandons.

4) Making the Best Use of Exclusive Personalization Tools for Website

It is obviously clear that the personalization tool is worth in improving conversion rates of your websites. The recent surveys give the data regarding the increased use of personalization tool and further, reveal a greater percentage of respondents who are planning to use it in the near future.

5) Employ Best Website Design

Of course, it is a known fact that, a user takes just some milliseconds to conclude upon your website’s visual appeal. For instance, if your website has an impressive design and better user experience, it is definite that the visitor will go on to explore their actual requirement. So it is important to keep the website updated with current trends in designing.

Three Strategies for Maximizing Website Conversion Rate

For businesses such as online retailers, conversion rate is a crucial factor that determines the growth of revenue from their business. These businesses heavily invest in online marketing campaigns to attract quality traffic from search engines and social media sites to their website. They expect the majority of this traffic will convert into sales by purchasing products displayed on their site. Getting conversions online is not easy as thought and just like any other business, it is essential that your customers feel confident in your business to make a profit. Whether you are selling products or selling a service and trying to generate leads from your site, the same principles coincide.

Here you need to build up consumer confidence by following five important strategies given below. By adhering to these 3 conversion optimization strategies, you will build confidence of your consumers and generate leads and conversions you are looking for.

Making Your Site Professional-looking and Navigation-friendly

When you visit a website and leave it a few seconds later, it is called a “bounce” and it is usually because of the way the website appears to the site visitor. This can be due to the usability of the site or user experience in designing a site specifically for your target customers. Either way, there are people who study conversion rate optimization (CRO) for a living. When you own a website that is professional-looking with navigation-friendly features, then you will find that site visitors perceive your business as a professional enterprise which they can put on their confidence. Your website visitors will understand precisely what they need to do and how to find the information they want, if the website is navigation-friendly. Yu need to ask yourself the following questions to figure out whether your site is navigation-friendly.

• Does my site possess clear navigation links that lead to relevant and useful content?
• Does my site have a clear call-to-action?
• Is the opt-in box in my site provides a free offer that is appealing to customers?
• Whether the opt-in box is easy to find and above the fold?
• Is there a shortcut way other than the Menu bar that will lead to my products/services and “About Us” page?

Once you have got your website designed as per your customers’ needs, it will develop confidence in your business, thereby attract more visitors to your site, and more conversions.

Incorporating Testimonials in Your Site

When it comes to building customer confidence in your business, you cannot underestimate the value of word-of-mouth marketing. Also, when it comes to getting more conversions, what other people have to say is much more significant and effective than showcasing your work. You showcase the evidence of satisfied customers on your site, then more customer traffic will pour into your site and will convert. For realizing this goal, you need to ask your ‘satisfied’ customers to write a short testimonial for you to post it on your site. If most of the customers are really happy with what you have done for them, then they surely write a testimonial that positively portrays your business. You need to ensure that these testimonials are specific and show results. You can even take it one step further and ask for video-based testimonials.

Why Your Products/Services are Different Your Competitors

When it comes to purchasing a product, people do not care about its manufacturing jargon. They only care about how this product will solve their problems. When a potential customer visits your site, they expect three things that need to be satisfied:

• Can your product/service really solve my issue?
• Why is your solution is different and better than everyone else’?
• Whether your product/service is affordable to purchase?

Before selling your product to a customer, you need to think about why your site is different from your competitors and how it will increase sales from your target audience. Here you need to think as a customer, ask questions such as what a customer want to have and how he/she will use your product. Also, you need to figure out why your product is the best one to solve customer’s problems, and lay that out for them.

If you find difficulty in developing CRO strategies for increasing sales from your sites, you can consult with experts who will offer cost-effective and client-specific solutions that will fulfill your marketing campaign requirements.

Article is a combination of CRO research some of the contents are taken from What is CRO?  and checked and researched by Kalim Khan (khanztuto). For educational and research purposes only. Funkada is doing free website audit/analysis and working on research and implementation of CRO in Malaysia.