Conversion Rate Optimization ( CRO ) is a set of tactics used in order to optimize the conversion rate of a website. CRO aims to improve your site's ability to make money through analysis and implementation of tactics designed specifically for it. CRO targets the logical parts of our minds, which are responsible for decision-making. This guide will walk you through CRO basics, give you some ideas to get started and introduce some CRO tools to get you started.
At its' core, CRO is the art of increasing your website's potential to make money. CRO helps remind us that our websites key objective is increasing conversion rate. Increasing the percentage of users that convert means making your website and its pages work better for you, your customers, and your business. By increasing the rate at which people take favorable actions when they visit a website, we're improving our business metrics and the user experience.
While there are many ways to approach optimizing conversions, every business is unique. We therefore need a way to test and validate that a change had a positive impact on our desired metrics. Enter A/B testing. A/B testing allows us to measure the relative impact of a change to the experience and compare it to the original baseline (control group). There are a variety platforms designed to make A/B testing easy. Visit our A/B testing page for a full breakdown on how to get started.
Here are some great place to start testing to see if you can improve your conversion rates. It's often best to start at the top of the funnel or user experience and work your way down.
Here is a complete list of over 1000 Shopify apps designed to improve conversion.
The biggest constraint to CRO is traffic and conversion volume. If you don't have enough traffic, you won't be able to tell if the changes you are making are having a net positive of negative effect. As a result, reaching statistical significance for your A/B test can be challenging early on. Try reducing the cutoff threshold. While it is typically 95% confidence, this is strictly convention and ultimately an arbitrary cutoff. While we want to maximize confidence, we can still make incremental progress with less certainty when volume constraints are governing our ability to determine success. If we are 65% confident that a variant is better (rather than 95%), the odds are still in our favor.
Also consider increasing ad budget or other acquisition channels to maximize the learnings from test.
Additionally, the most common outcome of a test is that there is no measurable, statistically significant change in performance. That means we may need to run ten or more tests before we find a winner. Rapid testing prioritizes speed, dismissing low impact variants early in hopes of finding an extreme outlier. If a change makes a big difference, it will reach statistical significance much more quickly. Therefore if a test fails to reach significance early, shelve it and move on to the next idea. Just keep testing and you'll inevitably discover the right experience for your brand and consumers.
With so many variables to test, getting started with CRO can be daunting. The best thing to do is to dig and get going. Start with a free A/B testing platform and try something simple. Once you've got the hang of it, the sky is the limit. Be creative, be bold and have fun!