A Total Guide to Putting Together a CRO Strategy

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking ways to maximize their online presence and drive conversion rates. This is where a conversion rate optimization strategy comes into play. 

A successful conversion rate optimization strategy can significantly impact a company’s bottom line by improving website performance and increasing customer conversions.

However, creating an effective CRO strategy requires careful planning, data analysis, and iterative testing. This comprehensive guide will explore the essential steps and best practices for crafting a winning CRO strategy. 

From understanding the importance of CRO analysis to leveraging test results for continuous improvement, this guide will equip you with the knowledge and tools necessary to optimize your website and maximize your conversion rates. Get ready to take your business to new heights through the power of CRO.

Step 1: Analyze Your Current Performance

The Role of Data

Data is crucial in developing a Conversion Rate Optimization strategy. Data makes it easier to identify where you can improve and empowers you to make data-driven decisions, among other things. 

1. Identifying areas for improvement: Data allows you to understand how your website or landing pages are currently performing. You can pinpoint specific areas needing improvement by analyzing metrics such as conversion, bounce, and exit rates, and session durations. Data helps you identify the pain points and bottlenecks in the user journey, allowing you to focus your CRO efforts where they are most needed.
2. Making data-driven decisions: Rather than relying on guesswork or assumptions, data allows you to make informed decisions based on actual user behavior. By analyzing user interactions, click patterns, and navigation paths, you can gain insights into what works well and what needs to be optimized. Data helps remove biases and subjective opinions, allowing you to prioritize your optimization efforts based on evidence.
3. Setting realistic goals: Data provides a baseline for measuring the success of your CRO strategy. By understanding the current performance metrics, you can set realistic and achievable goals for improvement. Whether increasing conversion rates, reducing bounce rates, or improving average order value, data helps you set benchmarks and measure progress over time.
4. Tracking the impact of changes: When implementing changes as part of your CRO strategy, it’s important to track and measure the impact of those changes. Data allows you to compare before-and-after metrics to determine if the changes have positively or negatively affected conversion rates. This iterative approach helps you refine and optimize your strategy based on real-world results.
5. Justifying investments and demonstrating ROI: By using data to show the impact of your CRO efforts, you can justify investments in resources, tools, and experiments. Data helps you demonstrate the return on investment of your CRO activities, making it easier to secure buy-in from stakeholders and make the case for further optimization efforts.

Key Metrics

There are several metrics that you can look at when analyzing website performance. The metrics you should focus on may vary. It really depends on your specific business goals and the type of website you have. Here are some of the key metrics you should consider tracking:

1. Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors to your website who take a desired action (such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter). Conversion rate is one of the most important website metrics to measure, as it shows how effectively your website is converting visitors into customers or leads.
2. Bounce Rate: This metric refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are not finding what they are looking for or that your website needs to be more engaging to encourage them to stay.
3. Session Duration: This metric tells you how long visitors spend on your website. A longer session duration can signify that visitors are engaged with your content and find what they need on your website.
4. Pageviews: Pageviews count the number of times a particular page on your website has been viewed. This metric can help you determine which pages are most popular with visitors.
5. Exit Rate: This is the percentage of visitors leaving your website after viewing a page. An unusually high exit rate for a particular page may indicate that the page is confusing, uninformative, or irrelevant to visitors’ needs.
6. Time on Page: This metric shows how long a visitor spends on a particular page. Time on page can help you determine your content’s effectiveness and whether visitors find it informative.
7. Click-Through Rate (CTR): This metric measures the percentage of users who clicked on a particular link or button on your website (such as a call-to-action button). CTR can help you determine the effectiveness of your website’s design and layout.

By monitoring these metrics and other relevant ones, you can gain insights into user behavior on your website, identify areas for improvement, and develop an effective CRO strategy that helps you achieve your business goals.

Gathering This Data

This all sounds great, right? But how are you supposed to actually gather this information? Well, as it turns out, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can provide valuable data about your website’s performance. We highly recommend utilizing this powerhouse of a tool to collect the data you need for your CRO strategy. 

1. Set up Google Analytics: First, you’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account and add the tracking code to your website. The tracking code is a snippet of JavaScript that collects data and sends it to your Google Analytics account. Follow the instructions provided by Google to set up the tracking code correctly.
2. Define your goals: Defining your goals within Google Analytics is essential before diving into data analysis. Goals are specific actions or milestones you want visitors to take on your website (e.g., completing a purchase or filling out a form). You can track and measure the conversion rate and other related metrics by setting up goals.
3. Explore the reporting interface: Once you’ve set up Google Analytics and defined your goals, you can start exploring the reporting interface. The interface provides various sections, including Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions, allowing you to view your data’s different aspects.
4. Analyze audience data: In the Audience section, you can gather insights about the demographics of your visitors (age, gender, location), interests, and behavior on your website. This information can help you better understand your target audience and tailor your CRO strategy accordingly.
5. Analyze acquisition data: The Acquisition section shows you how visitors are finding your website. It provides data on channels (organic search, direct, social media, etc.), referral sources, and keywords. Analyzing this data lets you identify which channels drive the most traffic and focus your CRO efforts accordingly.
6. Analyze behavior data: The Behavior section helps you understand how visitors engage with your website. It provides insights into the most popular pages, the flow visitors follow through your website, and how they interact with specific content. This information can help you identify pages with high bounce rates or low engagement, allowing you to optimize those areas.
7. Track goal conversions: In the Conversions section, you can track the performance of your defined goals. This allows you to measure your conversion rate, look at specific goal completions, and analyze visitors’ paths to complete those goals. By understanding the conversion funnel and potential drop-off points, you can optimize the user journey for better conversions.
8. Create customized reports and dashboards: Google Analytics allows you to create customized reports and dashboards to focus on specific metrics important to your business. You can create segments, apply filters, and choose specific dimensions and metrics to analyze. This customization helps you dig deeper into the data that matters most to your CRO strategy.
9. Set up regular reporting and monitoring: To gain ongoing insights, it’s essential to set up regular reporting and monitoring within Google Analytics. You can schedule automated reports to be sent to your email or regularly review the data within the platform itself. This helps you stay updated with your website’s performance and identify trends and changes over time.

Remember that Google Analytics offers a vast array of features and functionalities, so it’s helpful to explore tutorials, resources, and documentation provided by Google to utilize the tool fully. You can extract meaningful insights for your CRO strategy with practice and a deeper understanding of the data.

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Why Your Target Audience Matters

Understanding your target audience is crucial to Conversion Rate Optimization success because it helps you tailor your website and its content to meet your customers’ specific needs and preferences. 

By gaining insights into what your audience wants and expects from your website, you can optimize the user experience to increase engagement, conversions, and sales.

Here are some reasons why understanding your target audience is essential for CRO success:

1. Improves website relevance: Understanding your audience helps you tailor your website to their specific needs and preferences, making it more relevant to them. You can gain your audience’s trust and foster stronger relationships by providing relevant content, offers, and messaging.
2. Increases engagement: By optimizing your website for your audience, you can improve engagement levels. When visitors feel your website meets their needs, they are more likely to spend more time on it, return frequently, and engage with your brand.
3. Boosts conversion rates: By making your website more relevant and engaging to your target audience, you can increase your conversion rates. When visitors find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they are more likely to take the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
4. Reduces bounce rates: High bounce rates often indicate that visitors did not find your website relevant or engaging. Understanding your target audience can create a more compelling website that keeps visitors engaged, reducing bounce rates.
5. Tightens integration: Understanding your audience enables you to align your website with your brand and company mission. This improves the overall integration of your website with your marketing and business strategies.
6. Provides a competitive edge: Understanding your target audience helps you differentiate your website from competitors. By tailoring your website to meet the needs of your audience, you can create a unique value proposition that sets you apart from others in your industry.

How to Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience, including Conversion Rate Optimization, is critical in any marketing strategy. Here are some methods you can use to help identify your target audience:

1. Surveys and questionnaires: Conducting surveys can provide direct insights into your target audience’s preferences, needs, and expectations. You can create online surveys and distribute them through email, social media, or your website. Ask questions about demographics, interests, behavior, and their experience with your website. Analyze the responses to identify patterns and trends.
2. User testing: User testing involves observing and collecting user feedback as they interact with your website or prototype. This method allows you to understand how real users navigate your site, where they encounter difficulties, and what elements they find appealing. You can conduct user testing through in-person sessions or online tools like UserTesting.com. Analyze the feedback and observations to identify common pain points and points of improvement.
3. Analytics and data analysis: Dig into your website analytics, such as Google Analytics, to gain insights about your current visitors. Analyze data on demographics, behavior flow, pages visited, and conversion rates. This data can reveal valuable information about your target audience’s characteristics and behavior. Look for patterns and trends that can inform your targeting efforts.
4. Customer feedback and support channels: Actively seek feedback through customer support channels, such as email, chat, or social media. Pay attention to the questions, concerns, and suggestions from your customers. This feedback can provide insights into their needs, pain points, and areas where your website can be improved to serve them better.
5. Competitor analysis: Analyzing your competitors can help you identify overlaps and differences in target audiences. Study their websites, messaging, and marketing strategies to gain insights into their target audience. Look for gaps in the market that your website can fill or ways to differentiate yourself by targeting a different segment within your industry.
6. Social media listening: Monitor conversations and discussions related to your industry or niche on social media platforms. Tools like social media monitoring software or even manual searches allow you to gather insights into people’s interests, needs, challenges, and opinions. This information can guide your targeting efforts by understanding what resonates with your potential audience.

Remember that identifying your target audience may involve a combination of these methods. It’s important to continuously gather data and refine your understanding of your target audience as your business evolves. Regularly review and update your target audience profiles to ensure your targeting strategies remain effective.

Creating User Personas

Creating user personas is an effective way to understand and represent your target audience. User personas are fictional characters representing users with similar characteristics, needs, goals, and challenges. Here are some examples and best practices for creating user personas:

1. Identify your key segments: Start by identifying the key segments within your target audience that share common characteristics. For example, you may have different customer segments based on demographics, such as age, gender, income, or psychographics, such as values, interests, and lifestyle.
2. Gather data and insights: Use surveys, analytics, and user testing to gather data and insights about your target audience. Analyze the data to identify patterns, behaviors, and characteristics unique to each segment.
3. Organize and prioritize the data: Organize the data and insights into categories representing each persona’s characteristics – including demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and pain points information. Prioritize the data based on relevance and loyalties to the purchasing journey.
4. Create fictional personas: Once you have identified the key segments, create a fictional character or persona representing each group. A user persona should have a name, a photo, a job title, and a brief description of their life. Be creative and make the user persona as realistic and relatable as possible.
5. Capture persona traits: For each persona, capture their traits, goals, needs, and motivations. Understand what drives them to your website. How can they best engage with the website? What challenges do they face that would prevent them from converting? And so forth.
6. Use personas for decision-making: Finally, use the personas to inform decision-making across your business – from marketing and messaging to website design and content creation. When making tactical decisions, ask yourself, “Are we making this decision based on what we know about our personas?”

Here are some examples of user personas:

• Sally, the working mom: Sally is 35 years old and works full-time as a marketing director at a tech company. She has two children, a busy schedule, and limited free time. She values convenience and efficiency. She needs a website that provides clear information quickly and easily without too much effort.
• Mike, the young adventurer: Mike is a 23-year-old recent college graduate who loves to travel and explore. He’s single and always on the go. He’s interested in unique experiences and values spontaneity. He needs a website that recommends off-beaten-path travel experiences and offers seamless booking processes.
• Linda, the small business owner: Linda is a 50-year-old who owns her own flower shop. She values quality, affordability, and customer service. She’s looking for a website to enhance her brand and business image and showcase her work.

Step 3: Develop Hypotheses for Optimization

In Conversion Rate Optimization, hypotheses are crucial in testing and optimization. Hypotheses are educated guesses or statements that propose a potential improvement or change to a specific element of a website or user experience to increase the conversion rate.

The role of hypotheses in CRO is to provide a framework for testing and experimentation. They help to answer questions like, “What should we test?” “Why do we believe a change will lead to better conversion?” “How can we prioritize our optimization efforts?”

Hypotheses provide a structured approach to testing by outlining the expected outcome, the reasons for expecting that outcome, and the specific elements or variables to be tested.

By formulating hypotheses, CRO practitioners can generate testable ideas and prioritize potential changes based on their impact and likelihood of success. These hypotheses help focus the optimization process and ensure that tests are conducted with clear objectives and measurable outcomes in mind.

An effective hypothesis in CRO typically follows a structure known as the “If-Then” framework. It consists of the following components:

1. If: Clearly define the specific change or variation that will be implemented.
2. Then: State the expected outcome or improvement that you anticipate will result from the change.
3. Because: Provide the rationale or supporting evidence behind the hypothesis, explaining why you believe the proposed change will positively impact the conversion rate.

Once hypotheses are formulated, they guide the creation of A/B testing or other testing methods to validate or invalidate the proposed changes. The results of these tests provide valuable data and insights that can inform further optimization efforts to continuously improve a website’s conversion rate or user experience.

Here are some examples:

1. Hypothesis: Moving the “Add to Cart” button to a more prominent location on the product page will increase the number of items added to the cart.
   • Test: A/B test with the control page (original design) and the variation page (with the “Add to Cart” button moved to a more prominent location).
   • Result: The variation page showed a 22% increase in the number of items added to the cart and an 11% increase in conversion rate.
2. Hypothesis: Simplifying the checkout form and minimizing the number of form fields will reduce cart abandonment rates.
   • Test: A/B test with the control page (original, complex form) and the variation page (simplified form with fewer form fields).
   • Result: The variation page showed a 20% decrease in cart abandonment rates and an 11% increase in conversion rate.
3. Hypothesis: Adding social proof elements, such as customer reviews and ratings, to the product page will increase trust and credibility and result in more purchases.
   • Test: A/B test with the control page (original design without reviews or ratings) and the variation page (with customer reviews and ratings added to the product page).
   • Result: The variation page showed a 16% increase in conversion rates and a 12% increase in revenue per visitor.
4. Hypothesis: Changing the headline and call-to-action (CTA) on the home page to emphasize the product’s unique value proposition will increase the number of signups.
   • Test: A/B test with the control page (original design with the generic headline and CTA) and the variation page (with a more compelling headline and CTA).
   • Result: The variation page showed a 25% increase in sign-ups and a 16% increase in conversion rate.

It’s important to note that every website and audience is unique, so a hypothesis that works for one site may not necessarily work for another. 

The key to successful hypothesis testing is to use data and insights to formulate educated guesses, test these with controlled experiments, and continuously iterate and optimize based on the results to improve conversion rates.

Step 4: Plan and Execute Your Tests

A/B testing, or split testing, is a crucial component of Conversion Rate Optimization. It compares two versions of a web page to determine which one performs better in terms of achieving a specific goal, such as increasing the conversion rate or reducing bounce rates.

A/B testing works by randomly dividing the website traffic into two groups and showing each group a different web page variation. The variations can differ in any element or feature of the page, such as layout, copy, images, colors, and call-to-action. 

The variation that performs better in achieving the desired outcome is considered the winner, and the optimization team adopts it as the new and improved version of the page.

The steps involved in A/B testing are:

1. Identify the Test Objective: Clearly define the goal of the test. What do you want to achieve? What metrics will you use to measure its success?
2. Formulate a Hypothesis: Formulate a hypothesis based on your goals and data insights. What changes or variations do you expect to result in improved performance, and why?
3. Divide Traffic and Run the Test: Divide the traffic between the control group (the original web page) and the variation group (the web page with the proposed changes), and run the test for a predetermined period.
4. Collect and Analyze Data: Collect and analyze data during the test period to determine which web page version performs better. Use statistical analysis to ensure that the results are significant and not just due to chance.
5. Select a Winner: Based on the results, select a winner that achieves the desired outcome and makes the changes permanent on the site.

A/B testing has been highly successful in driving conversion rates and improving user experience, and several businesses have used it to achieve significant improvements. Here are two examples of businesses that used A/B testing to drive growth:

1. Obama’s 2012 Campaign: During Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, his team experimented with multiple A/B tests on the campaign website to drive donations. By testing different headlines, variations in website design, and copy, they increased the donation conversion rate.
2. Amazon: Amazon has been using A/B testing for years to optimize its website and customer experience. In one instance, they used A/B testing to optimize the placement of their product recommendations on the home page. The result of the test was an increase in sales.

A/B testing is a powerful tool for improving website performance, and the key to its success is to use data and insights to inform the testing process, design meaningful and data-driven experiments, and continuously iterate and optimize based on the results.

Step 5: Analyze Results and Iterate

Analyzing test results and iterating on your CRO strategy is essential for driving continuous improvement and maximizing conversion rates. It allows you to gain insights into user behavior, understand what works and what doesn’t, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your website or marketing campaigns.

Here are some best practices for analyzing data from A/B tests and using the results to inform future tests and iterations:

1. Segment Data: Segmenting data allows you to analyze the performance of different user groups separately. By segmenting data based on demographics, traffic sources, device types, or any other relevant factors, you can gain deeper insights into the impact of variations on specific user segments.
2. Statistical Significance: Use statistical analysis to determine whether the observed differences in test results are statistically significant or just due to chance. This ensures you make decisions based on reliable and accurate data, not random fluctuations.
3. Identify Key Metrics: Identify the key metrics that align with your goals and focus on those when analyzing test results. Look for significant conversion rate changes, bounce rate, revenue per visitor, or any other metrics crucial to your business objectives.
4. Consider User Experience: Consider the user experience while analyzing test results. Look for user feedback, qualitative insights, and feedback from support channels to understand how variations may have impacted the user experience.
5. Learn From Failures: Even if a test doesn’t yield the desired results, the results can still hold valuable insights. Analyze failed tests to determine why they didn’t perform well and extract learnings that can help guide future experiments.
6. Document and Share Insights: Keep records of your test results, insights, and learnings. This documentation will serve as a knowledge base and reference point for future tests and iterations. Share this information with your team to foster collaboration and alignment.

By diligently analyzing data and using test results to guide future tests and iterations, you can continuously improve your CRO strategy, optimize your website or marketing campaigns, and ultimately achieve higher conversion rates.

Up Your CRO Strategy Game With Revity Marketing

Ready to unlock the full potential of Conversion Rate Optimization and skyrocket your business growth? Contact Revity Marketing today and let our team of professionals handle the hard work for you. 

With our expertise in CRO strategies, we will optimize your website, increase conversions, and drive your business forward. Take advantage of the incredible benefits of CRO in action. Contact us now or call us at 801.559.7539 to schedule a consultation and start elevating your online success.