Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy in 5 Easy to Follow Steps

Everybody wants users to do something on their website. However, you need a conversion rate optimization strategy to encourage them to act.

Learn how to apply the principles of conversion optimization to any landing page with my free email course.

If you want to improve the conversion rate on your website, you need a conversion rate optimization strategy. If you are reading this post, you don’t need me to explain why conversion rate optimization is essential.

No website will perform as well as it should when initially launched. No amount of pre-launch testing with users will prepare your site for the real world. That is why we need to optimize for conversion post-launch. That is why you need a CRO strategy.

No amount of pre-launch testing with users will prepare your site for the real world. That is why we need to optimize for conversion, post-launch.

I have been working in the digital design field for over 27 years, most of those spent in user experience design and conversion rate optimization. Yet users still surprise me every time.

Only once a site is live can you monitor people’s natural behavior and begin to improve how well a site converts.

I have written an entire book on conversion optimization and a reasonably comprehensive conversion rate optimization guide. Still, in this post, I want to summarize my conversion rate optimization process when a client asks me to improve their site’s conversion rate. Hopefully, these conversion rate optimization tips will help you too. But, if you have questions, please feel free to drop me an email.

1. Identify Drop Out Points

All conversion rate optimization strategies start at the same point — identifying the weaknesses in the existing experience. If you don’t know where your site is underperforming, you cannot know where to put your efforts.

That starts in Google Analytics. But don’t worry; you don’t need to be an analytics expert to find problem areas of your website. You don’t even need to have goals or funnels set up. Starting is effortless.

Simply look at the pages that lead to the most exits from your site as a proportion of its page views. These are typically pages that are underperforming for some reason.

If you are carrying out e-commerce conversion rate optimization, pay particular attention to each page in the product selection and checkout flow. Where are people abandoning the process?

Focus your attention on the poorest performing pages. You can always return to the other pages later. You should continually optimize your site for conversion by passing through these steps. This process is not a one-off exercise.

2. Identify the Problem on the Underperforming Page

Once you have identified a problem page, the next step is to identify what is going wrong. We need some more insights into the page and how users are behaving on it to do this.

How to Look for Conversion Optimization Opportuntities

To understand what users are doing, we need to see summaries of their on-page behavior in the form of heatmaps and other insights. But we also need to watch individual users interacting with the page.

A good starting point is to install a tool like Hotjar. However, Microsoft also offers a similar free tool called Clarity.

By looking at the heatmaps and insights, you should get a clue about what may be going wrong. You can then watch some individual sessions to confirm your suspicions.

Occasionally, you will be non-the wiser even after using these tools. In those cases, some form of facilitated usability testing is the best way of identifying what is going wrong.

What to Look for When Seeking to Optimize a Page for Conversion

The actual process for identifying where things have gone wrong on a page and how they can be approved is not an exact science. It depends as much on experience, intuition, and empathy as anything. That said, three common issues come up regularly.

User’s Didn’t See Something

It is common for users to miss a critical piece of information or call to action, making the page less persuasive or preventing them from completing an important task.

You can typically spot this by looking at how people scroll on a page or watching back some individual session recordings. You may also want to run the page through an eye-tracking simulation tool like Attention Insights to see where people are probably looking on a page.

People Didn’t Understand

Even when users see important messaging, they don’t always understand what they were expected to do. For example, they may not realize an element is clickable or understand the required type of interaction.

You can typically identify this by looking at behaviors like rage clicking, clicking non-clickable elements, or triggering validation errors on forms.

What Didn’t Convince them?

If users are looking at the correct elements on the page and not making mistakes in their actions, it could be that they do not find the content of the page compelling.

It is a little harder to identify this through analytics or session videos. Often you need to speak to people or at least run a survey. However, dwell time may be one indicator because it could show the content is not grabbing the user’s attention. A poor click-through rate on critical calls to action is another good indicator.

Once you have an idea of where things might be going wrong, you can start exploring ways to improve things.

3. Test the Solution

The next step in your conversion rate optimization strategy is to come up with a way of overcoming the page’s current shortcomings. As with finding problems, this is mainly reliant on experience and intuition. Even after all my years as a designer, I still never find the optimal solution on my first attempt. If I implemented my first idea, I would make things worse!

Testing and experimentation are the only way to achieve a high conversion rate on a page. You will not miraculously guess it the first time.

Testing and experimentation are the only way to achieve a high conversion rate on a page. You will not miraculously guess it the first time.

How you test your ideas will depend on their complexity. If the changes you need to make are small, such as changing text or images, then the best way to test is using AB testing. You can make these changes quickly in a tool like Google Optimize or Optimizely.

Where you need to make more extensive changes such as changing page layout or the flow between pages, building and testing a prototype may be required.

Prototypes work particularly well for testing issues of visibility and usability. However, AB testing excels at judging whether a solution will convince users to act.

That said, whether you test a prototype or use AB testing, testing is the most important of my conversion rate optimization techniques. You will need to pass through multiple rounds of iteration and testing before you find the optimal solution. Even then, there is always room for improvement.

4. Rolling Out a Solution

When you struggle to improve on the results you receive from your testing significantly, it is probably time to roll out the solution you have developed.

If it is a simple AB test improvement, rolling out will be trivial. However, where a prototype has been built, you will probably need to present a business case justifying the development cost for making the changes. Fortunately, the testing you have carried out to date should provide you with all the evidence you require.

I want to share one word of warning when you do come to roll out your solution. Make sure you can roll back if things go wrong. No amount of testing can account for everything that might happen when you go live, so always have a way to revert to the previous version.

That said, don’t panic if you receive an adverse reaction, especially if making more significant changes to a system people use regularly. It takes time for people to adjust to change, and they often react negatively in the short term, even if the changes are positive.

As a general rule of thumb, I wait a couple of weeks before drawing too many conclusions about any negative feedback.

Once you have successfully rolled out your improvement, it is time to start the entire process again.

5. Rinse and Repeat Your Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy

If you are asking yourself, “what is a CRO strategy,” at its heart it is extremely straightforward. All it involves is going through an ongoing cycle of:

1. Identifying under performing pages.
2. Working out exactly what is going wrong.
3. Proposing and testing possible solutions.
4. Rolling out the highest performing solution.

So once you have completed the above steps, you return to the start, look for the next poorest performing page, and begin again.

Learn how to apply the principles of conversion optimization to any landing page with my free email course.