CRO: What is it, and why do you need it?

There’s no doubt about it: e-commerce is a lot trickier than it used to be. The early days of Google Ads (Adwords) and Facebook’s transformation into a marketing behemoth used to mean that for every dollar you threw into digital advertising, you’d net a tidy profit from the online sales. Back in the day, it was easy, predictable money.

Then everyone caught on. Suddenly, competition was fierce. Bidding for both space and audience attention quickly became eye-wateringly expensive – and audiences became smarter and more sophisticated as they got used to the new ways in which they were being exposed to advertising.

Today, this means that throwing a few thousand dollars into a slick, expensive and professional campaign is likely to be a waste of money unless you understand and configure your site according to how people behave. In other words, these days it’s not good enough to post a Hollywood blockbuster-style video as an ad and just hope for the best, you have to deliberately design landing pages to make it as easy as possible for visitors to buy, once they click through to your website. This is what’s known as CRO.

CRO – Conversion Rate Optimisation – is simply increasing the percentage of visitors to your site who convert.

Depending on what you do and what you’re selling, a conversion could mean a sale (for example, buying a pair of jeans from a clothing retailer), a booking (such as reserving a table at a restaurant), or even a lead (such as a new client enquiry to a law firm).

In fact, it’s because of this sheer volume of things we can now do online – everything from seeing a doctor to ordering a delivery pizza to holding a 250-person meeting – that people are so easily overwhelmed. As a business owner, you need to respect the ever-shortening attention span of your customers. They are probably just as busy as you are.

That’s not their only problem though, people aren’t just very busy – there’s now no predictable behavioural path like there used to be. For example, a customer might first discover your business through an ad. After clicking on your ad, they arrive on your site, but leave without buying anything. Within the span of a week, they might receive a retargeting ad, hear a radio spot, read some online reviews, and perhaps even get a friend’s recommendation before finally returning to your site to actually buy.

Due to how messy and frenzied today’s customer journey typically is, optimising your site to prompt the desired customer actions are more critical now than they’ve ever been. To get site visitors to convert to customers, you must optimise your entire e-commerce shopfront design. This involves such things as removing barriers to purchase, encouraging specific actions, and generally making your site as user-friendly as possible. CRO is simply doing all of this: optimising for conversion above all else.

Why Bother With CRO?

Well, without it you run the risk of wasting money! No matter how glossy the ad campaign, if people can’t easily buy your product, they won’t. CRO gives you better control over how your customers interact with your website and enables you to customise paths they can take towards conversion.

• CRO increases your profits

If more people are buying your product, that means more people are perusing your product pages, opening your EDMs, and subscribing to your notifications. CRO means making small tweaks for no extra cost: you pay the same amount to attract customers but increase the number of actual buyers.

• CRO improves SEO

Google loves easy-to-navigate websites. If customers easily locate the products they want and buy them – that’s a big green tick. Increased conversion rates mean visitors are spending more time on your site, and probably leaving as satisfied customers. Remember - these happy shoppers will convince others to visit your store as well through word of mouth or online reviews – which again, is more traffic for you.

• CRO ensures the customer comes first

When you optimise your site for people, it means you’re always thinking about the experience they have with your brand. When you consider CRO when redesigning your e-commerce site, you look through the eyes of your customers - you’re not putting your preferences (or your web designer’s preferences!) over theirs. CRO keeps you customer-centric.

What is my conversion rate?

It’s hard to know how to improve something if you’re not measuring it! Fortunately, if you’ve got Google Analytics (or a similar platform), calculating your conversion rate is relatively simple.

Conversion Rate = Conversions ÷ Visitors x 100%

For example: if you sell jewellery online, all you need to do is divide the total number of buyers by the number of total site visitors, expressed as a percentage. If 50 people bought jewellery and 400 visited your site, your CR would be 12.5% (50 ÷ 400 x 100 %).

Incorporating CRO into your landing page

All this info, you’re probably wondering how to get started! Unfortunately, depending on your product, industry, and audience, CRO has quite a few moving parts.

Easy wins are things like shortening the checkout process (fewer clicks), offering more forms of payment such as AfterPay, and allowing customers to transact as ‘guests’, rather than making them create an account. Beyond this, there are data tracking methodologies, A/B testing, site speed improvements and mobile-first strategies.

In a nutshell, considering your customers by adopting good CRO means you’ll reap the rewards of your online marketing much sooner – and more predictably – to foster sustainable business growth through online sales.

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Want to develop a customised CRO strategy to accelerate your online sales? Reach out for a chat – kiran@glasselephant.com.