From fizzle to sizzle ??: steal our CRO audit steps and boost your conversions
Love to Grow ??
From conversion rates that fizzle to conversion rates that sizzle! Whether you're a digital marketer, product manager, or website owner, you want to be on the sizzlin’ ?? side at all times. But how??
Have you ever created a punchy meme for your landing page that had sass, spark, and a super furry animal? The clicks should have poured in: but instead, it sank like the Titanic (whomp whomp).?
We’re not saying you should forgo the witty puns and cheeky calls to action (CTAs), but increasing your conversions is a balancing act of letting your creativity shine and giving customers what they actually want and need—aka, the difference between getting website visitors to become paying customers, subscribers, or registrants.?
One of the fastest ways to do this is to perform a conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit. Think of it as an investigative assignment. Once you know what’s happening on your site, you can dig into why it’s happening and see those conversions rise.
In this month’s edition of Love to Grow, we walk you through the first phase of a CRO audit, so you can quickly identify the factors that hurt your conversion rate and prioritize improvements.
Before we dive in:
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?“For an effective CRO audit, look at your entire funnel, from visitor > purchase funnel > completed purchase. Check for drop-offs at each stage and see if there are gaps you can optimize. It’s better to start there than to focus only on getting more traffic into your funnel." — Laura Wong , Product Manager at Hotjar
????4 steps to kick off your CRO audit
Step 1: define key user conversions and set goals
Before starting your CRO audit, get super clear on your goals.?
A conversion refers to user actions that bring them closer to becoming paying customers. In ecommerce, it refers to purchases, while in SaaS, it includes trial signups, such as lead magnet signups or webinar registrations.?
Speak with stakeholders to define what conversions mean for your team, including macro-conversions like purchases and subscriptions, and micro-conversions, such as users adding items to their wishlist or watching a demo video.
?? Try these tools to help you define your goals quickly: Hotjar Funnels and Google Analytics Conversions.?
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Step 2: focus on high-impact pages
Follow CRO best practices by running your audit on pages with the most potential to impact your conversions.
? Prioritize pages that act as key touchpoints in the customer journey—like specific landing pages designed to convert, or pages where users sign up for demos or download whitepapers or ebooks.
? Avoid optimizing top-of-the-funnel content, such as blog posts designed to rank for informational keywords, which may get high traffic but have minimal direct sales impact. Auditing these conversion-oriented pages with healthy traffic numbers lets you make changes that yield results.
Step 3: understand the user behavior on those pages
To better understand user behavior and improve conversion rates, first use goal conversions in Google Analytics, enable event tracking, and check your metrics for user actions such as purchases, sign-ups, and registrations.?
Then, analyze heatmaps, which give you a visual representation of where users click, move, and scroll on your site, to pinpoint which conversion elements—like CTAs—are getting attention and which are being ignored.
Next, watch recordings—playbacks of user sessions—to see exactly what people do on your pages, so you can highlight where they drop off or become frustrated and understand why they’re failing to convert.
Step 4: gather voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights
Go beyond the numbers and dig into what users really want and need—in their own words.?
Conduct interviews and research to understand why some users convert?and what blocks other users?from becoming paying customers. Lean into feedback tools for first-hand opinions on your site elements, and launch surveys to discover more about your customers.
Are you noticing that users add products to their cart but abandon them when they reach checkout? Ask your users why they’re leaving with an exit-intent survey—perhaps they’re not finding what they need, and you need to improve your navigation design and search filters.?
?? Here are five free survey templates you can use right away to understand churn, investigate abandonment, and get more conversions.?
In a nutshell ??
Running a CRO audit not only helps you better understand your user needs, but also allows you to see which aspects of your site are maximizing or blocking conversions, so you can test out possible improvements. We'll be back next month to show you how to conduct phase two of your CRO audit. Stay tuned.?
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