What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
I originally published this at Forbes.com >>
Imagine you’re trying to sell your chief marketing officer on SEO, but he’s hesitant. “I understand SEO has the potential to drive a lot of traffic, but how do we know it’s the right kind of traffic?” he asks. “How do we know that traffic will turn into revenue? The CEO doesn’t give me high-fives for more traffic, she wants to see marketing directly tied to revenue. SEO seems like a lot of guesswork–we need science.”
If you’ve ever had an exchange like this with an executive, a client, or within your own head, then conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the answer. Not because CRO replaces SEO (it doesn’t), nor because it necessarily changes SEO (although it can help), but because while much of SEO focuses on generating traffic, CRO turns that traffic into leads and sales, or what we call conversions. And it doesn’t do it through guesswork, but rather through a methodical, scientific, straightforward process that virtually guarantees ever improving results.
“Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the art and science of getting people to act once they arrive on your website,” says Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners, author of the bookLanding Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions, and founder of the international Conversion Conference event series. “It typically involves elements of visual design, copywriting, user experience, psychology, testing out different versions of your website content, and the neuromarketing to influence people to act.”
If you’ve ever heard people talk about A/B split testing, or changing the colors of buttons on a website to see which one converts better, then you already know something about CRO. But that’s kind of like saying if you’ve ever driven a car then you know something about the auto industry. There’s more behind the scenes. In this blog post Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry: An Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing and Founder of Orbit Media Studios, a digital marketing agency, shows how far you can take something as simple as button design when it comes to CRO. CRO is a term that includes everything you do with your marketing and website that influences conversions. It’s scientific and straightforward, but is also complex, because people are complex, and it’s people CRO seeks to influence.
In this post you’ll be introduced to 12 activities involved in CRO, starting with those that take place before you even launch your website.
1. Persona research. A “persona” is a fictitious profile of a potential visitor to your website, or potential customer of your services. For example, a simple persona for a jewelry website in New York might look like this:
Sam is 28. She lives in New York. She’s single. She has an undergraduate degree in journalism from Columbia, and an MBA from Harvard. She works as an associate for a private equity firm. She has a 40 minute commute each day on the subway. She enjoys triathlons and vegan cooking–she’s a health nut. Oh, and she’s been set up on a blind date, which is coming up in three days, and she wants some jewelry she can wear to it.
“Buyer personas help to break down the complexity into insightful understanding, allowing for improved decision-making,” says Tony Zambito, a leading authority in buyer insights and buyer personas. In a 2013 blog post, Zambito explains how various factors, including globalization, make the creation a buyer personas a more important practice than ever. As he says, “Companies are entering new markets with little knowledge of regional buying behaviors and little room for errors.”
Personas are important to CRO because they influence how we design the website, the content we create for the website, and what keywords we target for SEO purposes, amongst other factors.