Why You Need A Conversion Rate Optimisation Process

Process is one of those words that when uttered immediately causes people to glaze over.

Ok it’s not fun, but having a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) process is the difference between increasing conversion rates and not.  

Practising CRO without a proper process is like playing darts in the dark - you’ll like a few of the numbers you hit but on the whole it’s not going to be pretty.

By going through a repeatable set of actions, it’s easy to kid ourselves that a proper and valid process is in place. But all processes are not created equal.  

Let’s take a look at what conversion optimisation looks like without a proper process.

A common scenario is that somebody in an organisation thinks that the value proposition on their homepage is misleading/unhelpful/something else they don’t like.

They believe it’s causing a drop in conversion rates and users are bouncing from the site because of it.  They have no proof of this, just lots of conviction.      

So they set the team into action to develop a new value proposition, spin up an A/B test, and hope to validate their hypothesis.  

The test runs and guess what - the conversion rate actually goes up.  That’s great, their process seems to be working, what’s the problem?

Well, taking this kind of scattergun approach to choosing experiments often means wasted time, money, and resources.  

How does this well-intentioned employee know that this experiment is the one that will have the most impact for the business?  

How do they know that this is the lowest-hanging-fruit in terms of driving up conversion rates?

The simple answer is they don’t....

It may work once, but repeated, this is what I like to call a ‘faux-cess’ - a set of repeatable actions pretending to be a valid process!

So how do you figure out what to test and when?

There are lots of different way to do it, but we like to use something called the PIE framework developed by WiderFunnel across the pond.

It sounds all fancy but in reality it’s pretty simple.  All of the pages of your website are put into a spreadsheet alongside three columns: Potential, Importance, and Ease (PIE!).

Potential is the amount of scope there is to improve the page. Importance is how valuable the traffic is that comes to the page. And ease is how simple it’s going to be to actually run some tests.

Each page is then given a score out of ten across the three criteria, and a PIE score is generated by adding the scores together and dividing by three. You then rank all your pages by your PIE score and this is the priority order to be worked through.  Easy right?

The PIE framework applies focus to your conversion efforts and creates a roadmap for future improvement.  It’s a simple activity that will save your organisation time, money, and also increase your conversion rates.

If you've got a digital growth challenge, please either get in touch with me directly or take a look at the DigitalLitmus website to see how we can accelerate your business growth.