Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving a website or mobile app to increase the number of visitors that perform an action that results in a conversion. CRO can help businesses understand what persuades or discourages website or app visitors from converting, how to improve performance, and in turn, gain more conversions.
Improving CRO is a combination of strategy and tactics to understand the user experience through quantitative and qualitative testing methods and improve the website and app UX.
CRO is an iterative and continual cycle of researching, testing, deployment to achieve the best conversion rates possible.
A “good” website conversion rate falls between 2% and 5% across all industries and the average is 3%. However, a good conversion rate is also dependent on your industry, niche, target audience and other factors specific to your business. The most important factor in evaluating whether it’s good is that it aligns with your company’s goals and success metrics.
The method you use to calculate the conversion rate depends on what you’re defining as the conversion, for example a sale or unique visitors, etc. but the general formula remains the same:
Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions ÷ Total number of (sessions, purchases, etc.) x 100
To measure conversion rate optimization, track the CRO changes you made to the website or mobile app and calculate the conversion rate frequently to determine if the revisions made increase conversions.
A CRO strategy involves developing a program to maximize the conversion rate of a website or mobile app based on goals and objectives of the business, informed by relevant data. The critical piece of a CRO strategy is that you’re creating a “big picture” roadmap to improve the digital experience instead of random tactical, one-off tests.
CRO techniques are targeted methods to improve conversion rates on a website or app for leads, sales or other goals. They can include optimizing forms, improving CTAs, increasing page load pages and other tactics. CRO techniques are most effective when they’re based on objectives and research.
A CRO test is based on a hypothesis about how to improve a specific conversion rate for an element on a website or app. It could be an A/B test, experiment or survey, depending on the CRO goal. CRO tools are integral to testing analysis of results and next steps.