The Power of Conversion Optimization

What is conversion optimization (CRO)?

“What is that again?” , you might think. CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. A mouthful, but really it just means getting more out of the same thing. In short, you'll get more leads or whatever conversion goal you've set from the same number of visitors to your website.

Sounds like a plan, but how does that actually work?

CRO is more than a CTA (Call to action) button change from green to red. In most cases, this really does not spontaneously result in 200% more completed forms or orders. Unfortunately, if only it were that simple. CRO is an ongoing process that requires time and attention to be truly successful. Below, we'd like to take you through a few concrete steps to maximize your CRO.

The 7 steps of conversion optimization

1. What's the goal?

This is the first question to ask yourself. What do you want to achieve? This can be done either at the macro level (more leads or sales) or at the micro level (increase the number of likes, more downloads of your white paper, number of subscriptions to your newsletter).

2. Knowledge is power

To measure is to know. With data, you can make informed choices. Good tools for this include Google Analytics and Hotjar. These are (partly) free to use and offer you a lot of insight into the behavior of your visitors.

3. Data provides insights

Dive into your collected data and see if there are things that stand out (or are out of place). For example, on desktop, the conversion rate is 5%, but on mobile, it's only 2%, according to Google analytics. That's a big difference, especially when half of your visitors visit your website on a mobile. How is that possible and, above all, how can we improve that? In Hotjar, for example, you might see that your visitors are not scrolling far enough to see the “Add to cart” button.

4. We think things

Your findings and the behavior of visitors form the basis of a hypothesis. In other words, you come up with a statement describing the problem and providing a possible solution for it.If we take a look at our example above, the hypothesis might be: by placing the “Add to cart” button directly above the fold (visible part of the page upon arrival) on a mobile screen, we expect it to be found/used more often.

5. The proof is in the pudding

Complete all the steps above? Top! Then it is time to test your hypothesis. There are various software packages that make it possible to set up tests. Many are quite expensive, but a free alternative (where you can run up to three tests at the same time) is Google Optimize, for example.

A good way to do this test is to set up an A/B test.

In an A/B test, you will try two variants to see which one works best. Version A is unchanged, so the website is as it already is. You have modified version B based on your hypothesis.

NOTE: Change up to 1 thing at a time (color, shape, location, size) so you can really see what works. Let's take our example again. You move the “Add to cart” button higher on the page so that it is immediately visible when visitors come to the page. Once this is done, send 50% of your visitors to version A and 50% to version B and see which version performs better. Are these differences big enough not to be a coincidence? We have ourselves a winner!

6. Mind the gap

Is version B the clear winner? Congratulations! You've just made your website perform better. This brings you one step closer to achieving your goals. You will now permanently make the changes that have been made to the test software on your website.

Don't be surprised if you secretly win version A (that really happens more often than you think). In that case, too, you have gained a lot of knowledge about your visitors and their behavior. You simply include this in the next test. Over time, you will learn to better assess the behavior of your visitors and you will see that you are increasingly successful with your tests.

Remember: You document everything you've learned from this process so that you always have an overview of all the tests that have been done and what results and conclusions have come out of them.

7. Repeat Repeat Repeat

You have now completed a full cycle of the conversion optimization process. Keep repeating this process (from step 2) to get the most out of your website and make it better every time. Even though the differences in conversion rates are usually not very large, the growth is exponential and will certainly result in a substantial improvement in results over a long period of time.