If you’re brand new to digital marketing, you’ll likely hear the term CRO. It doesn’t matter if you’re a digital marketer working at an agency, member of an executive team working at a SaaS company, or marketing team member at an e-commerce company, you may hear this term and need to know what it is. And when I say CRO, don’t worry if you have no clue what I’m talking about. Often times, when I explain my job to people that aren’t super familiar with digital marketing, most of them say, “C-R-what?”
Basic Definition
Conversion Rate Optimization, also known as CRO, is a way to get more of a website’s users to complete a desired action—like filling out a form, purchasing a product, or otherwise. It also looks at how users move through a website, what actions they take (or don’t take), and what’s stopping them from completing actions that feed into your business goals.
Our Senior CRO Manager here at Hanapin, Samantha Kerr, summed it up in one of my favorite ways. She asked, “If you had 100 people visit your site, would you rather have one convert or ten? Of course, it’s ten. That’s why CRO matters.”
How CRO Ties Into PPC
One important aspect of CRO is how it ties into pay-per-click (PPC) marketing efforts. They’re related in a number of ways, but most importantly (in my opinion), it maximizes ROI from PPC.
What Does CRO Entail? How Do You Get Results from It?
CRO has two major areas that work together to produce results: testing and analysis. It’s important to make a user’s digital experience seamless and make conversion as easy as possible. For PPC, at a high level, it generally starts with an initial search or click and ends with a conversion action.
There are several types of analyses that can be done and lots of data sets that can be used. Some of the platforms used to gather those data sets include, but aren’t limited to, Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, Hotjar, HubSpot, Google Ads, Bing, and Facebook. But truly, the list could go on and on. If you want to know who is visiting your website, what they’re looking at, and what could be improved, these platforms are excellent places to start.
In regard to testing, analyses guide tests. And when I say tests, I mean finding something on your site that could be improved and trying a new variation of it. If your business goal is form submissions, for example, and you noticed (via your analysis) that form submissions are extremely low, then you’d have a strong indicator that something is probably wrong with your form. That’d be a great place to run a test.
Analysis + Testing = Results
To Sum It Up…For Now
If you’ve never heard of CRO or you’re not sure why it’s important, I hope I’ve bridged the gap for you in some way and maybe even motivated you to learn more. I’m super passionate about CRO and truly feel that it’s important for every business in the digital realm.
I also made a video about the basics of CRO in Hanapin’s new Hero Academy, and you can find it here. It’s free, and you’ll get access to several other informational videos (huge props to the #hanateam)! Sign up and go check it out!
If you don’t have the time or resources to devote to UX and CRO but want to optimize your landing pages or website, reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you!