What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

At its most basic, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is a process of figuring out why more people don’t reach the goals you’d like them to on your website, and fixing those issues.

For example, why don’t you get more online conference registrations?  Other goals might include brochure downloads, email signups or sponsorship enquiries.

Why does it matter?

As you can imagine, if you’re able to increase how many people register for your conference, without increasing your marketing budget, that’s real money in the bank!

For example, lets say you run a conference that charges £500 per ticket, and your site typically gets 2,000 visitors per month, of which you convert 5% of them on average.  That’s £50,000 in sales per month.

Now let’s say you start thinking about CRO, and you manage to increase average conversions from 5% to 6%.

You’ve just made a £10,000 increase in sales per month – without spending any additional money on marketing!

No wonder that Econsultancy found that  “According to three out every five companies, CRO is crucial to their overall digital marketing strategy.”

Here are two real-world examples of CRO in action, courtesy of Econsultancy:

• Simply by removing the optional field Expedia managed to increase conversions to the point that it achieved $12m in additional profit.

• Moz achieveed a conversion increase of around 170% over four months and generated more than $1m in additional revenue.

Now we’re confident that CRO matters, and is worth your time, the next questions are: how hard is it to achieve this kind of uplift in sales thanks to CRO; and how do you do it?

Methods for improving your CRO

There are many ways to tackle CRO, here are just a few of them, as detailed in Econsultancy’s Conversion Rate Optimisation Report 2013:

For now, we’ll just look at 4 different methods that are relatively cheap and quick to implement.

A/B testing

This is the bread-and-butter of CRO.  The idea is that you split your existing traffic to the site between two variations of the same page, and then analyse which variation performs better in terms of conversion.

The classic example is where one page (your existing one for example) has a black button that says ‘Register now’, while an alternate page has a larger bright green ‘Register now’ button.  After a suitable amount of time (let’s say a week), you look at the results and see whether the new green button has produced more registrations than the old black one.

If it has, you’d probably change the button to a larger green one across your site; and move on to another test (e.g. is ‘Register now’ more or less effective than ‘Book your place’).

Hopefully, with a few smart tests, you can find some quick wins that will increase the effectiveness of your site.

A/B testing is also a great way of validating your ‘gut feelings’ with real, verifiable data, so that you don’t go down the wrong path based on instinct that turns out to be wrong.

Top Tip: Make sure you only ever test one thing at a time, otherwise you won’t really know what change is making the difference, and it could lead to some incorrect generalisations!

Popular tools for the job:

www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

www.optimizely.com

www.jellyfish.co.uk

Further reading:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-b-testing/

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-testing/

http://unbounce.com/blog/

User testing

At its simplest, user testing is observing how a person interacts with your site.

This is a qualitative method of CRO, and has to be handled with caution, because it’s easy to get distracted by people with strong opinions about their experience of the site.

Our advice would be to list the outcomes of your user testing, and then A/B test each of them before making a final decision on whether that change should be implemented in full.

When user testing for the purposes of CRO, you should start the user on the landing page, and then ask them to perform the action that your want to optimise (such as register for the conference).  You then watch them as they perform the task.

You will be amazed how hard some people can find it, because you become so familiar with your own site, and become blind to any issues a non-educated user might have in navigating it.

Top Tip: Don’t just ask users to do it on your computer.  Tell them to use their favourite browsers and devices, to pick up any cross-browser issues or device-specific problems you might have missed.

Popular tools for the job:

www.usertesting.com

Further reading:

http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/03/dos-and-donts-of-usability-testing.php

http://www.usertesting.com/blog/category/best-practices/

Google Analytics Goal tracking

Goal tracking in Google Analytics is a great high-level way to understand where you have a problem across a users journey, as opposed to a single page.

Typically a web visitor will go through at least 2 steps before they provide you their card details, and they’ve made a booking.

For example they may click on a link from your email, which takes them to the landing page.  From there they might check the speaker line-up, before clicking to register for the event.  At this point they might click on terms and conditions, before finally entering their card details and clicking ‘confirm.’

By looking at your conversion rates for the goals you’ve set up in Google Analytics (in this case, focused on registration again), it will tell you if there’s a page or stage in the journey that is causing people to abandon your site.

This will help you hone in on that particular stage and start to improve it – or figure out if you can cut it out entirely – which should then lead to another upswing in registrations.

Popular tools for the job:

www.google.com/analytics

Further reading:

http://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en-GB

http://searchengineland.com/a-beginner%E2%80%99s-guide-to-setting-goals-in.google-analytics-101826 

http://yoast.com/setting.google-analytics-goals/

Heat tracking

Heat tracking is a really neat and interesting way to understand how your visitor interacts with your site.

It should help you understand where your potential delegates are looking, which will give you some ideas on where to place ‘call to action’ buttons, or whether you need to push a vital quote up above the fold because no one is scrolling down and reading it.

Again, heat tracking is probably best used to generate some ideas on how to improve your sites layout, which should then be verified by A/B testing before being adopted.

Popular tools for the job:

www.crazyegg.com

www.clicktale.com

Further reading:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/

http://seo-hacker.com/heatmaps-scrollmaps/

4 best practices for CRO

If you really, really don’t have time to conduct some Conversion Rate Optimisation yourself, then we cautiously offer a few rules of thumb below – but please be aware they do not always hold true, and you should verify them for yourself!

Shorter is better

As a general rule of thumb, shorter performs better on the web.

• Keep your copy concise and to the point.
• Ensure sentences are not convoluted.
• Asking for less information on web signup forms should increase signups

Reduce clicks

The less clicks from landing on your site to purchasing a conference ticket, the less chance your visitors have of becoming distracted or changing their mind.

Keep the user journey as simple as possible, and in the words of a famous UX book, ‘don’t make me think’ in order to complete the goal.

Guarantees & social proof

If you’re asking for users data, then explicitly telling them it will be kept safely and privately should increase their likelihood of giving it to you.  As with all these rules of thumb, there are cases where it doesn’t hold up (it depends how you word it), but it should help.

Social proof and high quality / verifiable testimonials will also add credibility to your site and this should help to increase your conversion rates.

A good example of high quality testimonials from http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/conversion-optimization-best-practices/

Top Tip: Eventbrite makes it really easy to offer social proof for your conferences – you can opt to publish who’s signed up on your Eventbrite page (and edit what details are viewable).

Make your calls to action really obvious

It’s a good idea to ensure your ‘register now’ call to action is displayed prominently on your site, and isn’t just a text link at the end of some sales copy.

• Make it a button – a large one
• Keep it above the fold so users don’t have to scroll to see it
• Help it stand out further by giving your button a colour that contrasts with the rest of the site

A prominent call to action should lead to better conversions.

Further reading

If you’re intrigued by the power of CRO and would like to take a deeper dive, there are several great resources you can turn to, including:

http://qualaroo.com/beginners-guide-to-cro/

http://moz.com/blog/the-definitive-howto-for-conversion-rate-optimization

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/100-conversion-optimization-case-studies/

http://conversionxl.com/

Got an upcoming event? Join us for a free webinar on ‘‘How to Sell Your First Event Tickets’’, which takes you through a step-by-step guide that will help you sell your first tickets and start to build momentum towards a sell-out event.  It takes place Thursday, September 18, 2014 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM (GMT).

Register your place now.

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