You’ve spent a lot of time and resources getting visitors to your website by doing search engine optimization (SEO), paid per click (PPC), social media, affiliate programs, and others. Now that your visitors are here how do you know that your site is providing the best possible experience to turn them into customers? How do you know that the image you are using is sending the right message; that the page headline resonates with your visitors; or that your visitors like the overall aesthetics of your website?
In internet marketing it’s known as conversion rate optimization (CRO). It’s a method of trying to persuade your visitors to take one or more actions on your website to:
- become a customer
- buy more products
- subscribe to a newsletter
- register for a membership
- download an asset
- refer a friend
- ‘like’, ‘pin’, ‘tweet’ your page
- make a phone call
- and more
If you are not doing CRO, then you won’t know if your site is performing up to its potential because you have nothing to compare against. This can potentially lead to a huge loss of revenue if your customers don’t fully understand your product offering or worse lose customers to your competition.
There’s typically 3 main phases to CRO:
- Planning
- Implementation
- Analysis
For now let’s say you have decided to pick the home page as a candidate for conversion optimization. The implementation phase is to run an A/B testing campaign (another name for this is split testing), there’s a lot of A/B Testing tools in the market to choose from. In A/B testing you create one or more alternate variations of your home page and randomly show your visitors in real time the original page or one of the variations. Once the campaign completes you analyze the statistical results and implement the best performing page — but it shouldn’t end there.
Website optimization is most effective when it’s integrated into your business process and not something you just turn on or off like starting a car. It takes organizational buy-in, technology, analytics, and resources.