Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of testing, tweaking and optimizing your website to increase your results. The simplest example of this is for an ecommerce website. If you have 100 people come to your website for every sale you make, your conversion rate is 1%.
What can you do to your website to improve this rate? If you could make changes to certain pages of your website and, as a result, get a 2% conversion rate, then you have immediately doubled your sales for the same number of people visiting your website.
But it’s not just related to ecommerce websites. CRO can be done to increase any outcome; be it online sales, phone enquiries, email enquiries – anything that you can track and measure. We do all this, by a process called “split-testing”
The way split testing works is that for any page that you want to test and optimize, you actually create two versions of the same page, version A and version B.
Each version of the page is just slightly different to one another. You may be testing phone numbers, price, offers, bonuses – or even things like colours, or videos. For each of these 2 variations, the outcome is the same (whatever that outcome is, for example sending you an email enquiry)
Since both page variations share the same outcome, you can see which page resulted in more (outcomes). For example, out of 200 visitors to your website, 100 were sent to page “Variation A” – which resulted in 12 email enquiries, and 100 visitors were sent to page “Variation B” which resulted in 35 email enquiries. Clearly in this example, whatever you did on variation B gelled with your visitors because more of them emailed you.