GUEST BLOG POST: What is CRO and Why Should I Care?
The digital world likes to portray itself as “savvy” and is never short of acronyms for their service offerings. Descriptions like “SEO”, “SEM”, “PPC” and so on, are thrown around all the time and it can often be a confusing bunch of technical language that can be difficult to get your head around. CRO or Conversion Rate Optimisation is no exception as this lesser known term may not be one that you have heard a lot in the digital marketing space, so let us explain to you exactly what Conversion Rate Optimisation is and how it can help your business be more profitable in 2020.
Conversion Rate Optimisation is described as “the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise.” Basically what this means is if there is any form of contact with your business or a transaction through your website, this is considered a “conversion” and conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of increasing the amount of visitors who come to your website who convert. So for example, if you are an ecommerce store selling perfume, your conversion rate would be the amount of visitors, divided by the amount of them who completed a transaction on your website. The average ecommerce conversion rate sits around 2%.
Another example might be more lead generation focussed, so if you are a real estate agent, one of the conversions could be someone submitting an enquiry form, or someone calling your phone number from the website. Lead generation conversion rates can average anywhere from 2% - 8% depending on the industry and the quality of the traffic coming to the website.
In Australia, conversions and improving your conversion rate aren’t as well known as a lot of digital marketing focuses more on increasing and improving traffic through Search Engine Optimisation or Paid Ads. The thought process is that if you improve the amount of people who come to your website, then more than likely those people will convert and more people = more chance of doing so. This is very true, but it is also a bit of tunnel-vision as it doesn’t take the whole equation into consideration. If we look at it from a conversion standpoint, instead of increasing traffic, you can utilise your existing traffic to convert more for you, meaning you don’t have to pay to bring in extra traffic to make more money.
A really good example is a coffee company we have recently done some work for. If we look at the date range of August 20 - September 20 and we compare it to the previous period you will get a better idea of why conversion rates are so important:
As you can see, when we compare both date ranges, there has only been a small 0.48% drop in users (or traffic), so we can count these as basically the same amount of traffic in these periods.
This is where things get real interesting, as you can see there is a 240% increase in “ecommerce conversion rate” for the period of August 20th - Sep 20th when compared to the previous before it and this has resulted in 274 transactions (compared to 84 the previous period) and $11,924 in revenue (compared to $3,092 the previous period. This means that with basically the same traffic, the Conversion Rate Optimisation work that was done to this website has boosted the client's revenue, amount of transactions and conversion rate all by over 200%.
As the title of this blog outlines, why should you care about Conversion Rate Optimisation? Well, as the above case study displays, you can make a massive impact on your conversions with the same amount of traffic and this can generate you more revenue. It doesn’t have to be ecommerce sales, this could be encouraging users to leave more enquiries on your website which leads to more bookings of your service, or this could be more potential clients signing up to your email subscription which could then improve your email marketing efforts and eventually impact your revenue.
Conversion Rate Optimisation is one of the most underutilised digital strategies in the Australian Market and with only a few strategic tweaks, you can have some extremely beneficial improvements to your website or your marketing campaigns that produce more conversions for your business and in turn, heavily impact your bottom line.