Don’t sleep on your CRO strategy in 2024

When running a digital marketing campaign, your CRO strategy is vital to success.

Earning conversions from website visitors is vital for any business – whether you run an ecommerce website, manage a marketing team or run your brand’s SEO.
Conversion rate optimisation is key to sustaining long-term growth – so how can it help you?

Read on to find out what conversion rate optimisation is, why it’s so important and the steps you can take so your business can increase conversions from your target audience.

What is conversion rate optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors that convert into customers.

This involves analysing a website’s performance alongside user behaviour to identify key areas to improve. Using the data, a company can then make changes in an attempt to increase conversions, positively impacting their conversion rates.

Examples of changes based on user data include website design, content, user experience, and more.

How to calculate conversion rate

Calculating the conversion rate is easier than you may think.

Simply, divide the number of conversions by the number of website visitors and multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.

For instance, if you defined a conversion as a website visitor filling in their contact information, you would divide the number of form submissions by the total number of visitors to the webpage and multiply it by 100.

So, if you have 50 contact form submissions and 2000 visitors, your conversion rate would be 2.5%.

What is a good conversion rate?

According to Shopify, the average conversion rate for an ecommerce website in 2024 is around 2.5% to 3%.

A baseline target of 2.5% is a good place to start when commencing your conversion rate optimisation.

Steps to take to improve your website’s conversion rate

Have your conversion rates dropped? You’ve come to the right place.

At Paramount Digital, we have a team packed with talented digital marketers who understand the ins and outs of conversion rate optimisation. We’ve put together a list of best practices for your CRO strategy so your brand can start converting website visitors into customers via dedicated landing pages.

Identify important conversions

Conversions vary from business to business and depending on the end goal.

Is the conversion a product sale, signing up for a newsletter or filling in a contact form for the company to get back to the customer?

Once you have clearly identified the desired action, you can optimise the rate at which website visitors complete the action.

Analyse your conversion funnel

Now you know your desired action, it’s time to review your conversion funnel and identify the factors behind a visitor’s decision to leave your web page before converting.

Using web analytics tools, you can calculate your conversion rate and figure out at which point your audience is leaving your web page.

Some tools allow you to track heat maps that show detailed information of where your visitors go on your web pages, and exactly which point they leave before converting.

You can also analyse key demographics, such as social media traffic or location, to better understand what you can do to improve conversion rates.

Gather user data

After figuring out the point at which your users mostly leave your website, you can start to gather as much customer information as possible.

This helps to further improve your landing page layout, content and appeal to improve conversion rates.

For any user-centric CRO strategy, this is an essential part of increasing conversions.

Three factors play a part in a visitor converting on ecommerce sites and more, and they are:

• Drivers
• Barriers
• Hooks

Drivers

Drivers are what bring visitors to your website. When analysing customer behaviour, determine which drivers work best to increase website traffic.

An easy way of figuring out where people heard about you is running a quick survey for all visitors.

You can also create user personas that represent your user base and organise all the data in a list of things your target audience wants when visiting your website.

Using these tools allows you to work out exactly where your traffic is coming from. You can then use this data to your benefit when running conversion rate optimisation.

Barriers

Barriers are defined as, well, barriers.

These are hurdles that are preventing your visitors from converting. Using the CRO tools mentioned above can help you figure out what’s preventing visitors from converting.

Hooks

Here’s where you figure out exactly what attracted visitors to convert.

The best way to do this is by asking for customer feedback from the visitors who previously converted. This gives you a clear indication of what works well in your CRO.

You could do this by sending an email to your customers asking for feedback on the process.

Conduct competitor research

Ecommerce and digital marketing is a competitive business, so you should look at what your competitors are doing well compared to you.

You can then use this information to strengthen your weaknesses compared to your competitors and improve your conversion rate.

It’s also good to understand that online users tend to research their options before making a purchase. If somebody is going to buy something expensive, like a new television or smartphone, they tend to look around at competitors and compare their options.

Optimise the layout of your landing page

The layout of your landing pages may not be easy enough to use or understand for your website visitors.

If your existing traffic numbers are quite good but you have a high bounce rate, it’s an indication that the design of your page could benefit from a design refresh.

CRO tools like clickmaps, mouse tracking and eye tracking show a design team exactly where they can improve their landing pages.

Improve page load time

Web pages with slow load times will lead to a higher bounce rate.

A study by ThinkwithGoogle found that web pages with load times of 1 to 3 seconds had a probability bounce rate increase of 32%. However, if the load time is 1 to 10 seconds, the bounce rate increases to 123%.

If you’ve found your web page is loading too slowly, optimise the images so they’re not too large, reduce redirects, and cache your web pages.

Test ideas

So, you’ve collected all of the data and implemented your CRO strategy – now it’s time to test everything.

With CRO testing, you should measure both qualitative and quantitative metrics because one will give you the ‘what’ and the other, the ‘why’.

Also, A/B testing variants of each page is a great way of trying out new page designs and funnel flows.

If you’re unsure of what A/B testing is, it’s a CRO test that examines two unique versions of the same landing page to determine which one increases conversions the most.

Review performance and publish

The final step of optimising your conversion rate strategy is to review your new ideas and find out how successful they were.

Put your new ideas up against your past performance and see what is working well and what needs improvement.

Continue to review, test and publish until your conversion rate optimisation is working successfully and you have a conversion rate you’re happy with.

CRO services at Paramount Digital

As an expert CRO agency, we have helped dozens of companies improve their results in digital marketing.

Using the tips we’ve displayed above, we can review your current performance and offer our highly professional CRO services to help increase conversions.

So, whether you’re attempting to sell a product, promote a newsletter, offer a free trial – or anything else – we can help you as an experienced CRO agency.

If you’re interested in improving your brand’s conversion rate, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Paramount Digital today.