CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. It is basically about improving your digital product so that your visitors take the desired action. This way you can set goals and are able to improve/reach them using experiments.
Who is Conversion Rate Optimisation for?
Not all digital products can start with CRO. There are a few things you will already need to have in order to start with the CRO process:
- 1000 visitors per day (consistently for 2 to 4 weeks)
- 100 conversion per day (also consistently for 2 to 4 weeks)
- Data collector installed on your website (like Google Analytics)
- A/B testing software (Google Optimize is for free)
You will need a website with a lot of traffic and some software/tools. The software and tools are mostly for free. Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar, Figma, etc. are all free-to-use tools!
The digital product or company you have/work for needs to be in the scale-up phase. Most of the time during the start-up phase there just is not enough traffic/consistency to be able to do conversion rate optimization as it should.
How to start with Conversion Rate Optimisation?
The easiest step is to hire a freelance CRO specialist to set up all the tracking, data collection, and set up all the tools for you. It is also an option to hire somebody in-house or hire an agency if that’s preferred. Often the last two options are more expensive.
How to get started with CRO yourself?
Of course, there’s the option to start with CRO yourself. Down below I will add some steps you can follow to get going.
Step 1:
Install Google Tag Manager on your website and add Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager. When that is done you are collecting the data needed to do experiments and get the data from the results of the experiments.
Step 2:
Install Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager. Google Optimize is used for A/B testing (or Multi Variant Testing, another way of doing experiments).
Step 3:
You are now able to do experiments since all the software needed is installed on your website. Next up is writing a hypothesis, what would you like to experiment and why would you like to do this? What should the results of the experiment be in order to tell if the test was successful or not?
Also in your hypothesis, it’s smart to use psychology! With psychology you can tell why something would work or not, it will get you more insights into the behavior of your users.
Step 4:
Design the experiment. You could dive into the code the straight way, but it is often better to start with the design and let it be approved by superiors. You can use Adobe Xd or Figma for this, both are free but Figma is in the browser!
Step 5:
Build the experiment in Google Optimize, straightforward forward since you already have the design.
Step 6:
Run the experiment for 2 to 4 weeks according to how many visitors and conversions you have.
Step 7:
Analyze the results of your experiment. What metrics did it improve (or not). Try and split your experiment results into devices (mobile/tablet/desktop). Just check all the data to see what the results of the experiment are.
Step 8:
Suggest implementing the changes on the live site or not. Make sure you are always sharing all the information with everybody within the company so they will support your way of improving the product.
Conclusion
It is not that hard to get going, but it is a long and slow process at the start. After doing conversion rate optimization for a while you will get used to the process and you will definitely get quicker.
If you are not up for doing this yourself, remember to hire somebody to do it for you.
