Your Guidebook to Understanding Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization isn’t really anything new — on the contrary, the goal for all advertising since before there was even a word for it has been to sell goods and services as efficiently as possible. However, despite all the impressive marketing innovation in this digital age, distilling ad performance down to its most basic and effective components has become somewhat less-than-intuitive.

The term conversion rate optimization (or CRO) pertains specifically to increasing the number of site visitors who achieve “desired business outcomes” (sales, leads, signups, downloads, or whatever your brand’s chief KPI happens to be). CRO is rooted in the ultimate goal of every campaign and exposes gaps in your strategy currently limiting your business’s earning potential.

Here’s why conversion optimization matters to your brand, how it provides a blueprint to address user pain points, and strategies to implement CRO into your everyday strategies.

Why Use Conversion Optimization

There’s no shortage of tools available to marketers these days. Even the most basic dashboard can give insight into overwhelming amounts of campaign data — how many users engaged with a tweet, spent time on a landing page, added a product to a cart, and hundreds of other interactions significant to your sales cycle.

CRO isn’t designed to funnel more volume to your site like a brand awareness campaign, nor flood your content with low-quality engagement metrics. It is an optimization, which means it is about efficiency. Efficiency in this case means finding greater value in the traffic you already have at your disposal. CRO strategies emphasize increasing revenue per visitor, enhancing the audiences already in your sales funnel and amplifying the success of upper-funnel campaigns by eliminating pain points. Anytime you see an app deliver bug fixes, a site update to become more mobile-friendly, or a once-complicated checkout process becoming streamlined, you’re witnessing CRO in action.

How CRO Helps Address User Pain Points

Let’s start with one of the examples above. If your upper-funnel campaigns are doing big engagement numbers on mobile just for 90% of that traffic to bounce, chances are good your website either has poor landing pages or hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices. The audience is there, well within reach of your branded content and targeting capabilities, but what’s needed is a streamlined experience for the majority of your users.

Mobile-ready websites lead to easier checkouts, easy checkouts raise campaign performance and get you approval for more ad-spend, and as a bonus your users will no longer suffer migraines from trying to navigate your previously-difficult mobile site.

User interface and experiences is just one of the many problem areas an increased emphasis on CRO can uncover within your ad strategy. Maybe your website loses customers before checkout because it lacks a guest checkout option, or maybe landing pages load too slowly, or with too many irrelevant products to maintain user interest.

Once you identify the conversion metric that most needs optimizing (which likely varies depending on your industry), you can begin to seek out pain points — underperforming pages, products or entire campaigns that deserve a closer look. The task of conversion optimization can be applied to just about any aspect of your marketing structure, but the appendages of your strategy that tend to lag behind represent the biggest growth potential once fixed.

3 Places to Focus Your CRO Efforts

Okay, so “make your campaigns work better” isn’t exactly much to go off of — successful optimizations have to start somewhere specific. Typically, detailed CRO strategies fall into one of three categories: better qualifying your audience, refining your content, and streamlining your user experience.

 

1. Audience: If you’re running successful awareness campaigns, you’re likely casting a wide net over audiences with varying degrees of interest in performing whatever action you’d consider a conversion. Treating this expansive audience as one mind is a frequent mistake marketers make as they attempt to coerce users down the funnel, spending the same ad dollars on retargeting low-value users as they would on those who expressed far more serious interest.

We’ve talked about segmentation on this blog (more than once), and will continue to do so because it remains key to optimizing your campaign efforts. Use your campaign data to determine which audience segments represent significant interest, and make those audiences the focus of your mid-to-low funnel efforts.

2. Refined Content: Hey, we almost got through a whole blog post without saying it: relevant, shoppable, sharable content is the key to marketing success. When you A/B test promoted posts, images or even pre-roll video ads, you’re essentially optimizing your content for conversions. This is likely a part of your role as a marketer already, but it’s a core piece of the puzzle and deserves mention as one of the major areas CRO can fall into.

3. User Experience: There’s a reason UI and UX designers are paid good money to do what they do. Without a clear pathway to your desired conversion action, even the best advertising campaign will see its audience scatter. This isn’t just about making your website “pretty” — it’s about making your menus, product search functions, site navigation, and checkout process more intuitive and user-friendly. And it’s also about making it pretty. UI is a big job.

Optimizing the user experience from various user perspectives is crucial. Is it kid-friendly? Mobile friendly? Adult-who-just-bought-their-first-smartphone-friendly? Is it informative, and is that information easy to locate? Are there too many products on display? Does the site look cheap and spammy or professional and trustworthy? Simple changes on a website can cause huge performance returns down the line, making this an important pillar of the CRO trifecta.

The world of digital marketing has grown massively complex, saturated with countless KPIs, platforms, channels, strategies, attribution models, and rules to winning at SEO that never seem to stop shifting. Make things simple for your brand by developing a commitment to CRO, and by maximizing the value of all the traffic your current strategies already earn.