Any internet marketing expert will tell you that Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, can be paramount for any basic online success. CRO is the method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal to increase the percentage of visitors that become customers. The trick is that one can have promising potential and a sound strategy, but you can still founder at picking the right tactics. Businesses with successful CRO programs have the ability to select and use the best possible tools for the job, and simply have a knack of developing the tactics that actually work.

Knowing your Objective

Defining your goals is vital when it comes to setting up your plan. If you are trying to identify what is causing all the friction on your site, your tactics should include primary user research and usability testing. Or, if your objective is, say, discovering which elements of your page are attracting all the visitors, then you would want to use heatmaps or other similar tools used for visual analysis. Besides knowing your objectives, it is relevant to recognize all the strengths and all the limitations of the activities and tools you’ve chosen. In order to track down all the possible problems the visitors are facing on your website, you will need to do a usability and accessibility testing. However, don’t get your hopes up if you think this will help you discover the way to magically make your page more effective when it comes to convincing visitors to click that buy button.

A/B Testing

Much like in the previous case of luring people to click the button, the randomized experiment with two variants, or simply A/B testing, can be quite useful a procedure, but it can’t really give you any tangible results if your website is not well organized and user-friendly in the first place. So, before you make sure your strategy and tactics match your objectives, you should prioritize your activities and ensure that they are themselves well organized and make sense. After all, we must not forget that, like any other program, your conversion rate optimization initiatives do operate under certain resource constraints. It does pay off to choose the appropriate tactics, but one must not refrain from prioritizing time and budgetary allocations.

Monitoring and Evaluation

When you want to monitor and evaluate activities, this basically means cross-referencing all your achievements with your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. A KPI is a business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization, and they vary depending on the organization itself. Business KPIs, for instance, may be net revenue or a customer loyalty metric, while government might consider unemployment rates.

Now, monitoring the right data helps you learn if your projects are going as planned, and if not, what exactly the problem is. Regular monitoring can be vital as it allows you to fix issues as they appear, change tactics if necessary, and improve your plan and strategy if it starts threading water. Evaluating data can be beneficial on the long run as well. Not only do you have the insight in just how successful your program was in achieving the desired goals, you are also able to identify unintended effects. These actions involve looking at the financial outcomes, but they also investigate the influence of leadership processes, as well as cultural elements.

If done properly, monitoring and evaluation of your Conversion Rate Optimization program can provide you with the much needed insight into your page’s activities, thus giving you the opportunity to figure out exactly which tactics are most effective in achieving the desired objectives.