Create a High-Converting Website with UX Design

Differences & Similarities between UX and CRO

Before getting into specifics, it is helpful to have a general understanding of the similarities and differences between UX and CRO. A CRO expert generally focuses on tracking click- through rates, form sign-ups, and other call to actions to maximize overall conversions. By utilizing tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar to test and analyze metrics. From forming hypotheses to optimizing the user journey, the goal is to increase the amount of users that take a specific action.

On the other hand a UX expert focuses on how a design can create an overall simple and easy to understand, user experience. The work often involves honing in on who the user is, mapping out the user journey through flows, wireframes, and developing personas. Research and testing involves finding key user pain points in order to improve the overall experience in an efficient way.

CRO and UX roles overlap in that they both utilize data, results, and findings to optimize the overall user journey or experience. This can involve A/B testing or optimizing designs to determine what changes make the most impact to drive toward an action. Both play a key role in how the user journey is ultimately shaped.

UX Research Strategies to Understand User Needs

Research and understanding the users needs is a critical UX strategy when designing with conversion rate optimization in mind. This means dissecting the problems users are facing, the main goals users are trying to achieve, and how they will interact with a product. There are different UX methods that can help identify the key problems and goals at hand.

1. User Interviews & Surveys

Conducting user interviews, or implementing user surveys are a key way to understand were the user is at. For instance, if we were trying to create a product that helps users with their travel booking, we would want to understand more about the user themselves and what problems they are experiencing.

General questions to ask during an interview or survey could look like:

1. What does your daily life typically look like: work, family, etc? 
2. When and where do you typically book your travel? 
3. What is the main purpose or goal you are trying to achieve while booking travel?
4. What are the most challenging or frustrating points of booking a trip? 
5. What solutions do you think would make it easier for you to complete what you are trying to do? 
6. If there is something you would like to change or improve about the product you currently use, what would that be? 

These questions will vary based on where in the product development process a company is at, whether it is conducting research for a new feature, or a feature optimization, or an entirely new product from scratch. In order to design a product or website that is easy to use, it is key to understand how this product fits into a user’s day to day life.

2. User Journey & User Story Mapping

A user journey map helps break down how customers interact end-to-end with a product from the initial touch point to a specific action and post-action. The map is typically a diagram or a set of diagrams that show the steps and touchpoints while interacting with a product or service. It is common to tie the touchpoints back to how the user is feeling at the moment as well as their pain points and motivations. The user journey map is typically broken down into five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Service, and Loyalty. 

Another helpful strategy for improving CRO with UX research is creating user story maps. These maps focus on tasks that users need to complete to accomplish a task. This helps product and development teams to understand what functions need to be prioritized to create a minimum viable product. For instance going back to a start up travel booking company, the user story map would include steps users take to search date availability, or hotel accommodation availability, as well as checkout.

ChatGPT breaks it down into this concise chart to compare user journey and user story mapping:

Both maps are helpful tools in understanding how a user thinks, what actions they need to take and what they are looking for. This helps ultimately improve CRO when the product or service is created or updated.

3. Heat Maps

Another tool that is helpful for both designers and CRO experts isare heatmaps. Heatmaps capture where users have clicked and scrolled throughout a website to help identify where there is friction and what frustrates users. Hotjar for instance, records user sessions and provides heat maps that show areas of high clicks, or how far users typically scroll down a page. It also provides insights across different device sizes. By analyzing heatmaps, solutions to different user pain points can be addressed and optimized.

Core UX Principles That Enhance CRO

In addition to research strategies and analytic tools that benefit both UX and CRO optimization, there are core UX principles that improve the overall design and user experience of a product, website, or landing page. In regards to design, this means creating an intuitive design system as well as overall content structure, which involves:

1. Information Architecture

 By having a clear architecture or structure of any landing page or product application allows users to navigate through the product smoothly and intuitively. This includes having clear labels, text hierarchy, action buttons and prioritizing the information that users need most.

2. Error Handling

Having clear user feedback interactions such as when an action they take is successful as well as when something they have entered is incorrect, is also a key element in helping users get to an end goal action. This includes having error messaging and also allowing users to make mistakes and fix them, rather than getting them stuck at certain step.

3. Accessibility

Accessibility is also a critical step in improving the user experience in terms of enough color contrast to ensure people can actually see the content at hand, or having large enough buttons or text sizes to ensure legibility and clickability. In addition to following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, having other tools like screen readers anddictation tools to be able to reach a wider audience who may have disabilities.

Why UX & CRO Matters 

Implementing UX research strategies and UX best design principles and practices into websites, landing pages, and products are crucial for optimized CRO. From conducting interviews to creating user maps, there are many ways to discover what users are actually struggling with and how to better address those pain points. Other analytics tools like Hotjar also help bridge design and CRO teams when it comes to understanding how users are converting and optimizations that can be made.

At the core of designing for the user always involves keeping core UX principles in mind such as how information is organized and how they support the user as they take different actions. At the end of the day, UX and CRO go hand and hand. Learnings and collaboration between the teams can only help create a stronger user journey. If you need help optimizing your website for UX and CRO, our experts can help; feel free to reach out to us.

The post Improving Your CRO With UX Principles in 2024 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Whether you’ve hit a traffic plateau, converting less on competitive ad spend, or are just looking for opportunities, a CRO audit is probably your best bet. Let’s say you have 5,000 monthly visitors at a 2.5% conversion rate and an AOV of $100. Bringing your conversion rate to 3% would generate another $2.5k a month without adding any more content or paying for ad placements.

Want to unlock more conversion potential?

Preparing for a CRO Audit

So you think you’re ready to jump right into a CRO audit, eh? Let’s pump the breaks a little and talk about timing. While some marketers would say there isn’t a wrong time to do a CRO audit, there are certainly times when one makes more sense.

The best time to run a CRO audit is right after a large change to your site, like a redesign or relaunch. Whether you’re doing this audit in response to a website change, a gap in performance, or just looking for opportunities, your preparation will likely look the same. Before initiating your CRO audit, there’s some critical data collection that has to be done first.

Goal Setting & Prioritization:

1. Identify Priority Pages: Focus on high-traffic or high-value pages. Ideally you want your high-value pages to have a good stream of traffic so you can gather data about your users quickly but if you don’t have both, focus on where you want the conversions to happen or pages leading up to conversion points.
2. Define Clear Conversion Goals: Establish baseline conversion rates and engagement metrics you can use to benchmark performance. Decide what metric or series of metrics are most important to uncovering opportunities.

Data Collection & Analysis:

1. Gather Website Analytics Data: Collect data (GA4) from the areas of the site you’re planning to test. Make sure to take stock of current and historical conversion data if you experience seasonality during your testing period. Take note of user engagement metrics native in GA4 like clicks, scroll depth, etc, this will give you some insight into what your users are currently doing once they reach these pages.
2. Map Out Conversion Funnel: Map out the conversion funnel as you see it. This funnel can differ from what is currently observed and allows you to uncover nuances you might not be considering along the user journey. The closer you are to the project, the less you can see. In other words, the user journey might not always be what you intend it to be.
3. Review Page Load Speed: Page load time remains the biggest and most influential level in conversion. Review the average load time of your site prior to your CRO audit especially if this is on your list of fixes (it should be).
4. Evaluate Call-To-Actions: Assess the clarity and placement of your CTAs before executing your audit to gauge their effectiveness. Take stock of the different types like top and bottom-third CTAs in blog content to main CTAs like “Contact Us”. Ensure these have aligned conversion events in GA4 prior to test launch so you can note performance changes.

Tool Selection:

1. Analytics Tools: Ensure that you can trust the data flowing into GA4 or any other website tracking tools you have at your disposal. This becomes your guiding light so having any hiccups in this area can throw the results of the entire audit.
2. AB Testing Software: There is so much that can be uncovered with the proper tech stack. If you’re starting your CRO journey, you need to invest in a testing tool. AB testing software is a much more reliable method than changing an element and trying to track performance changes without a proper monitoring tool.

5 Steps To a Successful CRO Audit

1. Key Pages & Low Hanging Fruit

At this stage, you probably already have a sense of what your key testing pages should be. These are going to be a combination of your product or services page, top landing pages, and any other pages that facilitate movement through the funnel.

You need to get into the user mindset. This means stripping away whatever you think you know about how a user may navigate your site. You know and understand your site better than any new user because you’ve been around the block a few times.

You want to identify things and prioritize them in order of impact and cost, whether that cost is time or real dollars.

To start, you’ll want to see which pages have the highest bounce rate or lowest engagement rates via Google Analytics. This will show you where you should focus your efforts in your list of priority pages. Once you identify where the majority of drop-off is happening, you can start to identify low-hanging fruit. Some low-hanging fruit elements could be:

• Slow Loading Time
• Poor Mobile Experience
• Confusing Navigation
• Weak Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
• Long Form Fields
• Lack of Trust Signals
• Missing Value Proposition

Remember to start small and only implement one or two changes at a time. You want to make sure that you are gathering valuable information and data points about the changes you make. Small changes can make a big difference and you want to make sure you’re tracking the right one.

2. Understand User Behavior

Once you get the easily identifiable low-hanging fruit changes out of the way, you’ll want to dive deeper to understand user behavior. Understanding user behavior is harder to do with just Google Analytics and most use a third-party tool to get this information.

The most influential data sources to understand user behavior are surveys, heatmaps/click maps, and session recordings. Knowing how far down the page users get and the elements they interact with can be telling.

User behavior can lead you down a road you didn’t think existed before. Everyone uses the web differently and changing certain elements, even slightly, can impact the flow of how users make decisions on a website.

CRO and AB testing is a guessing game but educated guesses make all the difference. You have to root all of your observations and tests on historical data, user behavior, and competition. There may be some obvious things missing from your site that can be easily added where other things are more subliminal and take time to figure out.

3. Form a Hypothesis

At this point, you have all the pages you want to test, you have them in order of priority, the low-hanging fruit items are already in motion and you’re ready for some real testing and changes.

Before you put any tests live, you’ll want to organize each one so that you have a clear direction and metrics to test against. This is a hypothesis statement that should include your primary metric and the specifics needed to make a clear decision on the success or failure of your tests.

When forming a hypothesis, you’ll also want to define the following elements:

• Variation(s): Clearly define what is going to be changing and what will be used as the control group.
• Be Specific: Clearly outline the goal and what metrics will be used to determine success.
• Be Realistic: If you’re new to AB testing, set conservative goals based on what you believe to be a likely outcome.
• Iterative Steps: Be ready for continuous testing and refining of your hypotheses

4. Run AB Tests

So now you have everything you need to put a test in place. You’ll likely need a testing tool to help you execute on each one like AB Tasty or Optimizely. The setup and execution will be different depending on which tool you prefer but the learnings and targeting will look similar.

There isn’t too much to say for running AB tests since most of the identification work is done before the test is actually set live. Setting the test live is the easy part, gathering and analyzing the data is the biggest lift.

One thing to keep in mind when waiting for AB test results is that you want to be patient. This means waiting for statistical significance to ensure your test has run long enough for reliable data. Too often people get antsy and want to take down a variation because they see it not performing well after a short period of time.

Depending on the tool you use, the viewing percentage of the control group vs your new variation may fluctuate and can impact initial results. It’s best to let tests run for a minimum of two weeks. It’s possible many of your tests will have to run longer depending on the volume of users heading to that page that actually completes the goal.

5. Put Your Learnings Into Practice

It’s time to determine a winner or loser. Go beyond just the basic metrics provided by a testing tool or GA4, try to get a deep understanding of what your users experienced and how their behavior changed based on the variations you provided.

Just because a test wasn’t successful on paper, doesn’t mean there isn’t something to learn from it. My Dad used to say “sometimes knowing what doesn’t work is more important than knowing what does.”

Once you’ve identified a winner, test again, and then again, oh yeah, and then again. If you have a winning variation, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve reached the peak of performance. There’s levels to this, and once you find a win, another one is lurking around the corner. Use your newly found greatness to inspire other changes to that page or across the site.

Uncover Greatness with a CRO Audit

CRO and AB testing are some of the most valuable insights you get from your website. User behavior and engagement is more important than ever and is a ranking factor. Know what your users love and hate are insights worth their weight in gold.

Here at NoGood, we are curious by nature, so CRO and testing is in our DNA. If you want to partner with someone to uncover insights about your users that you may have never noticed before, we’re NoGood for that. Talk with our team today to find out more about what you might be missing out on when it comes to conversion rate optimization.

The post CRO Audit: Process, Steps, & Checklist appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Combining SEO and CRO efforts results in more conversions, leads, and organic sessions which means more growth for your business. On average, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing but generates 3x more leads. This means when you focus on driving growth with SEO and CRO working together, you’re getting a higher ROI on your marketing efforts, and see results much faster than other marketing channels.

SEO vs CRO: How They Work to Drive Website Growth

SEO is the method of optimizing a page or a website to better align to user experience and organic search algorithm ranking factors. CRO refers to the process of optimizing conversion rate by testing and monitoring user engagement performance and making changes accordingly. CRO relies on UX design and AB testing to determine the most effective way to persuade the user to take action while on the page, while SEO primarily focuses on improving organic traffic and visibility in search results.

SEO Working Independently

SEO gets the user to click and remain on the page for as long as possible. We do this through keyword research and high-quality content creation, which allows our pages to be discoverable in search results. Then, once we have the user on the page, we add value through helpful content. If users find our content interesting and helpful, they will likely continue scrolling and even click through to other pages on our site. Through link building, we increase our site authority and make it easier for users and search engines to find our content.

CRO Working Independently

CRO relies on UX design and AB testing to determine the most effective way to persuade the user to take action while on the page. We can implement CTAs and social proof at different points on the page, change how they appear, and revise the copy, then run AB testing to determine which components yield the most conversions.

Need help optimizing your website for conversions?

User Behavior Principles That Influence SEO and CRO

1. Social Proof

Social proof is one of the most common examples of behavioral psychology used in marketing. We see it everywhere, from reviews and ratings to video testimonials. It all comes down to the basic principle that if a large number of people hold a view or opinion about something, that belief is more likely to be true.

If I want to purchase a new cookware set for my kitchen and during my search see a set that has 8,000 reviews and 4.8 stars and a set with 14,000 reviews and 5.0 stars. I’ll compare both options and read some of the reviews. If I see reviews from people who describe using the cookware in a similar way to how I would use them, I may trust the perspective of the person leaving that review and, therefore, be more likely to purchase the set from that brand.

Social proof can also swing the other way as well. If I look at the cookware set with 14,000 reviews and 5.0 stars, I may have some skepticism if I don’t see any critical reviews of the set. So I would go back to the cookware set with 4.8 stars and consider some of the factors that led to lower ratings.

Perhaps some customers found the pots and pans too heavy, or they felt the cookware was better for use on a gas stove rather than electric. Now, I can consider these factors to determine how they might affect my experience with the cookware set. This helped to inform my decision much more than the other brand, which had more reviews, but none of them were critical.

2. Fast and Slow Thinking

Fast and slow thinking are fundamental to how we make decisions. Fast thinking is based on emotions, while slow thinking is rooted in logic and reason.

When this principle is applied to web design, images, fonts, colors, and videos evoke fast thinking as they play on the user’s emotions. Tech specs, informational snippets, and blog posts encourage slow thinking.

Let’s say I’m looking for a new blender, I’ll go to the product pages of some top rated blenders. Product pages typically have a good balance of images and technical descriptions.

The images capture my attention and show me how nice the blender looks in a kitchen and the delicious food I can make with it, evoking fast thinking and encouraging me to add it to my cart. If I scroll down to the features, slow thinking kicks in, and I rationalize my decision by considering how tech specs will influence how the blender will perform.

A product page that allows me to use fast and slow thinking makes me feel as though I am making a well thought out decision because I have used both logic and emotion.

3. Scarcity

Scarcity is an extremely powerful tool marketers can use to persuade potential customers to convert. It’s based on the idea that if something is in a limited quantity, people will be more likely to buy it.

We see this all the time with limited edition items or “drops” from exclusive brands like Supreme or Yeezy.

Though, It’s not just exclusive brands who can take advantage of this phenomenon, even Amazon uses scarcity to persuade customers to click purchase on the items in their cart, by letting them know that there is a limited quantity left in stock.

If the customer thinks an item or ticket will no longer be available, they’ll be persuaded to take action so they don’t miss out.

Learn more about how to influence consumer behavior with neuromarketing:

How SEO and CRO Work Together

1. User Experience Optimization

The user’s experience on your website determines whether they bounce or convert, directly impacting both Search Engine Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization results.

If the user clicks on your website and doesn’t find what they are looking for, or they find your website confusing, they are likely to bounce before converting.

CRO practices utilize elements of UX/UI design to ensure the user finds exactly what they are looking for, maximizing the chances of a conversion. These principles also benefit SEO by encouraging the user to stay on the page for longer.

Through intuitive navigation, clear page structure, simple CTAs, and responsive design, CRO and SEO work together to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

2. Conversion Funnels

SEO practices bring the user to the page then CRO leads them to make an action like subscribing to an email list, purchasing an item, or downloading a free guide.

Through keyword research and content creation, we can create helpful content that not only gets the user to click on our page but encourages them to continue reading and spending time on our site. We can distribute CRO elements like CTAs, downloadable guides, and email sign-ups throughout the page using clever copy and design choices.

With CRO elements, we can move the user from top of the funnel pages like a blog post to the middle and bottom of the funnel pages like product or service pages and contact forms.

3. Lead Generation

Lead generation allows us to connect with our users through email to remain top of mind, even when they aren’t searching for information or services. SEO and CRO allow us to build relationships with our target audience for when they are ready to convert.

Lead magnets can be distributed throughout blog posts, landing and product pages, in the form of interactive elements like quizzes, forms, and sliders. These interactive elements don’t just capture emails, they also invite users to learn more about products and services we can offer them.

4. Creating Brand Awareness

SEO and CRO work together to promote brand awareness by getting the user to visit and interact with the website.

By encouraging the user to visit our site and read content, interact with forms and quizzes, and learn more about products and services, we create brand awareness even if the user doesn’t convert. Each time they see our page in search results, they’ll become more familiar with our brand and what we can offer them.

How to Align SEO and CRO Goals

Aligning SEO and CRO goals starts with understanding how users engage and move past the awareness stage. By joining SEO and CRO goals, you’ll be focused on the holistic effort of simultaneously improving your organic website traffic and reducing the friction for the user to convert. This makes your digital marketing efforts much more effective since good SEO doesn’t always mean high conversion rate.

1. Lean Towards Simplicity

The more complex something is, the more friction it creates, reducing the probability of a conversion. Fonts, navigation, color scheme, and informational content such as descriptions should be as simple as possible.

As marketers, we often want to include industry jargon to help us create helpful content and establish authority in our niche. However, this can get confusing for the user. We want to ensure our content is easy to navigate and understand to maximize our chances of conversion.

Our SEO practices make our content discoverable and encourage users to click on our site. Simplicity will ensure they continue on the page. If the navigation is confusing or the descriptions are too complex, users are likely to bounce before converting.

When optimizing for SEO, it’s tempting to pile on relevant keywords and helpful content onto the page, but this isn’t always the best for CRO as the user may get lost and not end up where you want them to go. It can be helpful to prioritize the most essential elements, only giving the user the information you need them to know. This practice can work to ensure the user takes the desired action, leading to a conversion.

Elements to consider for increased simplicity:

• Infographics and images that reinforce overarching concepts
• FAQs with an accordion drop-down
• Simple language in CTAs and descriptions
• Prioritize the most essential elements – only give the user the information you need them to know

2. Focus on the User Experience

SEO and CRO are both heavily tethered to user experience. Helpful and informative SEO content encourages users to stay on our site for longer. While they are on our site, our CRO practices guide them toward other pages and lead to a conversion.

Once we get users to our site, we want to make sure they find the information helpful so they continue scrolling through our site instead of bouncing.

As users trend toward more cellphone usage, mobile search traffic continues to climb, so it’s important to add responsive design elements to your website and test your navigation and blog posts on both mobile and desktop.

Improving user experience with SEO & CRO:

• Sticky sidebar navigation with jump links for each section of a blog post
• Create persona and customer journey maps to tailor your content to your ideal audience
• Intuitive navigation for contact forms, add to cart, and checkout pages
• Interactive elements like quizzes, forms, and sliders improve user engagement

3. Conduct A/B Testing

While A/B testing is a classic CRO move, it also applies to SEO.

Conducting A/B tests can help determine the efficacy of your CTA copy, keywords, content structure, and website navigation. We recently ran A/B testing on a few of our marketing agency listicles on the NoGood blog to see if we could increase our conversion rates.

For Variation A we did a content optimization of the page but did not change the format. For Variation B, we optimized the blog and changed the format by placing key information about each agency vertically next to the company logo as opposed to horizontally at the bottom of each section, like Variation A.

After running this test, we found that this change increased conversions, as we hypothesized. What we weren’t expecting was that this would also improve our organic sessions, CTR, and average position.

Here are some CRO and SEO A/B tests to try:

• Landing page variations
• CTA copy and placement on the page
• Horizontal vs vertical navigation
• Semantically related keyword variations

Creating an A/B testing roadmap

An A/B testing roadmap is a document used to track your A/B tests and their results. Your map can help you outline challenges and user pain points and plan how you’ll address them in your testing.

Here are some components to include in your A/B testing roadmap:

• Test Name: Create clear naming conventions so you don’t get your tests mixed up
• Location: Where on your site this test will take place
• Funnel Stage: Consider the user’s funnel stage to determine the copy and elements you’ll use
• Value: How much value will this bring to your users
• Importance: How important is this test to your overall strategy
• Background: Provide some context on why you’re running this test
• Hypothesis: Explain what you hope to accomplish with this test

4. Focus on Keyword Intent

Keyword intent major determinant for what type of users will make it onto your page. If you’re creating SEO driven content that is attracting the wrong audience, your content won’t lead to conversions.

The keywords you target in your blog posts match the search intent of your target audience. Let’s say a B2B SaaS company needs more conversions for their new service, so they decide to create more blog content in order to generate leads. When conducting keyword research for their blog posts, they’ll want to consider the user intent for each keyword.

Each keyword will fall under four intent types:

• Informational: The user wants to learn about a topic
• Navigational: The user wants to find a specific page or website
• Commercial: The user wants to learn about products and services
• Transactional: The user wants to make a purchase

Since our SaaS company wants to generate leads through blog content, they’ll want to target keywords with informational intent. If they want to optimize their product or service pages, they can target keywords with commercial and transactional intent.

Creating and optimizing content around keyword intent helps to align SEO and CRO goals by ensuring that you are not only increasing organic traffic but you’re attracting users that have a high chance of converting.

5. Unify Your Measurement

SEO and CRO each have their own metrics, so in order to align your goals, you need to determine how you’ll measure success.

Metrics to track to align SEO and CRO goals:

• Heat maps: Visualize where users are interacting on the page. A ‘hot’ CTA will appear red, meaning that a lot of users are clicking through. If the CTA appears blue, users aren’t clicking as much, signifying revision is needed.
• Scroll depth: Measures how far down the page the user continues to scroll before making an action.
• Dwell time: Tells you the amount of time user spend on the page before bouncing or converting
• CTR: Click-through rate helps determine if users are converting by clicking the links on your page
• CAC: Tracking customer acquisition costs ensures you’re staying in the profit with your CRO and SEO efforts

6. Create a Clear Path for Users

When a user arrives on your site there should be a clear path of actions they should take that leads them through the funnel stages and ends in the desired action. With SEO and CRO, you can create a clear internal linking path that controls the user’s journey and directs them to relevant content that facilitates conversion.

It can be helpful to reference the persona and user journey maps you created to address the user’s interests and pain points. Consider the problems the user has, and how your product or service can solve them.

Creating a user path with click funnels:

• Optimize your landing page to capture the user’s attention
• Promote product awareness by inviting the user to learn more about your products or services
• Nurture leads through interactive elements like quizzes, forms, or sliders
• Add a lead magnet to connect with users through email
• Optional: Offer an introductory package or promotion

Final Thoughts

Combining SEO and CRO for growth is ultimately a long term strategy. It requires strategic planning and coordination to align your conversion goals and conduct testing to find out what works for your audience and your business goals.

When uniting two different digital marketing strategies for the same goal, it can be difficult to find your north star. If you need help aligning your SEO and CRO strategies to maximize your growth, we have growth experts who can help, feel free to drop us a line.

The post How SEO and CRO Work Together for Scalable Growth appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

CRO, as you’re aware, is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a site’s desired action—be it filling out a form, becoming customers, or any other action that is relevant to your marketing objectives. A finely tuned CRO strategy can make all the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that falls flat.

Indeed, CRO is an intricate dance that involves detailed experimentation, data analysis, and the ideation of roadmaps to improve user engagement. Whether it’s an A/B test on a landing page, a multivariate test on email marketing campaigns, or a detailed heatmap analysis of user interactions, CRO requires both creativity and technical prowess. The question is—how can we utilize a powerful tool like ChatGPT to streamline this complex process, effectively drive traffic, and increase conversion rates?

Consider this: an assistant that can not only help you ideate experimental design but also assist in the interpretation of user data collected from these tests. What if it could even aid in identifying impactful activities within the CRO workflow and in the formulation of future-proof strategies? That’s exactly the potential of ChatGPT for conversion rate optimization. As a leading LLM, ChatGPT leverages its broad language understanding capabilities to become a robust, versatile tool for your digital marketing strategy.

We’ll delve into how you can employ ChatGPT to enhance your CRO efforts. From ideation to execution and analysis. Whether you’re just starting your AI journey or looking for new ways to push your current AI usage even further, this piece aims to provide actionable insights you can start using today.

As we progress, remember this: the future of digital marketing may lie in the marriage of human creativity and AI’s vast processing power. Understanding and harnessing the potential of ChatGPT (or other LLMs) for conversion rate optimization is not just an exciting adventure—it’s an essential step in modernizing your marketing strategies for the digital age. Let’s embark on this journey together.

Understanding CRO

It’s essential to begin with a firm understanding of CRO itself. While we’ve touched upon what CRO involves in the previous section, it’s worth examining this cornerstone of digital marketing strategy in greater detail, highlighting its unique role across varied industries.

At its core, CRO is a scientific approach to optimizing your website or landing pages to increase the likelihood of visitors completing a desired action. The exact nature of this action can vary greatly depending on your organization’s goals and the nature of your industry. For instance, in ecommerce, the action might be making a purchase, while in the B2B space, it could involve filling out a form for a software demo or signing up for a newsletter.

CRO is not a one-size-fits-all process. It necessitates a deep understanding of your target audience and their unique needs and behaviors. As you begin to unravel these patterns, your marketing strategy becomes more nuanced and effective. The success of your CRO efforts is measured through conversion rates – or move-forward rates, since the metric you may be working to improve is not directly tied to the final conversion, but in a separate key event within the journey toward conversion.

To truly excel in CRO, it’s not enough to simply understand your audience or craft compelling calls to action. CRO requires a rigorous commitment to testing, experimentation, and analysis. This might involve running A/B tests on landing pages, performing multivariate tests on email marketing campaigns, or analyzing user interaction data to understand how various elements of your site or campaign contribute to (or hinder) conversions.

This rigorous process, while rewarding, can be complex and time-consuming. And this is where a powerful tool like ChatGPT can step in, acting as a supportive assistant in the ideation of such experiments, interpreting the complex data generated, and even in the formulation of strategic plans based on the insights gained.

From ecommerce to healthcare, SaaS to Finance, CRO plays a pivotal role in guiding potential customers along the conversion funnel towards the desired action. By effectively integrating ChatGPT into this process, you can navigate this journey with greater confidence, efficiency, and success. Let’s explore how in the following sections.

ChatGPT for CRO – An Overview

The potential of ChatGPT for conversion rate optimization lies in its capabilities across three core facets of CRO: experimentation ideation, data interpretation, and strategy formulation.

• Experimentation Ideation: ChatGPT can simplify your testing roadmap by generating innovative ideas for A/B or multivariate testing. It can pinpoint potential improvements for your landing pages or campaigns, aiding the creation of effective test scenarios.

• Data Interpretation: Deciphering complex datasets can be daunting. ChatGPT helps streamline this process, swiftly analyzing data from tests to uncover vital insights and trends, guiding your next CRO moves.

• Strategy Formulation: Based on insights, ChatGPT aids in crafting strategies that align with your CRO goals. It identifies high-impact activities, taking into account industry specifics and customer behaviors, provided it’s trained effectively.

In a nutshell, ChatGPT’s language understanding and generation capabilities make it a dynamic tool for CRO. Let’s explore practical applications and scenarios.

ChatGPT in Action: From Data Collection to Experimentation

Here are some tangible ways ChatGPT can be employed to augment your CRO workflow, starting from the collection of data through to the design and execution of experiments.

Data Collection

ChatGPT’s potential in data collection emerges strongly when considered in the context of AI-powered chatbots (or similar mechanisms that accomplish the same). Chatbots have been extensively used in digital marketing for lead generation, but the emergence of potential AI based use cases adds a new dimension of personalization and efficiency. An API connection to OpenAI can equip a chatbot with enhanced conversational skills, allowing it to collect crucial data points in a more engaging, human-like manner.

Instead of the typical, somewhat mechanical process of asking for a user’s name, email, or phone number, an AI-powered chatbot can conduct these interactions in a more conversational and personalized manner, leading to higher engagement and sign-up rates. Not only does this enrich the data collected, but it also paves the way for a more customized user experience. Using the collected data, the chatbot can subsequently deliver personalized messages to the users within the same engagement, effectively guiding them through the conversion funnel.

Say, a company in the telemedicine space wants to improve conversions on their website – specifically, registrations for first-time consultation. Their primary user base comprises individuals seeking immediate medical advice from accredited professionals.

An AI-powered chatbot, backed by ChatGPT, can be employed right on the site. When a user visits, the chatbot greets them in a friendly manner, “Hello there! Looking for a quick medical consultation? We’re here to help!”

Based on the user’s response, the chatbot guides the conversation, making it interactive and personalized. It might ask about the user’s medical concerns, preferred consultation timings, and if they have used telemedicine services before.

For example:

1. Chatbot: “Could you tell me a little about the medical advice you’re seeking? It’ll help me guide you better.”
   
2. User: “I have been experiencing frequent headaches lately.”
   
3. Chatbot: “I’m sorry to hear that. Would you prefer to talk to a specialist soon, or schedule a consultation for later?”

As the conversation progresses, it can naturally ask for essential data like the user’s name and email in a non-intrusive, conversational way. With the information collected during the conversation, it can also recommend personalized next steps like “Based on what you told me, Dr. Smith, a renowned neurologist, is available tomorrow at 5 PM. Would you like me to schedule a consultation?”

This process not only gathers crucial user data for the company but also streamlines the user’s journey to registration, effectively serving as a personalized guide through the conversion funnel.

While this may require a more technical build and implementation, it can certainly be done.

In essence, AI-powered chatbots, with ChatGPT at the core, can serve as dynamic tools for collecting richer, more insightful data, while simultaneously enhancing user experience— a critical step in the conversion rate optimization process.

Experimentation Ideation

Now that you have an array of specific data points collected from users through something like an AI-powered chatbot (using the same example from above), these insights can significantly fuel the ideation process for CRO experimentation. The personalized user responses gathered aren’t confined to enhancing chatbot interactions alone but can inform wider business strategies.

Let’s consider a few examples. If you find that many users, like our telemedicine seeker from earlier, have frequently complained about headaches, this could spark an experiment to test whether including content related to headache relief on the home page (or any other key page based on site data) improves conversions. You could test multiple content variants like articles about headache causes, tips for immediate relief, or even testimonials from patients who received successful treatment.

The specific consultation times preferred by users is another valuable data point. You could design an experiment to test sending reminder emails at different times of the day, comparing morning versus evening send-outs, to see which yields a higher consultation booking rate.

Using the information about whether a user has used telemedicine before, you could segment your users and create personalized marketing campaigns for first-time users and repeat users. This could involve A/B testing different versions of the campaign to see which resonates better with each segment.

In essence, the specific data points gathered via an AI-based interaction can inspire a plethora of experiment ideas, each designed to enhance the conversion rate not just within the chatbot’s user journey but across the business’s digital presence.

Keep in mind that while this example focuses around a chatbot-based use case, the concept is by no means limited to it. You can apply this to other scenarios as well. For example, if you already have rich data on your users, you can follow the same thinking and use ChatGPT to help you ideate based on that data. However, the chatbot approach does a nice job at explaining the entire idea.

Experiment Execution

Once you have your experiment ideas, executing them effectively is crucial.

For the telemedicine platform, using ChatGPT, you could efficiently generate diverse variations of content related to headache relief for your landing page experiment. This could range from informative articles, quick tips, to empathetic patient testimonials. All of these content variations could be rapidly created and modified, enabling you to carry out A/B or multivariate tests in a streamlined manner.

When it comes to the experiment involving reminder emails, ChatGPT can aid in crafting compelling subject lines and email bodies tailored to your user’s preferred times. You can test whether a friendly morning reminder like, “Start your day headache-free, book your consultation now!” performs better than an evening-oriented message such as, “Headache keeping you up? Book a late-night consultation now!”

Similarly, for the personalized marketing campaign test, ChatGPT can generate multiple versions of campaign content tailored to both first-time and repeat users. It can help craft messages that appropriately address the concerns of first-time users, perhaps by highlighting the ease and efficiency of telemedicine, and different messages for repeat users, perhaps emphasizing new features or services.

In summary, ChatGPT can significantly augment the execution phase of your CRO experiments, providing the means to rapidly create, test, and iterate on content variations across different platforms and formats, all aimed at enhancing the user experience and boosting conversion rates.

ChatGPT and the Conversion Funnel

The conversion funnel typically comprises four stages: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA). Each stage has its unique characteristics and requirements, and an AI tool like ChatGPT can be leveraged effectively across all of them.

Attention: At the top of the funnel, the goal is to capture the attention of potential customers and make them aware of your product or service. ChatGPT can aid in crafting engaging social media updates, blog posts, or even compelling product descriptions, all designed to reach and resonate with your target audience, ultimately driving traffic to your website or landing page.

Interest: Once you’ve captured the attention of your potential customers, the next step is to pique their interest. ChatGPT can assist in tailoring personalized email marketing campaigns or customized landing page content based on the specific user data collected, effectively maintaining and deepening the interest of the potential customer.

Desire: In this stage, the aim is to convert the interest of potential customers into a desire for your product or service. Here, you could leverage ChatGPT to create compelling case studies, testimonials, or detailed product benefits, all aimed at fostering a stronger connection between the potential customer and your offering.

Action: Finally, the action stage is where the potential customer makes the decision to convert. ChatGPT can assist in crafting persuasive calls to action, guiding the customer to complete the desired action, whether that’s signing up for a service, purchasing a product, or booking a consultation.

Because this is mainly on the content creation side, understanding your audience, the stages of the conversion funnel, and the potentials of AI technology is key to maximizing the benefits of ChatGPT for conversion rate optimization.

Increasing Operational Efficiency with ChatGPT

While other large language models (LLMs) could be equally effective, the efficiencies that a tool like ChatGPT brings to your CRO processes are certainly worth exploring.

In a rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape, tools that streamline operations, reduce manual workload, and expedite decision-making are valuable. Here’s how ChatGPT or an equivalent AI tool can have a profound impact:

Content Generation: Consider an ecommerce company dealing with a massive inventory. Writing unique product descriptions for each item could take hundreds of employee hours. ChatGPT can automate the creation of these descriptions, freeing up the marketing team to strategize on larger initiatives. Similarly, a SaaS company could use ChatGPT to generate social media posts promoting their software features, thereby maintaining a consistent online presence.

Data Analysis: A healthcare company may collect patient feedback to improve services. Manually extracting key trends from such data could be daunting. ChatGPT can analyze and identify critical patterns, enabling the company to make informed decisions and adjust their marketing strategy for better CRO outcomes.

Experimentation Speed: A B2B company may want to test different calls to action on their landing page. With ChatGPT, they can quickly ideate, create, and execute A/B tests, gathering insights in real-time. The quicker they discern what resonates with their audience, the faster they can apply winning strategies.

Personalization at Scale: Suppose an online education platform aims to provide personalized experiences for their students. ChatGPT can leverage user data to create tailored marketing campaigns or landing pages, catering to specific student preferences. This personalization, done at scale, can drive traffic and boost conversion rates efficiently.

In essence, the adoption of ChatGPT or another LLM in your CRO workflow can lead to notable gains in operational efficiency. The time saved on activities like content generation, data analysis, and experimentation, coupled with the increased precision of your strategies, can culminate in a higher conversion rate. However, the key lies in integrating these capabilities strategically within your existing marketing framework, to ensure the tool works to your advantage.

Future-Proofing Your CRO Processes with ChatGPT

Looking to the future of digital marketing and conversion rate optimization (CRO), it is clear that AI, and specifically large language models like ChatGPT, will continue to evolve and play a key role in shaping new strategies. It’s not just about staying relevant in the present—it’s about being ready to tackle the future head-on. Here are some ways ChatGPT can help future-proof your CRO processes:

Predictive Personalization: With advancements in AI capabilities, we’re not far from predictive personalization where ChatGPT could generate real-time personalized content based on a user’s activity sequence on a site. Imagine a potential customer browsing a furniture e-commerce site. The AI chatbot, foreseeing their intent based on their browsing pattern, could immediately offer personalized product suggestions or discounts, drastically increasing the chance of conversion.

Integrated Voice Assistants: With more consumers embracing digital assistants, the scope of CRO extends beyond text. Integrating ChatGPT with voice-enabled assistants could pave the way for voice-activated conversions. For instance, a SaaS business could enable users to upgrade their subscriptions or access new features through a voice command, making the conversion process seamless and efficient.

Autonomous CRO Workflows: As AI matures, there’s potential for fully autonomous CRO workflows, where AI handles the entire CRO process, from data collection, analysis, experimentation ideation, to executing experiments and interpreting results. In a B2B scenario, an AI-driven workflow could identify potential conversion points and autonomously launch micro-tests to optimize each point, reducing manual effort and accelerating optimization.

Explainable AI: As AI continues to evolve, so does the demand for transparency in how AI makes decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) models are set to become more prevalent, providing insights into how AI algorithms reach conclusions. In the CRO context, this could mean better understanding the suggestions and insights provided by ChatGPT, fostering trust and ensuring alignment with brand values and strategy.

Beyond Omnichannel – Hyperconnected Experiences: The future will break down silos between different digital channels, creating hyper connected customer experiences. With ChatGPT, you could orchestrate interactions across social media, email, website, and other digital touchpoints, ensuring a consistent, personalized experience that amplifies your conversion rates.

With these future-oriented considerations in mind, leveraging ChatGPT (or other AI technologies) for conversion rate optimization becomes not just a current boon but a long-term strategy, positioning your organization at the forefront of digital marketing innovation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, leveraging innovative technologies like ChatGPT for conversion rate optimization has become an essential strategy. By harnessing the power of this large language model, you can revolutionize your CRO processes, from using an AI-driven chatbot for personalized data collection and experimentation, to optimizing your conversion funnel and increasing operational efficiency.

This journey is not just about improving metrics—it’s about creating meaningful experiences that resonate with your target audience and cultivate lasting relationships. By deploying ChatGPT strategically, you can enhance these experiences, driving more conversions and shaping the future of your business’s digital presence.

The post Leveraging ChatGPT for Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

The chaotic nature of today’s buying process makes it more necessary than ever to predict and prompt customer actions. To convert visitors into customers, you need to optimize your overall marketing strategy and website design. That means you need to remove barriers to purchase, trigger specific actions, and create a pleasant and safe experience for customers. With conversion rate optimization you can achieve all this.

What Are Conversion Rate (CR) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion Rate

A website’s conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who perform the desired action on your website. This action converts them from visitors to leads (or customers). The desired action can be downloading an ebook, signing up for a demo, making a purchase, downloading an app, or anything else.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of conversions from a website or mobile app. CRO typically involves developing ideas for elements on your website or app that can be improved and then validating those hypotheses through A/B testing and multivariate testing.

Why is CRO Important?

• Get higher profits
• Increase your traffic
• Put the customers front-of-mind

Conversion rate optimization is important because it allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs by getting more value from the visitors and users you already have. By optimizing your conversion rate, you can increase revenue per visitor, acquire more customers and grow your business.

For example, if a landing page has a conversion rate of 5% and receives 1,000 visitors per month, then the page is generating 50 conversions per month. If the conversion rate can be improved to 20% by optimizing various elements on the page, the number of conversions generated increases by 300% to 200 conversions per month.

There is always room for improvement when it comes to increasing conversion rates, and the best companies are constantly working to improve their websites and apps to create a better experience for their users and increase conversion rates.

What Are CRO Tools?

If you want to convert interest into more sales, improve your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), increase your customer acquisition, or outsource your CRO strategy, you need a CRO tool. The type of tool you need depends on your business goals. CRO tools gather data about your website and its visitors to give you insight into how your website is being used, analyze it, and identify possible changes that could improve conversion rates.

Broadly speaking, CRO tools fall into three main categories:

• Web analytics CRO tools: Collect quantitative data about your website and its visitors, such as sessions, bounce rate, and more, to understand what is happening on your website.
• User behavior analytic tools: Track, monitor and optimize various aspects of user behavior on your software, app, or website.
• CRO testing tools: Determine what the best outcome is for your conversion rate when you make changes to your website.

What to Look for in a CRO Tool?

• GDPR Compliance

Protecting user data should always be the primary concern when making decisions based on user data. The CRO requires user data at every step, so it is extremely important for companies to choose CRO tools that are GDPR compliant. Opt for tools that use password encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular hacking tests to protect all your data.

• Integrations

Before choosing a CRO tool, know which vendors will integrate with your existing technical infrastructure. Not only is this important for the functionality of the website/app, but a good conversion rate optimization tool will also make your other tools work more efficiently. A lack of integration between tools leads to data silos.

• Best-of-Breed vs Best of Suite

With a best-of-suite approach, you get a composable architecture that allows for continuous extensibility and flexibility, while best-of-breed solutions often have a static architecture that gives you a polished solution with high performance but less flexibility.

• Maturity Level of Your CRO Process

Recognizing the importance of CRO and using optimization resources effectively are two different things. However, it is relatively easy to determine how CRO -mature your organization is. You need to figure out where you are on the roadmap and what you need to do to take your CRO to the next level.

Top CRO Tools

Web Analytics

• Google Analytics
• Adobe Analytics
• Matomo
• Amplitude

User Behavior Analytics

• Mixpanel
• Datadog
• Pendo
• Microsoft Clarity

CRO Testing

• Google Optimize
• Qualaroo
• Yieldify
• Optimizely

Web Analytics

Google Analytics

Platform Summary: Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. It is a free tool, but you can upgrade it to Google Analytics 360 if you want to record more data. With this tool, you can view the health and performance of your website with detailed tracking and reporting dashboards. 

Key Features: 

• Track conversion, retention, and bounce rates to re-strategize your marketing efforts by analyzing user activity and behavior.
• Get detailed and segregated demographic data to better understand your user base with visuals and reports.
• Create custom reports with the selected data you need for your purposes.
• Understand how users explore your site with flow visualization graphics.
• Track campaigns to understand what works on your website by adding UTM parameters to the URL.

Key Integrations: Google Optimize, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Callrail, Shopify, Marketo, Facebook, WordPress, Hootsuite, Zendesk

Pricing: Google Analytics has two pricing plans: free and 360. The cost of Google Analytics 360 starts at $12.5k per month and $150k per year.

Clients: J.P Morgan, Salesforce, The North Face, Zara, Tesla, Fiverr, Bloomberg, Binance, Cloudflare, The Guardian

Adobe Analytics

Platform Summary: Adobe Analytics is a powerful tool that reports on web visitor data such as page views, time spent on a page, user tracking history, and more. Conversion rate optimization in Adobe Target lets you optimize experiences at every step of the customer journey based on KPIs. You get all the testing and targeting tools you need for cross-channel experimentation, from landing page to the mobile app. And when you combine Target with Adobe Analytics, you get insights into customer interactions across mobile, web, and other channels. So you can deliver better experiences to high-value customers – and improve your ROI.

Key Features:

• Capture data across multiple channels including web, app, email, web kiosk, campaigns, and client-server apps.
• Set up business goals and KPIs to track the success of your campaigns across all touchpoints.
• Use advanced segmentation to identify the key characteristics of each segment that drive your set metrics and dimensions.
• Integrate customer data from your CRM tool to add new dimensions to your segments.
• Supports ad hoc analysis, flow analysis, and cohort analysis.

Key Integrations: Segment, Salesforce, Marketo, Facebook, Power BI

Pricing: The cost can vary between $30k to $350k+ per year.

Clients: Dell, Deloitte, Citibank, Asos, Elsevier, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Asos, Marriott

Matomo

Platform Summary: Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a downloadable (GPL licensed ) web analytics software platform. It provides detailed reports about your website and its visitors, including the search engines and keywords they use, what pages they like, what files they have downloaded, and more.

Key Features:

• Take advantage of numerous benefits, such as tracking new data, restricting access to specific users, and modifying UI by writing plugins and adding available features.
• Gain insights into your business by understanding key metrics, such as the best time of day to schedule paid ads and post to social media.
• Unlimited website tracking, email reporting, data export and storage, e-commerce transactions per day, and more.
• Use various data anonymization techniques to gather useful information while protecting user privacy. The platform protects the sensitive or private information of organizations.
• Track goals and see if you are meeting your current business objectives.

Key Integrations: Magento, WordPress, Jira Cloud, and Jira Server

Pricing: Pricing can range from $0 to $16.9k based on your monthly site traffic and hosting options.

Clients: United Nations, Amnesty International, Ahrefs, NASA, Hubspot, Ahrefs, Flaticon, European Commission, NOYB, Kinsta

Amplitude

Platform Summary: Amplitude is another conversion funnel analyzer CRO tool. It is primarily designed for SaaS companies. Product, marketing and growth teams use it to gain user behavior insights from data and make decisions. Amplitude is preferred by managers compared to its competitors. It makes it easy to get insights from data.

Key Features:

• The entire field of mobile analytics is dedicated to the nuances of user behavior.
• Real-time user analytics, including customer engagement, funnel, revenue analysis, and flexible user segmentation.
• The Growth Discovery Engine helps predict behaviors that drive conversation or customer engagement and exponential user growth.
• Analyze the user behavior behind each data point. You can also make a comparison between the behavior of engaged and disengaged users.
• Track, visualize, and analyze engagement and behavioral data in real-time so you can optimize your entire customer journey.

Key Integrations: Snowflake, Braze, Amazon Web Services S3, Adjust, Adobe Analytics, Airbridge, Airship, Amazon, Appsflyer, Bigquery

Pricing: Pricing starts at $0 for 10M events, and $995 for 100M events. For 100M+ events, you will need to contact their sales times.

Clients: Intuit, StackShare, Ford, Atlassian, NBCUniversal Media, Square, SoFi, DataRobot, CloudApp, Calm

User Behavior Analytics

Mixpanel

Platform Summary: Mixpanel lets you analyze how users interact with your web-enabled product. It’s designed to make teams more efficient by allowing everyone to analyze user data in real-time to identify trends, understand user behavior, and make decisions about your product. Mixpanel’s Modeling Layer makes it easy to adapt existing data to your needs without burdening development teams.

Key Features:

• Compare time spans to better understand how trends change over time.
• Examine how users navigate to your product and where they leave your funnel so you can direct them to the optimal paths. Features like the ability to add an unlimited number of steps, filter by cohort, and exclude events make this report one of the most powerful on the market.
• View total conversions in Funnels to see how many times a user has converted in total within the specified time period. For example, if someone completes multiple purchases in a single visit, you now have the option to show all of those conversions instead of just one. The Time to Conversion chart also lets you see how long it takes users to complete a particular step in the funnel.
• You can add multiple correlation events, filter and drill down by properties, and add cohorts as filters or target events. Zoom in on actions that relate to your key business objectives.
• Examine how users move through your product, where they get stuck, and why, and find the most profitable paths to conversion.

Key Integrations: Adjust, Airship, Alooma, Appcues, Appsflyer, Batch, CallRail, Branch, Databox, Kameleoon

Pricing: Mixpanel’s pricing starts at $0 for 100k monthly tracked users. However, accounts can unlock the full power of Mixpanel for only $299 per year or $36 per month.

Clients: DocuSign, Uber, Ancestry, Yelp, BuzzFeed, Expedia, Ticketmaster, Deliveroo, GoDaddy, ZipRecruiter

Datadog

Platform Summary: Datadog gives you end-to-end visibility of user journeys for web and mobile apps. Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides insight into your app’s front-end performance from the perspective of real users. Each user journey is seamlessly correlated with synthetic tests, back-end metrics, traces, logs, and network performance data so you can quickly identify a poor user experience and troubleshoot issues with context from across the stack.

Key Features:

• Get comprehensive insight into modern applications. Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance.
• Analyze and examine log data in context. Quickly search, filter, and analyze your logs to troubleshoot and comprehensively examine your data.
• Proactively monitor your user experience. Monitor critical user journeys captured with an easy-to-use web recorder and save technical resources with AI-driven, self-managing tests.
• Correlate front-end performance with business impact. Prioritize business and technical decisions based on usability metrics. Visualize load times, front-end errors, and resources for each user session. Decompose data using custom attributes.
• Visualize traffic flow in cloud-native environments. Understand performance using meaningful, human-readable tags. Use tags to filter traffic by source and destination or group by any criteria – from data centers to teams to individual containers.

Key Integrations: Kafka, Pusher, Apptrail, AuthO, Firefly, Altostra, Box, Snowflake, Apache, LambdaTest

Pricing: Pricing includes a Free, Pro, and Enterprise version. Pro pricing starts at $15 per host per month, while Enterprise pricing starts at $23 per host per month.

Clients: Samsung, Shell, Siemens, Whole Foods, Deloitte, SoFi, The Washington Post, Plaid, Sony, Lego System

Pendo

Platform Summary: Pendo is a product analysis app designed to help software companies develop products that are well received by customers. The app allows software publishers to incorporate a wide range of tools into their products that can lead to both a better product experience for users and new insights for the product team. As the company itself says, it promotes “product adoption, customer loyalty and team innovation.”

Key Features:

• Determine which features users are adopting and which they are ignoring, and how they are navigating your product portfolio.
• Monitor activity at both the account and individual user levels. Measure account activity to assess the state of your customers, understand who your super users are, identify historical trends, and track exactly what a user does over the course of a day.
• Compare usage between different segments. Whether they are large or small customers, test customers, or pay customers, the differences between segments is a great way to understand adoption patterns and retention risks. Pendo visualizes side-by-side comparisons of user behavior across segments, helping you identify hidden opportunities to improve the product experience.
• Understand user engagement and compare the health of your customers across all the apps they use. Pendo makes it easy to understand how users interact with different solutions, measure performance, and engagement between different apps, and drive user adoption across all your products.
• Identify revenue-generating activities, increase trial conversions, and develop features that customers are willing to pay for by analyzing the behavior of your most valuable customer groups and nurturing them at scale while creating plans to improve the state of less active customers.

Key Integrations: HubSpot, Algolia, Calendly, Figma, Salesforce, Zendesk, Segment, Intercom, Optimizely, Qualtrics

Pricing: Pendo’s yearly pricing can cost as high as $15K for the Pro plan and $50K for the Enterprise plan.

Clients: Verizon, Okta, Citrix, UserTesting, Henry Schein, Symantec, UserTesting, WebPT, IHS Markit, Verizon Connect

Microsoft Clarity

Platform Summary: Microsoft clarity provides usage statistics, session records and heat maps. It is a free analytics product that helps website managers improve their website by better understanding the behavior of website visitors. Clarity shows you which parts of your site are used the most and least, and provides an invaluable troubleshooting interface.

Key Features:

• Provides some unique insights, including unique reports such as “angry tips” and “excessive scrolling” that show users were confused or angry while navigating your site.
• Track users’ mouse movements, scrolling, and clicks on your web pages.
• Record where users click on your website to understand where your users navigate/interact the most.
• Set different filters to track sessions where users filled out a lead form, or create heatmaps to show which users might be frustrated by your page design.
• Clarity is GDPR compliant and is careful not to include sensitive data like numbers, images, and form content in records or heatmaps. This is ideal so you don’t accidentally store sensitive data like a user’s address or credit card information.

Key Integrations: WordPress, Google Analytics, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, ClickFunnels, WooCommerce, Unbounce, Joomla

Pricing: Clarity is free forever.

Clients: World Health Organization, Forbes, Steve Madden, Omega, Hewlett Packard, Cinemark, Acer, Pizza Hut, Adapt Worldwide, Pearly

CRO Testing

Google Optimize

Platform Summary: Google Optimize provides A/B testing, website testing, and personalization tools for smaller teams on a budget who do not have experience with CRO testing tools. Optimize lets you test variations of websites and see how they perform against a target you set. Then, the tool monitors the results of your experiment and tells you which variant is the best. Google Optimize can perform A/B testing, multivariate testing, and redirection testing. Thanks to the integration with Google Analytics, it is possible to segment audiences and deliver experiences to a specific group of users.

Key Features:

• A/B or A/B/n testing lets you test multiple versions of the same web page to find out which page works best for your users.
• With multivariate testing, you can test multiple elements on a page to see which combination achieves your goals.
• Run a redirect test or a split URL test where you can test different pages against each other. Redirect tests identify test variants by URL rather than by page element, which is especially useful if you want to test two very different landing pages or a complete page redesign.
• You can create and deploy your own variants in your own system. Use Optimize to view reports and determine the winner.
• Provide better-personalized experiences. Immediately launch the winning version of your site from an experiment or start a custom experience from scratch.

Key Integrations: Google Ads, Google Analytics

Pricing: Free

Clients: Fashion Nova, Candy, Grubhub, Theneo, Reonomy, Salesflare, Asana, Hive, Lulus, Instatext

Qualaroo

Platform Summary: Qualaroo is a user feedback and survey tool that helps businesses gain valuable insights and better understand their customers’ motivations. It uses surveys called nudges to gather deep user insights across multiple touchpoints. With more than 6 survey channels, Qualaroo is an advanced tool for user research and conversion optimization.

Key Features:

• Use the built-in professional templates to create any type of survey in minutes.
• Offers 12+ question types such as open, closed, dichotomous, Likert scale, NPS, emoji and more.
• Use Skip Logic and automatic language translations to make surveys more relevant.
• Capture and use feedback for product, website, and other optimization strategies.
• Helps you visually analyze feedback using the sentiment analysis and text analysis engine.

Key Integrations: HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, Eloqua, Zapier, Salesforce, Tableau, Intercom, Slack, KISSmetrics

Pricing: Pricing starts at $80 per month, while it offers a 15-day free trial.

Clients: LinkedIn, eBay, Shopify, Forbes, Spotify, Hootsuite, Udemy, Udacity, Khan Academy, Glassdoor

Yieldify

Platform Summary: Yieldify is a fully managed end-to-end personalization platform that helps e-commerce businesses generate more revenue by engaging their customers with personalized experiences. Yieldify takes care of the CRO optimization journey for you, from ideation to execution.

Key Features:

• Make website changes quickly and without developers. With easy-to-integrate tag and no-code builds, you can get your first tests up and running in less than 14 days and launch new tests in as little as 48 hours.
• Sunburst charts give you a detailed and “multi-directional” view of your customer journeys, explaining how your users navigate your site, where they exit, and why. This way, you can identify what’s hindering your conversion rate and determine the next steps to improve it.
• Track, measure, and report changes in each of these behaviors to get a more nuanced view of your A/B and A/B/n tests that influence customer activity using purchase indicators.
• With Performance Predictor, you can see within two weeks how an A/B/n test variation is likely to impact CVR. If you see negative performance within two weeks of starting a test, you can stop a test early, reduce your loss variants, and optimize for better performance.
• At Yieldify, all customer and company data is processed in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. With password encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular hacking tests, the information in your Yieldify dashboard is secure.

Key Integrations: Magento, Shopify, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Attentive, Yotpo, Afterpay, Klarna

Pricing: Their pricing model is custom and it is based on your company size and website traffic.

Clients: Adelaide Airport, Adidas, Asics, Coach, Harley-Davidson, Kerastase, Lee, Liquid I.V., L’Oreal, Macy’s

Optimizely

Platform Summary: Optimizely is a veteran website optimization software that enjoys great popularity and remains a favorite of many user testing brands. Optimizely is known for content, commerce and optimization with our Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Millions of experiences are served every day with our platform, helping businesses grow exponentially online.

Key Features:

• Design and run A/B tests without writing a single piece of code.
• Accelerate experiment execution and scaling without sacrificing performance with the Performance Edge feature, powered by the Experiment Delivery Network.
• Use the AI-powered product recommendation engine to recommend products and offers in emails and on the website.
• Automatically target audiences based on their interests and behaviors to optimize the user experience.
• Create, publish, and manage content across multiple channels with the integrated CMS platform.

Key Integrations: Shopify, Magento, Google Analytics, Shopify Plus, Magento, Criteo, Heap, Salesforce, Kalviyo

Pricing: Pricing starts at $36k per year. Depending on your needs and the features of the plan, your plan can easily reach $200k per year. Your website traffic is also a factor in pricing.

Clients: Dot, Atlassian, VISA, Discovery, AutoScout24, Electrolux, Gartner, IBT Industrial, Zoopla, SFI Health

All in all, you should realize that conversion rate optimization is not a quick fix. You will not see the results overnight. That’s not how conversion rate optimization should work either. It is a continuous process. So be prepared to increase your sales in the long run. If you are looking for an agency that can help you drive more leads, sales and revenue, contact us here.

The post Top CRO Tools for Marketers in 2022 (Free & Paid) appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

CRO includes all the activities that help improve the effectiveness of your marketing funnel and, while conversion rates may average 2-2.5%, if implemented properly CRO has the ability to significantly lower your CPAs and maximize the potential of your ad budget, and digital channels, including website, social, and email. While it may seem as though shop pages may be the most logical places to implement these strategies, they are universally applicable across home pages, service pages, blogs, landing pages, checkout flows, and anywhere else users are being driven to action.

Think of every step your potential customers or clients need to take in order to convert. Think of all the touchpoints they have with your brand along the way. You have the ability to improve each interaction with your brand and, as a result, convert more people into customers.

In this post, we walk you through what CRO is, why it is important, and how to properly do it.

When Does It Make Sense to Do CRO?

The short answer is that you should always be working on CRO. Yes, that may sound broad and pretentious, but let’s break it down. Independently of which stage your business is in, it can benefit from higher conversion rates.

For early-stage businesses and startups, CRO activities help you grow faster.

Investors are interested in how quickly they will see a return on their investment; and even if they’re in it for the long run, proving the viability of the product definitely puts them at ease and gives them the confidence they need to continue to invest.

It is typical that startups have to bootstrap themselves or work with a very limited budget that doesn’t allow them to break into the industry quickly and at scale. Having CRO as an internal framework will help startups achieve great results cheaper and faster.

For startups, CRO as a framework will help:

• Decrease the budget needed for digital advertising
• Increase the ROAS of every dollar spent online
• Build and expand userbase faster
• Gather a lot of qualitative and quantitive data fast
• Create a competitive advantage against bigger companies who are not employing effective marketing strategies
• Prove the business concept with strong KPIs

For mid-sized businesses, CRO will help you expand and get to the next level.

At this stage, every company is focused on getting to the next level and becoming the biggest or the best player in the field.

At this stage, businesses typically have larger advertising budgets and a more established positioning in the industry. Larger budgets enable these organizations to test extensively and every failed trial is actually an opportunity to learn and grow without creating irreversible damage.

Because these companies have had some success, they are looking to make it big. Since they are competing with other bigger companies who also have access to large funding, a competition based purely on the size of the budget will prove costly and damaging. So, it is important to not only have a large budget but also understand how to best employ these resources.

For mid-sized companies, CRO as a framework will help:

• Improve efficiencies of large budgets
  Create new opportunities that can be tested and scaled before assigning larger chunks of the budget
• Create even faster growth
• Invest into advertising and branding more effectively
• Higher ROAS create even larger budgets
• Rinse and repeat until you get to the top

For established market leaders, CRO will help you stay in the leader position.

Oftentimes, we assume that the largest player in the market is too large and too slow to see the change coming. Also, every small and medium player in the market is trying to poke holes in their approach and show the market how they are better than the leader.

To become a leader, and stay a leader, companies cannot rest on their laurels. They have to continually improve and innovate not only their offerings but also their marketing strategies. Besides, having very large advertising budgets and a recognized leadership position in the market all play to their advantage.

For market leaders, CRO as a framework will help:

• Create a competitive advantage over smaller players
• Secure sustainable, predictable growth that can be replicated again and again and again
  Prevent competition from “sneaking up on them” by consistently growing their market share
• Ensure that the human, time, financial, technological resources are utilized effectively
• Ensure that they stay on top of the market by continuously improving their marketing efforts

Importance of CRO as a Growth Lever

There are often multiple goals and KPIs in every business. However, there is usually one, the main goal that defines all activities within the business that support reaching it — typically this is increasing the revenue. But how do you increase it? Do you need more people making purchases on your website? Do you need more people to submit a form to get in touch with the sales team?

All steps along the digital customer journey should be built around — and encourage — that one target action. But to improve the conversion rate, you’ll need to deconstruct your whole funnel and improve the conversion rate at every step. You need to analyze the behavior and its driving forces at every interaction.

Building Your CRO Strategy

A method that many marketers implement to determine where to focus their attention is known as the PIE method. What this entails is as follows:

For example, if your main objective is to drive purchases on your website, you might want to take a look at the following mechanisms of your homepage through this lens:

Hero CTA:
Potential: Is the fastest pathway to conversions, but is currently below average and could see a 50% increase if brought up to standard rates
Importance: Is directly tied to website purchases, so would rank as high importance in this instance
Ease: Can be done manually and would instantly show impact

Organic Traffic:
Potential: While your site traffic is healthy, there are opportunities for SEO optimizations to drive new top-of-funnel users to the site
Importance: While new users coming to the site are great, they won’t likely be converting immediately, and so would rank as low importance
Ease: Would require hiring an outside SEO to optimize existing content and determine new content opportunities which could take weeks or months to see new traffic from

Hero Images:
Potential: Also the first touchpoint when people land on your site, a compelling new image could grab user attention and compel them to move further down the page to find more information
Importance: Feedback has indicated that current imagery is perceived as dated and deters users from converting due to the impression that the product may not be of high quality, and so would rank as high importance
Ease: Would require hiring outside creative, though turnaround would likely only be under a month with a moderate cost

As we look at the above information, it becomes relatively simple to generate a working strategy to begin optimizing our homepage conversions. Our first step would likely be to update the CTA from our hero section since it’s likely to have the highest impact, with the lowest effort and lead times. Second, we would likely hire an outside creative group to create new images for our hero section as that would also likely have a high impact in the short term, though with less ease. And finally, if budget and resources allow, we can bring in an outside SEO to optimize our content to assist in lead generation since, while not immediate, those new users that are generated will someday convert to leads — and likely more efficiently with our newly optimized hero section.

How do people find out about your proposition? What channel is the most appropriate to target them on? Where can you get the relevant traffic at the cheapest rate?

While this is an exercise that focuses specifically on our hero section conversions, the below framework has long been used as a way to approach building landing pages but is just as capably applied to all matter of content or conversion opportunity.

AIDA: Attention – Interest – Desire – Action

If you’re not familiar with the AIDA framework it’s likely time to add yet another acronym to your marketing vernacular. As mentioned, this typically applies to landing pages, and it will be explained here as such as that is typically where most conversions begin on our websites, though the same principles apply to nearly every facet of our marketing and brand presence — whether that’s on social, email, or elsewhere.

Attenion

For conversions, attention is earned and never given. It’s for this reason that attention is given priority not only in terms of the cadence of AIDA, but also in terms of the actual collateral that we’re building for our landing page.

Because grabbing a user’s attention is of such importance, these parameters are typically applied to the avove-the-fold section (it’s called the HERO for a reason) of our site. This is your opportunity to not only make a first impression, but create intrigue and drive users down the page, and in the process further down the funnel.

While it is incredibly easy to become overwhelmed with just what it is that we are going to choose to set expectations for our brand, and by extension win customers, there are a few key elements that have proven to be crucial to winning attention.

Strong Imagery

Beautiful, bold imagery has been the calling card of a strong hero section since the advent to Web 2 — and for good reason. And while illustrations, artwork, photography and other form of visual components are still reigning supreme in above-the-fold real estate, video has been making waves for landing page creative in the same way as it has in our social feeds.

Similar to the time users afford to brands to grab their attention on social, landing pages also have just a few seconds to win users or lose them to the bounce. It’s for this reason that it’s paramount that our hero imagery or videos are not only evocative, but also clearly communicate to users what it is the brand sells.

Value proposition

Hooks in the hero section of our landing pages have become the headline to any brand collateral and shoudl be not only prominently displayed alongside your stunningly beautiful imagery, but done so in a way that tells users immediately what it is that you’re offering them.

While there’s a time and place for story telling, the hook is not one of them. In the same way we want to optimize headlines in our blog content by keeping them under 60 characters, we likely want to keep hooks even shorter.

Branding legend, Marty Neumeier, created an infastructure for developing brand value statements, or as he calls them, Onliness Statements.

If this looks familiar, that’s not at all surprising as it’s been a staple for brands for writing value propositions for years, and is the most efficient formatting for determing what value a brand has. While the formatting is arguably fairly sterile, and maybe not super attention grabbing, it is still a good foundation to build off of if you were to be looking to write a hook for your brand.

For example, if we were to be building a hair care line and wanted to speak to the value of our hair conditioner we might write something like, “Our hair conditioner is the only cruelty-free beauty product that is organic.” Not bad, but kind of boring. If we were to use this as our baseline we could rewrite it to be more attention grabbing and say somethign like, “Loves animals? Love soft hair? Try our organic hair conditioner!”

Which brings us to…

Clear call to action

While navigating a website is fairly intuitive to most at this point in time, there’s still a need for guiding users down-funnel and giving them purpose once you’ve captured their atteniton. This comes in the form of a clear call to action which would either be incorporated into our value proposition as seen above with the “Try our organic hair conditioner!” or the form of a button or form that is not only prominently displayed, but actionable.

Social proof

Social proof is exactly what it sounds like, it’s some sort of validation from someone that’s not the brand to prove to the user that your product is reputable and that others have not only tried it, but would recommend it to others.

It may seem as though we may be very quickly crowding our hero section, and you would be right if all of these elements were crowded together and separate. They can be, however, and often are, combined in some capacity to make the elements collectively stronger.

In the instance of social proof, this could mean incorporating a photo of a prominent and well regarded content creator in your hero image to grab attention of users who might align with that particular creator, or even having a quote from that content creator as a part of your hook.

Additionally, if you wanted to incoporate a more broad proof to your process, you coudl have a statement that calls out the number of 5-star reviews your product has had, or another similar metric to communicate to users that your brand is loved by many people.

Trust elements

These sit complimentary to our social proof as validation that a brand has been vetted on a professional level in order to prove to users that a business is, in fact, legit.

While many of us may not thing twice before clicking a banner ad and pasting our credit card information into a website’s check-out page, in the realm of start-up products and pre-orders, users have become wary of being burned and often want to know that they will actually receive the product they’re ordering before handing over their digital cash.

This proof can be as simple as adding the logos of the various payment methods your site accepts to prove that your brand is trusted to process payments, or even offers Klarna as a payment installation partner. Additionally, the logos of any press outfits that have featured the brand, or even badges to show certifications or accolades that the business have earned can help to build confidence in users landing and help drive them further down the funnel.

Interest

Okay, you’ve gotten the user’s attention, now what? Well, you now have to build their interest. This is an opportunity to build on your value proposition as the user moves forward in their journey to conversion, so keeping in mind our onliness statement, and building sections of our landing page, or other content, will help to frame our product in a way that piques interest and helps warm leads.

A few simple ways to approach this can be…

Benefits

Features are a dirty word when trying to build interest as they don’t speak directly to the user. Here, let’s look at this example:

Feature:

This tooth brush has a milliion bristles.

Benefit:

Our tooth brush polishes 10x better than our closest competitor because of our patented bristle density.

By spelling out the benefits to a user, you not only are able to convey to them what it is your product does, but what it can do for them.

How to

Explaining how to use a product can be particularly useful in building interest, especially when it comes to products or new features that may not be particularly familiar to a user or if you’re developing a new category that users may not be familiar with.

Using the tooth brush again as an example, we may provide users with a diagram showing them the way that we recommend brushing with our tooth brush vs. traditional tooth brushes, or even have a step by step guide that walks them through the process.

Bullet points

Lists are great and incredibly efficient for building interest, if for no other reason than they make it easy for users to skim and quickly gather information as they make their way down screen.

While some users may love a 5000 word essay explaining the step-by-step process that was used to develop our toothbrush technology, a bulleted list can go just as far with a few key pieces of information in list form.

How we built meta-brush:

1. Surveyed and interview over 1M people with teeth
2. Consulted with the top 10 tooth professionals in the world
3. Hired the world’s top engineers to build our bristle technology

This is a simple and effective way to plant the seed of interest and link users to more information if they’ve decided they want to consume more without immediately overwhelming them if all they’re looking for is the key components of what they’re curious about.

Desire

Desire is typically an expansion on the social proof and trust elements from our hero section. While it doesn’t necessarily have to be a 1:1 expansion on the reviews or testimonials mentioned above the fold, it should be a more robust offering in order to continue to build the relationship with the user and help drive them to conversion.

In additon to adding more reviews, accolades, and testimonials further down the page, the additon of case studies can be a fantastic opportunity for brands to flex and have a section of their content or landing page that is dedicated to data points that support the benefits of the business and solidify the value proposition.

Action

In the same way that our hero section had a clear call-to-action above the fold, each subsequent section should too include a CTA to bring users to pursue the different journeys we’ve mapped for them on our site.

The “how we built meta-brush” section can have a CTA to read the full story of how the product was made. The added call-outs of the different publications can drive users to read more about what various publications are saying about the brand. The how-to section can call users to click through to a video tutorial that visualls guides users to using the meta-brush themselves.

As we map the customer journey, it’s important to make sure that each CTA offers a new value to users, and helps not only guide them to conversion, but also answer questions they may along the way.

A few things to keep in mind as you build your Call-To-Action:

How to Approach CRO Strategy

Just like with most other marketing activities, conversion rate optimization is not a “set and forget” deal. It is a continuous process of improvement. This is due to the fact that there is no limit to the number of improvements that can be made in any business. There are also many outside factors as well, such as competitive landscape, behavioral influences, and messaging adjustments.

As you may see, there are a lot of outside forces that affect consumer behavior on your website. So, it is not only about the internal factors that you may control, such as polishing your messaging or improving usability. It is also about being keenly aware of what’s happening in the market and which trends are affecting behaviors. It may seem like a hefty undertaking, and it definitely is. However, investing in CRO will continue to pay dividends in terms of an increased customer base, decreased advertising costs, and higher returns.

Researching Your CRO Strategy

At this point, it should be apparent that there are quite an innumerable number of ways, places, and opportunities to optimize conversions within a business’s operations. This begs the question, “How do we determine what to optimize, when, and why?”

In the same way, as we detailed the PIE method previously, there’s a fairly formulaic way to approach your CRO strategy which in many ways mirrors the traditional marketing processes.

By controlling the steps of the process, and creating a structure to the approach, we not only create parameters to ensure we are able to effectively determine accurate attributions for outcomes but also ensure that our decisions are made based on data rather than impulse.

Choosing Goals

This should look familiar to anyone who has ever been tasked with creating a marketing campaign as it mirrors the first step to almost every campaign ideation process. Before we bring in creative before we started writing headlines before we even start researching campaign concepts or anything else we must first look at our data and determine just what it is we want to optimize.

This can, unsurprisingly, take a number of different forms — as previously mentioned. These goals should directly reflect the mechanism of our marketing stack that we are seeking to optimize, as otherwise there will be inefficiencies in our reporting, and an inability to properly control our optimization efforts.

While not exhaustive, the most common goals tend to be:

Increase subscribers:

Email lists provide businesses with a captive audience and a direct line of contact with their communities, naturally growing these lists are often a focus of CRO campaigns. While there are many avenues to getting users to click subscribe, we most often see success in strong value propositions paired with prominently displayed, and easy-to-access pathways to subscribe.

Registering users:

Registering users sits complimentary to getting new subscribers, particularly for any business selling a product or service with repeat business. While CRO does technically start for conversion rate optimization the conversion rate, in this instance, would refer to converting users to registered users to not only move them further down the funnel but position them in a place where they can be targeted directly with new promotions and drive them to purchase.

Downloading content:

Guides, checklists, creative assets, or other forms of digital leave-behinds have become the modern form of marketing collateral that once took the form of postcards and other tangible materials. Driving users to download your content, particularly something they can use frequently is a great mechanism for building brand awareness and providing value to users while remaining top of mind every time they use it.

Spending time on site:

While yes, CRO is technically meant to act as a practice to convert users faster, there is always the scenario that users are clicking onto your site, social, or email, and immediately exiting — without even having the chance to drive them down funnel ot conversion. By increasing time spent on site, you’ll be directly decreasing bounce rate, while capturing more data about user behavior to determine user behavior and opportunities to convert.

Completing purchase

Coffee is for closers. But sometimes the closing can be a difficult part of the conversion journey and have to focus your attention on converting those add-to-carts to purchases. It may take removing steps from the conversion process, offering free shipping or other incentives, or just making check-out boxes more intuitive for users — so long as you get users to convert.

Up-selling

CRO but we’re optimizing the conversions themselves. Wild, right? Not so much. If our main KPI is to drive more revenue and we already have a healthy funnel that is converting at well above industry standards and, despite our best efforts, is not getting any more efficient, the logical next step is to try to increase spend on each conversion. This belt would look great with those pants.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Once you’ve determined just exactly where you’re looking to create your optimizations, the next step is to map out the customer journey since this will provide us the most immediate insights into where inefficiencies are occurring, where we’re losing customers, and what can be done to remedy any issues we may discover.

Where are they landing?

Understanding where users are landing can give you the greatest insight into not only what is driving them to your site, social, email, or other platforms, but also allow you to most effectively track them through their journey to find other inefficiencies down the funnel.

By understanding where users are landing, you are provided with a number of optimization opportunities. One for optimizing the mechanism that is driving them to you in the first place and increase potential leads to drive down the funnel. And one for each stage of the funnel once they’ve landed.

What actions are they taking?

These would be where the users wind up, or places where they pass through once they’ve landed. Do they click your CTA? Do they wind up on your blog? Do they immediately bounce? Maybe they go directly to purchase?

Understanding their actions once they’ve landed will help to determine the place where you implement your PIE method as you start building your optimization strategy.

Where are they leaving?

While this may often be a difficult optimization to make, there’s something to be said for putting the effort towards remediating bounces once users reach your site as, next to revenue, one of the main goals for any business is keeping users on-site as long as possible.

Yes, it’s entirely possible to attract users back once they’ve left with retargeting, but that’s extra ad dollars spent and an increased opportunity for them to never come back again.

Who are they?

Understanding customers can be helpful for optimizations in a number of ways. Aside from understanding their potential behavioral predispositions on your site, and what the likely pathways are to purchase, by understanding who these customers are you can also understand…

What are their motivations?

This is more so the fuel for your optimization strategies than anything as it will likely inform the strategic positioning and creative decision-making steps to optimize your site, social, or email. Different CTA languages may be more effective on different platforms based on fluctuations and nuances in the customers’ makeup — the same goes for visual decisions and a number of other factors that are reflected in our brand visuals and language.

Determine Road Blocks

Once you’ve identified where it is you’re looking to create optimizations in your conversion journey, the next step of the process is to isolate where it is that users are getting lost in the journey, and more importantly why they’re getting lost. There are often barriers within the journey that will, despite intention to convert, dissuade users from making that important decision to do so.

In the same way that we are constantly vying for attention with our content, it’s equally as easy for users to lose interest while moving down funnel and make the decision to bounce — never to be seen ever again.

These roadblocks, as with the previous examples, can vary from simple fixes to remove arbitrary annoyances in the user journey and user experience on your site, to incredibly complex, multi-month projects that can require outside consultation or even hiring new team members or entire new teams.

Hard to read fonts

The days of Angelfire and Geocities website are far behind us, and for the most part that’s a good thing. While the early days of website design were very much experimental and, more or less, anything was acceptable — that is no longer the case and accessibility is very much a thing now.

Beyond being a nuisance to users who might struggle to read the content on your site, understand the directions they’re being given, or even find their way to where they intend to go, having difficult-to-read fonts can limit your traffic by being a barrier to users being able to your site at all — despite their best efforts.

While it’s absolutely valid to want to extend your carefully crafted brand to all reaches of your brand’s presence, when making branding decisions related to fonts it’s best to test readability not only at different resolutions but on various screens and with all of your brand color combinations to ensure readability in all instances before committing to any branding decisions that may inhibit conversions.

Slow-loading pages

Yes, you spent a lot of money on that photo shoot to create an incredibly beautiful animation for the hero section of your website. And we understand that compression is a word not one of us wants to hear when it relates to our carefully crafted creative, however, it is a fact of life.

Is it important to wow users when they land on your page and show them that you do, in fact, have an incredible thing that you want to share with them? Of course. But also, we don’t all always have access to 5G satellite Elon Musk super fast uber fiber-network wifi. And if we don’t, then that makes a massive impact on our enjoyability of a site’s experience if there are slow load times.

In the same way that we have under 5 seconds to win audiences with our content, if a page takes more than a few seconds to load and move users quickly through their journey, then it’s very likely we’re going to lose them.

There are many magic numbers that float around the internet about where to cap your file sizes, and these range anywhere from 4-20 MB per image. But the reality is that you should always strive to keep images as small as possible without sacrificing quality too severely, and of course always be testing loading times to ensure that if a page happens to have more images or possibly embedded videos, it’s not going to be deterring users from clicking.

Questionable testimonials

It’s become fairly standard practice for newly launched products to give promo codes to friends, family, content creators, and others within immediate proximity in order to not only ensure that your site doesn’t immediately burst into flames upon launch, but also build up a convincing roster of testimonials as validation for your product when you start pushing public-facing campaigns.

This has become the standard for a reason because it works, but as users and consumers become savvier, it’s important that Aunt Gerty provides an accurate and believable account of her experience with your product or service.

While negative reviews are a bitter pill to swallow in many instances, they’re in no way a scarlet letter for brands, and in many cases, if there are 50k positive reviews and 0 negative reviews that dip below the 3-star threshold, users begin to become somewhat suspicious.

The purpose of our socials, our sites, and our emails, are obviously to make us look good and present both our brand and product in the best light possible, though it’s important to not be too overzealous and create a user experience that is believable and genuine.

Boring CTAs

There’s an incredible video that exists on the internet which has a fairly simple direction for user testing and designing for users, “Assume the user is drunk.”

While this may seem harsh, and in some cases it is, the reality is that anyone that has ever tested a site or mapped a user journey on a site or app will likely have some sort of horror story or unresolved trauma from an ingeniously dumb way a user broke their site or app.

It’s for this reason we need to make sure our CTAs are not only clear but interesting and engaging enough to grab a user’s attention as they move down a page or through a site journey.

In the same way, we want to make our own content stop the scroll when designing ad creative, we want the CTAs on our site to stop the scroll, demand user attention, and encourage clicks.

Intrusive Ads & Pop-Ups

The user journey is called such because it is, in fact, a journey. It’s a dance between the site and user where they are presented with questions, then the answers to those questions, gentle nudges in certain directions, instructions, and then finally the compelling call to convert.

There is nothing that will break this immersion more than a poorly placed pop-up or a pushy ad or an otherwise unwelcomed disruption to the user journey.

This isn’t to say that pop-ups shouldn’t be used, but they should be used intentionally and monitored to ensure that they can’t be attributed to any patterns in bounce rates. Too high up on a page and an offer or pop-up can make users feel as though they’re being pushed too hard because they haven’t even had the chance to see what the page is about or what information they’re being provided before getting asked for an email or other action. Conversely, having the ask too far down the page can lead to users landing on a page, getting the information they came for, and then bouncing before they’ve even triggered the pop-up, to begin with.

This is very much an area where it is helpful to put ourselves in the seat of the user and imagine ourselves in their place as they experience the page, app, or other pieces of media. At what point on the page do we feel satiated enough to want more, but not so fully satiated that we’re on the verge of bouncing? Somewhere in the middle is where we want to slide in the ask.

Disconnect between headlines and content

This one goes out to all the SEOs out there, because there’s nothing more confusing and bounce-inducing than landing on a page after searching for a key term, reading a headline, and then wondering to yourself 3 sentences in, “Where the heck am I?”

While particularly true of H1s and introductions as they are, by nature, the sections of a page that will make or break decisions for audiences to scroll past the fold, it’s also true of headlines and content for all subsequent sections of our content.

This is often a sign of lazy SEO and an attempt to quickly optimize content to rank for specific terms, assuming that the headlines and paragraphs are related sufficiently without needing to edit them further to cater to the new term that they’re meaning to rank for. And while sometimes that is absolutely valid and will achieve the desired results because a piece was previously improperly optimized — it’s best to be thorough.

Content not targeted to audience

Throwing it back to the “Who are they?” section of our customer journey mapping exercise, this is one of the many instances where it’s important to not only understand who the audience is, but how to properly speak to them and appeal to their needs and desires.

While there is absolutely something to be said for being thorough and providing in-depth, thought-provoking, thought-leadership in your content, or ensuring that you are the most expert voice in all of the internets on a certain subject — it won’t mean anything if your audience is comprised primarily of 3rd graders.

This is nothing against third graders, as we personally love painting with our hands, but it’s as much to say that you need to present your content to your audience in a way that they are able to digest, understand, and that will resonate with them.

CRO Testing Framework

The framework I like to use and refer to is one by our friends at Moz. It goes something like this.

Step 1: List hypotheses

From the previous data, analysis, PIE frameworks, and other prelimary research we’ve done, we should have a general idea of the tests we’d like to pursue, and the potential outcomes of those tests — or at the very least the potential methods we’ll be using to gain those outcomes.

To put those concepts into a scientific framework, we like to frame all of our CRO tests as hypotheses to not only simplify the process but ensure that there aren’t unaccounted-for variables that might muddy up our results or create false positives for the attribution of our results.

Put simply, the framework for creating a hypothesis is as follows:

If I do (action) then (result) will happen because of (user action).

If we were to frame this for our previous experiment encouraging clicks for our hero banner then our hypothesis might be looking something like:

If I (update the banner creative) then (users will click more) because (they will be more engaged by our hero section).

However, testing doesn’t always just mean testing a single component.

Step 2: Determine Test Types

A/B

A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like, testing one version of something against another. This is a fairly simple way to approach the testing framework as it leaves very little opportunity for error or misattribution to results — either positive or negative.

If a single change is made, then any observable difference in outcomes can fairly safely be attributed to that change assuming that there haven’t been significant other changes to the immediate contextual landscape of a site or other sites that are directing users on their journey to that site — though even if changes on other sites impact traffic to a specific page it is unlikely that those changes will impact outcomes on the page itself.

Multivariate

Unlike A/B testing where a single change is tested against the previous performance of a site or page, multivariate testing can test multiple hypotheses simultaneously while still implementing control to ensure that there is a mechanism in place to allow accurate reporting and attribution of the results given from the changes.

These tests become more complex in nature because there are considerations that have to be made and hypotheses made for our hypothesis.

If we alter our original test of changing the hero image but set our goal to have people scroll further down the page to click on a mid-scroll pop-up we will also be optimizing with a new CTA button that is more legible to users and has a more compelling copy, that’s fine, we just need to do a bit of extra work in our reporting.

In this instance, if we see an increase in triggers of our mid-scroll pop-up as well as an increase in time spent on a page, we can attribute that our hero updates have been successful in keeping users on the page longer. However, this is where things get a bit tricky (you got this). Many would also see an increase in clicks on the mid-scroll pop-up and attribute that increase to the changes made to the pop-up — not necessarily the case.

Since we’ve implemented changes in our hero section to intentionally get more users to trigger the pop-up, then we will naturally get more clicks as a result of the increase in the volume of users seeing the pop-up. If we want accurate evidence of the efficacy of our updated pop-up we’ll need to measure the click-through rate (CTR) to determine if there’s been an increase in conversions, and so we would implement the same formula as we would to determine the conversion rate:

Step 3: Time to Test

It’s been quite a journey already, but it’s finally time to test. You have your data, you have your hypothesis, you understand your roadblocks, and it’s time to set up the tests and GO!

And while we have discussed a few solutions to some roadblocks, and some examples of different CRO tests that may be helpful to leverage to overcome those roadblocks, there are a number of standard tests that are worth mentioning as you launch your testing.

Adding Mid-blog Text CTAs

While CTAs are often a great way to overtly call users to an action, it’s also sometimes worth stealthily adding a CTA into a piece of content to make it less of a hard sale and arguably even trick users into clicking through to an offer.

As we have more of a focus on community-led growth, these tactics of incorporating CTAs organically into our content offerings are increasingly becoming the standard, often paired with some more direct CTAs for those who may not click on the blue text in a blog post (see what we did there?).

This can also help to fight banner blindness as users have been proven to instinctually ignore anything that is presented in the form of a banner as they associate the format with ads and block them from their minds.

Lead flows

While it is easy to get fixated on the click, it’s also important to focus on where the click goes. As we look at CRO as a means of getting users through the journey, our testing should also serve as a mechanism for creating a more streamlined journey to conversion.

While a pop-up on a homepage asking for an email address within the first five seconds may be abrasive to most users, there can be an incentive added to the pop-up to not only entice users to convert but do so with a significantly shorter journey.

Observing successful journeys can give insights into what processes are most successful on a site, and testing incentives at various touch points throughout the journey can help to determine if there’s an opportunity to drive users to conversions at earlier points if given an incentive.

Automated Workflows

Despite the next section (spoiler alert) focusing on adding human touches to the customer journey, the opposite can also be true in optimizing conversions as removing labor from the process is as much an optimization as removing a click.

While abandon cart flows and pop-ups are the most well-known automation in CRO, there are other processes that can be automated in order to move users more quickly down-funnel while requiring less lift from your teams.

For example, having an automated email response from an MQL form that sends the user an email with an introduction and a calend.ly link to schedule time with a sales member can remove a lot of time from the plate of a sales team that was once spent corresponding and coordinating with potential SQLs.

Taking it a step further, those same people can be sent a survey prior to their discovery call in order to answer a number of questions that would otherwise take time away from the call, and allow the sales team to better know which direction to take the conversation during the call — reducing their lift significantly as they move leads to conversion.

Add a human touch

While the above is wonderful for sales teams, there are often instances for B2C businesses where it is easier to answer in a 5-second call which would otherwise take 15 texts. Adding human touches to the various touch points of your user journey can often build trust, and allow users to feel more confident as they move to conversion.

SEO

SEO is an incredible tool for making existing content go further rather than taking the time and effort to write completely new content — though sometimes you do wind up doing both.

This can be done on a piece-by-piece basis or as a quarterly or annual overhaul of all content depending on the nature of your content strategy and business.

In the world of growth marketing, there are often new techniques, tools, technologies, and other strategies or standards that require us to keep a careful watch over our content in order to not only keep it up-to-date and relevant but also to ensure that it stays competitive as others seek to rank for the same keywords as we are producing our content for.

Retargeting

While it may not seem as though this fits within the realm of CRO as it implies that users have already bounced, it is a great way to test in the same way that win-back campaigns are leveraged to get users to return to a site or complete an action via email.

Ultimately, the reality is that no matter how optimally crafted your site, content, or emails are, there are always the externalities of the world that can distract users from converting, even if they had intention to. Retargeting can go out into the internet, and ensure that users are reminded that they were on their journey, and pull them back to the place where they dropped off in order to increase conversions once they’ve returned.

Visual Elements

Visuals are the first thing that will make an impact on users when they land on your site, so should be something that is optimized often and held with the most scrutiny. Users today see the products they purchase as investments in themselves, particularly as consumers continue shifting towards purchasing things for longevity. Users welcomed with low-quality, or disjointed, visuals upon landing on a page will likely perceive a brand as such and be led to believe that if there are corners being cut on creative, they’re likely being cut elsewhere as well.

The good news is that with the quality of images and videos that we are capable of creating with our cell phones alone, it’s not outside the realm of possibility for most to be able to arrange a pleasant vignette and capture compelling imagery without the need for expensive equipment, access to a professional studio space, or even a production team. If we were to approach this from a performance branding perspective, we would recommend testing new imagery captured on a phone or device with relatively low lift in order to determine what resonates and converts with your users first. Then once that is determined, an investment can be made in creating a campaign that is informed by the data you’ve captured from testing to ensure that your creative investment goes further.

Step 4: Obtaining results and creating new tests

Once your tests have been running for a period of time, you want to ensure that you have collected enough data to reach statistical significance. Do you have enough data points from a big enough sample size to be representative of the overall audience? If you’ve collected data from 10 website sessions, you cannot confidently say that these 10 sessions represent your entire audience or market. The good news is that many testing tools actually tell you when your tests have reached statistical significance, so you don’t have to guess or calculate it yourself.

Now, we get to the best part – analyzing your results and getting your answer! Now, you will finally find out if your hypothesis was correct. If it was correct, kudos to you! If not, do not stop testing. Create more hypotheses and continue to learn more about your audience, your website, and your company’s branding. There are no failed tests, just learnings to be uncovered.

Either way, like I already said, CRO is a continuous process, so after running a few tests, do not just stop. Develop new hypotheses based on the results of your previous tests.

If a red button works better on the checkout than a green button, create a new test and test the red button versus the yellow button, and so on. If reducing the number of clicks it takes to submit a form, improves your form conversion rates, sees if you can simplify and shorten the form even further. If USP A is performing better than USP B, test against USPs C, D, and E to find out what your customers really care about. You get the drift.

It is also key to document all the tests that have been run, what the results were, and what the next hypothesis based on these results would be. Documenting your processes and learnings is as important as testing itself. Ensure that these learnings are shared with as many internal stakeholders as possible, so that continuous testing, learning, and improvement is at the core of your organization. It also ensures that all this time and money have not been wasted without learning something important and that you do not create extra work by running duplicate tests over and over.

Step 6: Adjust & Repeat

As with any experiment, the results are never the conclusion of your work, but the beginning. Once you’ve had your test running for some time, you’ve seen the impact, and you’ve measured the results, you’re likely to have already begun forming new hypotheses based on those insights.

Maybe your new creative didn’t perform well but you’ve gained new data on what your audience likes in creative. Maybe you’ve found a new roadblock in the process by moving a user down-page and have a new experiment to run for that roadblock. The possibilities are many, and the testing never stops.

Conclusion

Conversion Rate Optimization is an absolutely necessary part of your overall marketing efforts. CRO activities allow you to maximize your limited resources, including advertising budgets, to optimize every stage of the funnel.

CRO has the potential to turn more of your website visitors into email subscribers and purchasers, email subscribers into paying customers, and retargeting to convert the more hesitant crowds effectively.

While a lot of CRO efforts begin with a hypothesis about certain behaviors or a well-educated marketing hunch, it is also deeply rooted in data and analysis. Modern technologies allow us to track every step of the way and every action a potential customer or client is taking along the way. Leverage the many tools available to you.

Allow the data to show you the way to higher conversion rates and lower advertising costs. Follow all the steps along the way and resist the urge to skip any steps. Come up with a well-defined hypothesis, ensure that whatever you’re testing will make a difference in performance, and try to develop a deep understanding of consumer behavior. Document as much as possible for future use, educate new marketing staff and avoid duplicating the efforts.

Finally, remember that there are no failed experiments. If you’ve learned that your hypothesis was wrong, you’ve just uncovered one way that won’t work, so that is valuable learning as well. The few experiments that will work and will improve your conversion rates will definitely be worth all this trouble. Approach CRO as a never-ending process of getting more educated on what your customers want and don’t want, getting better organized in your marketing processes, and improving your bottom line. Are you ready to implement a strategy for your business in 2022? Our conversion rate optimization experts can support you.

The post CRO Strategy: Experts’ Guide to Conversion Optimization in 2024 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.