How to build a CRO strategy (that actually works)

Why conversion rate optimization matters

Let’s face it—your marketing team is already spending money to get people to your website. So why not make those visits count?

That’s the beauty of conversion rate optimization. Instead of constantly chasing new traffic, you squeeze more value from visitors already coming your way.

Here’s the thing:

CRO isn’t just about quick wins—it compounds over time. When you boost conversion rates by even 1-2%, that improvement ripples through your entire funnel, affecting everything from email signups to final purchases.

The best part? Those gains stick around. Unlike paid ads that stop working the moment you pause them, CRO improvements keep working for you 24/7.

Plus, better site experiences don’t just drive conversions—they build trust. When visitors have a smooth, intuitive experience on your site, they’re more likely to remember your brand positively, even if they don’t convert right away.

For digital marketers already investing in traffic generation, CRO is the missing piece that turns good marketing into great marketing. It’s the difference between pouring water into a leaky bucket versus fixing the holes first.

CRO connects directly to business goals and ROI in ways that other marketing tactics simply can’t match.

Step 1: Set clear conversion goals

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. And you definitely can’t optimize for conversions if you haven’t defined what “conversion” actually means for your site.

Before you start tweaking pages or running tests, you need specific, measurable goals that connect directly to business impact.

Define the right conversion actions

Not all conversions are created equal. There’s a big difference between macro conversions (the big wins like purchases or demo requests) and micro conversions (smaller actions like newsletter signups or video views).

Think about it like this:

For your blog, a good conversion might be joining your email list.
On pricing pages, it might be requesting a demo.
On product pages, it might be adding to cart or clicking “buy now.”

Each page on your site has a different job to do. By defining specific conversion actions for different sections of your site, you create a clearer picture of how visitors move through your funnel.

The best conversion goals are specific, measurable, and tied directly to business value—not vanity metrics.

Align goals to your sales process

Your conversion goals should match where your visitors are in their journey.

Someone landing on your blog for the first time isn’t ready to buy—but they might be ready to grab a free PDF. Meanwhile, a return visitor hitting your pricing page is much closer to becoming a customer.

By mapping conversion goals to specific funnel stages, you create a more natural progression that respects how real people make decisions.

This alignment helps you spot gaps in your funnel and understand user behavior at each stage of the customer journey—giving you clear targets to optimize for.

Step 2: Start with user research and data analysis

Before you jump into testing random elements on your site, you need to understand what’s actually happening. Great CRO isn’t about hunches—it’s about listening to what your data and users are telling you.

Channel your inner Sherlock Holmes here. You’re trying to gather clues and context before you try to solve the case.

Use analytics to spot drop-off points

Your analytics platform is a goldmine of conversion insights just waiting to be discovered.

Look for pages with high traffic but low conversion rates—these are prime opportunities. Check your funnel reports to see where visitors bail out before completing key actions.

For example:

Is your checkout abandonment rate through the roof?
Are blog visitors reading but never clicking your CTAs?
Do visitors bounce from pricing pages immediately?

Google Analytics can show you exactly where the leaks in your funnel are happening. These drop-off points are your first targets for optimization.

The goal isn’t just to see what’s happening, but to start asking why it’s happening.

Study user behavior with heatmaps and recordings

While analytics tell you what’s happening, heatmaps and recordings show you how it’s happening.

Tools like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity give you a visual representation of exactly how visitors interact with your pages:

Where are they clicking?
How far are they scrolling?
Which elements get attention and which get ignored?

User recordings are especially powerful—they’re like watching over someone’s shoulder as they navigate your site. You’ll spot usability issues, confusing elements, and missed opportunities that numbers alone would never reveal.

Layer in qualitative insights from surveys or support chats

Numbers and heatmaps tell you what’s happening, but they don’t always tell you why. That’s where voice-of-customer data comes in. By gathering direct feedback through:

Abandoned cart emails: Instead of just nudging them to come back, ask why they didn’t purchase.
Support chat logs: What questions keep coming up?
Sales call recordings: What hesitations are most common?

You’ll start understanding the emotional and practical barriers preventing conversions.

It’s not always easy to get, but this qualitative context can be the string that connects everything together when combined with the quantitative insights you can pull from the data.

Step 3: Prioritize high-impact pages

Don’t try to fix your entire website at once. Instead, focus your CRO efforts where they’ll actually move the needle—on pages with high traffic, high intent, or both.

The right approach? Start with the pages already getting attention but failing to convert to their full potential.

Fix friction on pricing and checkout pages

These high-intent pages are conversion goldmines waiting to be unlocked. Look for common issues like:

Slow load times that frustrate mobile users
Missing trust signals (like security badges or testimonials)
Confusing pricing tables
Complicated checkout forms

Small fixes here often deliver massive returns because visitors on these pages are already interested—they just need a smoother path to saying “yes.” For example, adding simple elements like money-back guarantees or customer logos can dramatically increase trust at the moment of decision.

Turn blog and resource traffic into leads

Your blog might bring in tons of visitors, but if they’re not converting, you’re leaving money on the table. The trick is adding relevant, non-disruptive conversion points:

Contextual CTAs that match the article topic
Strategic popups that appear at the right moment
Content upgrades that enhance what they’re already reading

The key is relevance—offering something that feels like a natural next step rather than an interruption. When blog visitors find genuinely helpful resources that expand on what they’re already interested in, they’re much more likely to hand over their email.

Focus on product pages and core service pages

These are the pages that directly impact your bottom line. When someone lands on your product pages or service pages, they’re signaling interest—they’ve already taken the first step. Your job is to make the second step irresistible.

For SaaS companies and marketing agencies especially, these pages are conversion battlegrounds. A well-optimized page might convert at 15% while a poor one struggles at 2-3%.

Focus on these proven elements:

A headline that immediately speaks to your visitor’s main pain point
Visual hierarchy that naturally guides eyes to your primary CTA
Benefits-focused copy that answers “what’s in it for me?” before listing features
Customer testimonials that specifically address common objections
Product videos or demos that show your solution in action

Remember: visitors don’t necessarily care about your product—they care about their problem. Make sure your landing pages show them that you understand that problem and connect it to what you have to offer.

Step 4: Run tests, not guesses

Let’s be real—plenty of companies run tests based purely on hunches (or worse—whatever the CEO dreamed up last night).

That’s not a strategy. That’s gambling with your website.

True CRO is about testing smart hypotheses based on actual data. The difference between hunch-based and strategic CRO is simple: one tests random stuff, the other tests the right stuff.

Prioritize what to test based on impact and effort

Not all tests are created equal. Some changes might take weeks to implement but barely move the needle. Others might take an hour and transform your conversion rates overnight.

That’s why smart CRO teams use frameworks like ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) or PIE (Potential, Importance, Ease) to decide what to test first.

Here’s how to pick high-value starting points:

Look for elements with high visibility (above the fold content)
Focus on primary CTAs (text, color, placement)
Test headline variations that speak to different pain points
Experiment with social proof placement and formats

Keep in mind as well—small tests on high-traffic pages will give you data faster than complex tests on low-traffic pages. If you’re trying to validate a hypothesis with the goal of implementing that change across all of your landing pages if it works—run the first version on a page that’s already getting a lot of traffic. You’ll reach the statistical significance thresholds far quicker.

Use A/B testing to validate changes

Hunches aren’t data. The only way to know if a change actually works is to test it against your current version. Setting up proper A/B tests isn’t complicated. Plus if you’re using Unbounce, A/B testing is already built in—and you can run as many tests as you’d like.

Here’s what we’d recommend you keep in mind:

Make sure you’re testing only one significant change at a time
Run tests until you reach statistical significance (not just for a day or two)
Document everything—even “failed” tests contain valuable insights

One of the biggest mistakes we see? Companies stopping tests too early. If your test has only seen 100 visitors, you don’t have enough data to make decisions yet. If you’re not sure how long to run your A/B tests for, you can use a statistical significance calculator to get a rough estimate. If you’re struggling to hit statistical significance, you may want to rethink your conversion goal, like shifting from form fills to CTA clicks. 

The beauty of A/B testing is that it removes opinion from the equation. Your visitors vote with their actions, and the numbers tell the story.

Step 5: Make CRO an ongoing process

The biggest CRO mistake we see? Treating it like a one-time project.

“We did CRO last quarter” is a phrase that makes us cringe. Why? Because conversion optimization isn’t something you finish—it’s something you build into your marketing DNA.

Building a culture of experimentation is what separates companies that see modest gains from those that transform their business through CRO. When testing becomes as routine as checking your email, that’s when the magic happens.

The most successful companies we work with have established a regular cadence for their CRO work:

Weekly team check-ins to review active tests
Bi-weekly test launches (at least one new test every two weeks)
Monthly deep-dive analytics reviews
Quarterly planning sessions to map out bigger testing initiatives
Real-time performance monitoring with 24/7 data feeds

That last point is crucial too. The days of launching a test, forgetting about it completely, then checking back in a month later only to see there was a clear winner one week in are in the past. Keep a close eye on your active tests. If you can find a winner in one week instead of four, that’s three extra weeks of higher conversion rates. Plus, you can launch your next test even sooner.

This real-time approach is especially vital for marketing agencies and ecommerce businesses running time-sensitive campaigns. When a promotion is only running for a week, waiting days for test results isn’t an option.

Smart teams create a shared knowledge base of lessons learned. This prevents the same failed tests from being recycled because nobody remembered the results from six months ago.

The most impressive CRO programs we’ve seen share these traits:

They test continuously, not sporadically
They learn from both successes AND failures
They focus on customer needs, not internal opinions

Your customers keep evolving, your competitors keep improving, and your business keeps changing. Your CRO strategy needs to evolve right alongside them.

Commonly asked questions about CRO

Before we wrap up, let’s touch on a few common questions we often see come up when discussing conversion rate optimization strategy.

What’s considered a good conversion rate for my industry?

There’s no magic number here—good conversion rates vary wildly across industries. While the universal average conversion rate is roughly 6.6%, what’s “good” depends on:

What you’re selling
Where your traffic comes from
Your business model

Ecommerce sites typically see product pages convert at 1-3%, while specialized landing pages can hit 5-8%. SaaS companies often average 3-5% for trial signups. Instead of only obsessing over average conversion rate benchmarks, make sure you also look at your own conversion rate and focus on beating it month over month. The best conversion rate is simply better than what you had before.

Remember—a seemingly “low” conversion rate with high-value customers can outperform higher rates with smaller transactions.

How does CRO support my larger marketing strategy?

Think of CRO as the multiplier for everything else in your marketing toolkit. When your site converts better, you’re:

Getting more from your ad spend
Maximizing your SEO efforts
Improving email campaign performance
Boosting social media ROI

The math is simple: if you improve from 2% to 3% conversion, that’s 50% more results without spending another dollar on marketing efforts.

CRO also gives you insights that strengthen your growth marketing approach. The messaging that works on your website often works in your ads and emails too.

Why does understanding my target audience matter in CRO?

You can’t convert people you don’t understand—it’s that simple. Knowing your target audience helps you:

Create messaging that addresses their specific pain points
Design interfaces that match how they make decisions
Remove the right friction points (not just any friction)
Prioritize features they actually care about

Your audience members have specific concerns when they land on your site. When you know what those are, you can create experiences that feel tailor-made for them.

For example, a B2B company discovered their audience cared more about implementation time than price. By highlighting their quick setup process, they dramatically increased how many visitors requested demos. Without these insights, you’re just guessing at what might encourage visitors to take that desired action.

How can I use CRO to convert more of my existing traffic?

Before chasing more website traffic, maximize what you already have. Start with your highest-traffic, lowest-converting pages—they’re your biggest opportunities to turn existing website visitors into potential customers.

Try these proven approaches:

Simplify forms (every field you remove typically boosts conversions)
Add relevant social proof near decision points
Improve page load speed, especially on mobile
Clarify your value proposition
Test different CTA placements

What makes a CRO strategy successful over time?

Successful CRO strategies are systems, not one-off projects. The most effective approaches:

Establish a regular testing cadence
Document both wins and losses
Share insights across teams
Combine data analysis with user feedback
Adapt as your business evolves

Companies with the best results don’t just test random elements—they build a culture where continuous improvement is expected. Their optimization strategy helps them identify gaps systematically rather than haphazardly, and they treat “failed” tests as valuable learning opportunities.

What separates great programs from good ones isn’t budget—it’s consistency. A modest testing program that runs reliably will outperform sporadic “big bang” optimization projects every time. The secret isn’t finding one magic bullet—it’s building a machine that generates insights and improvements month after month.