25 Ways to Know if You’re a Pro Conversion Rate Optimizer – Checklist

You think your CRO skills are top-notch, right? Maybe. Perhaps. Conversion rate optimization is really fun when you’re winning, but super hard when it’s not going your way. So how good are you? Use the checklist below and find out.

Using the Conversion Rate Checklist

To find out how much of a pro conversion rate optimizer, check off everything you’ve done and you’ll see your score add up in the counters (hopefully a lot). After you’re finished you can make a to-do list from the remaining items.

1. Your testing decisions aren’t based on the HiPPOs
2. You’ve run more than 15 successful test experiments
3. You’ve learned from a failed test and produced a winning test as a result
4. You use user feedback to develop a test hypothesis
5. You send your marketing traffic to landing pages, not your homepage
6. You never use the word ‘Submit’ for your CTAs
7. You’ve had a conversion lift of over 50%
8. You’ve won an A/B test page fight with a colleague
9. You’ve A/B tested things in your everyday life. Like your lunch. Wife/husband. Dog.
10. You’ve tested a CTA
11. You’ve downloaded – and read – The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Optimization
12. You’ve used social proof in an A/B test
13. You’ve tried more than one optimization platform
14. You’ve won an award in the Which Test Won awards
15. You regularly hammer away on the refresh button to see how your test is doing
16. You sleep with your smartphone next to you in bed to check on your tests in the middle of the night
17. You’ve tried a number of tests that fails repeatedly, only to realise that your original page really is the best
18. You know who Bryan EisenBerg, Peep Laja, Michael Aagaard and Oli Gardner are. If not, look them up and come back to check this one off.
19. You tweet with hashtags like #CRO, #conversions or #abtesting
20. You’re a member of the Google+ Conversion Heroes community
21. You’ve set up an RSS feed of the best conversion blogs
22. You’ve written a guest post about conversion rate optimization on a top marketing blog
23. You’ve read [How to] Use Design Principles to Increase Conversions
24. You’ve hosted or been a guest on a conversion-related webinar
25. You ALWAYS use landing pages for your A/B tests

So what’s your score? It would be great if you’d share it in the comments to show how great a conversion rate optimizer you are. And remember to take the unchecked items and use them as your to-do list.

— Oli Gardner