How to implement a conversion rate optimization (CRO) process

Why do you need a CRO process?

Before we dig into definitions and steps, let’s define what CRO isn’t:

Unlike some online marketing activities, where you can check off a box having done something like a user testing day, an annual survey, or implementing an analytics solution, CRO is not a one-off task.

As we mentioned above, CRO is a process. 

Image courtesy RedEye

CRO is a way of combining different elements to produce a repeatable system of continual testing and analysis, where you’re constantly benchmarking your performance.

The trick with this process is that it doesn’t have to rely on continual spending on expensive tools or consultants. It’s about following basic principles and most importantly setting up the benchmarks correctly from the start.

To that end, there are four major reasons why you need to establish a CRO process: 

1. Supporting a strategic approach to your marketing efforts
2. Making it easier to allocate marketing resources
3. Ensuring you’re getting the most out of your CRO efforts
4. Creating a repeatable structure for your CRO activities

How to build your conversion rate optimization process

With those definitions cleared up, it’s time to establish a conversion rate optimization process. 

Step 1: Process introduction

The first step is to establish some basics for your process. This means outlining the tools you’ll use, how you’ll measure your process, and setting up goals for what you hope to accomplish with every CRO test you run.

Efficient optimization begins with ensuring the right tools are in place at the beginning. You need to ensure you have analytics tracking and reporting in place, because poor data and an inability to measure and test changes means all optimization is guesswork.

You should invest in the right tools. Why, you ask?

Because however much web analytics can tell you what the problems are on your site, it will never tell you why the problems are there or suggest solutions. 

Using the right set of CRO tools can help you dig into what’s going on and what you need to do about it.

Finally, you need to agree on the key goals of your landing page and set up core tasks on the website to drive these goals. 

You should:

• Decide what your main site conversion goals are
• Understand what drives these goals (assess all aspects of the site and understand how they aid the goals)
• Use this understanding to build CRO metrics that will allow you to measure success or failure

As an example, let’s look at how you can do this for a typical travel site:

• You should have clear set of goals around getting bookings and selling extra ancillaries like parking or travel insurance.
• A key goal of the site is having reviews, so you need to measure the reviews.
• By understanding the role of the review (to make people confident in booking the holiday they’re searching) you can see that you need to compare conversions of people reading/using reviews to those who don’t.

Repeat this process for each of the goals you want to benchmark for future testing. Easy.

Where to start with CRO goals?

We always recommend establishing a simple goal for your CRO efforts. 

(And yes, those goals need to be more specific than “increase conversions.”)

These goals act as guardrails or guidelines for your actual CRO tactics. For instance, you could have a goal as simple as “decrease cost of acquisition by a minimum of 10%>”

As a quick refresher on setting good goals, keep them SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Repeatable
• Time-bound

Step 2: Measure

Measuring your CRO efforts is critical to understanding what’s going on with your pages and assets and taking informed action. 

To effectively measure your CRO efforts, you need to focus on three core elements: 

Web analytics, survey data, and user testing. 

So what role does each of these play in your CRO process?

Analytics

Your analytics are one of the few “set it and forget it” things in your CRO activities. Analytics gives you direct facts and data on what is happening on your page. When used with segmentation, you can generate different data sets for different audiences.

This lets you dig deep into pain points and target where changes might be necessary to enhance conversion. In many ways, analytics is the engine driving your conversion machine.

Surveys

Surveys are the voice of the customer. Survey tools remove any semblance of guesswork from your analytics tools. Running these regularly can give you a baseline of customer opinion, and, over time, insight into what needs changing.

What’s more, it’s also vital to acknowledge that what your customers aren’t telling you could also play a role in your conversion rate. 

User testing

Directly interact with the user to see how they are using the site. Issues are clearly laid out and it’s also possible to test potential changes and get controlled feedback to alter the site and improve conversion.

You combine all three of these tools into this stage to build a baseline against which all future optimization can be measured—or benchmarked.

We always recommend benchmarking your own data, but for added insight into the industry you serve, we’ve put together the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report to help you with the big picture.

Recommended reading: Learn how a 3-word A/B test led to triple-digit conversion growth

Step 3: Analyze and investigate

Without interpretation, the data you gather on your CRO activities is meaningless. Analyzing, assessing, and investigating the information you’ve gathered is, arguably, the central component to most CRO activities.

Your goal at this stage? Take the benchmarks you’ve identified in step 2 and use them to uncover details about the pages and content you’re testing. 

Tip: remember to focus your analysis around your goal. 

There are plenty of findings you can uncover through your efforts, and they’re worth recording, but don’t let them distract from any hypothesis you’ve come up with. 

For example…

Compared to your benchmarks, you find that your bounce rate has been rising for the last few weeks

Looking at a report in your analytics tool, you focus on the bounce rates for the pages that represent over 60% of the site traffic. Your analysis shows that two pages in particular have higher bounce rates.

You could run some tests to highlight what issues people have with these pages, or, if you have access, consider reaching out to a UX expert to review the pages in question. Remember, your analytics tools won’t necessarily highlight the problem—only that one exists. 

Alternatively, another option would be to run a survey specifically targeting those users who see this page and ask them for their direct feedback.

All the information you gather and analyze here can help you come up with alternative page layouts, content, or features that you can then test (more on that in the next step).

This is a simplification of the analysis process—but the truth is, it’s not much harder than this.

The TL;DR on analysis and investigation:

• Focus on your goal
• Investigate details
• Record findings
• Come up with a new hypothesis or solution

Step 4: Implement your test strategy

This step is all about taking the analysis and investigation results from step 3 and implementing the test strategy that you ran in step 5. 

The key here is detail. Take the time to get everything you need in place to ensure accurate results from your test. You don’t want any skewed data or results when it comes to your conversion rate.

What can you test?

A better question would be “What can’t you test?”

As a reminder, CRO tests focus on user experience and behavior to help identify the on-page elements that encourage users to take action (and the elements that discourage them).

In practice, this could mean…

• Swapping out page content with fresher messaging
• Updating or altering design elements
• Cutting content to reduce friction and encourage users to take action that much faster

The sky’s the limit, but for our purposes, your CRO process should focus on testing the areas you identified in your analysis and investigation in step 3. 

Ideally, what you test should be a combination of what will have the greatest impact on conversion rate and what you can implement quickly. 

Recommended reading: What to A/B test: 10 A/B testing ideas to inspire your experiments

By way of example, let’s imagine a four-stage funnel on an ecommerce landing page:

1. Add to basket
2. Enter personal details
3. Enter payment
4. Confirm

Your initial temptation might be to focus on testing and refining your bottom-funnel element (confirmation or final sale) because that is a direct driver for revenue. 

But the top of the funnel will typically have higher traffic by a significant margin. Through your analysis, you could spot a serious disconnect between traffic in one location and the final conversion rate. This would imply it’s actually something higher up your funnel causing problems. 

Quick tips for your CRO testing process

If you’re still struggling to figure out where to start with CRO testing, no worries. We’ve got a few easy dos and don’ts to help you figure out what to focus on first.

DON’T change too much at once: Try and focus on testing a single element on your page at a time. While it’s possible to test multiple elements at once, sticking to A/B testing for now is a great way to start building a strong data foundation you can then build on for future success. 

DO get creative: CRO testing is your opportunity to put your big ideas to the test. As tempting as it is to play it safe, you’ll learn more by testing each and every one of your ideas without simplifying them or otherwise compromising on them. This is your chance to swing big—don’t hold back!

DON’T forget to track your tests: Always, always, always keep detailed records of your testing process and what elements you’re changing. This is vital not only for keeping your sanity, but for ensuring you’re not covering something you’ve already tried later on.

DO get input from your team: Field ideas, suggestions, and techniques from your colleagues. When it comes to finding things to test, sometimes you’re just too close to the topic at hand. A fresh perspective is always welcome for helping you get the most from your CRO efforts. 

Step 5: Run your tests

Hopefully you already understand the power and benefits of A/B and multivariate testing, but the point we’re really hammering home is that these tests need to be part of a continuous process, based on analysis and research. 

They cannot be standalone one-off activities, testing just like conversion rate optimization is a continual process that should be built into everything that you do.

Your take away from this step is to ensure you base your tests around what you learned in the third step of your process and check it against what you’ve measured. 

As for running your test, we’ve written a lot on it elsewhere, but as a quick refresher: 

• Set your goal and plan your experiment
• Build and launch your landing pages
• Track data and let your tests run
• Close your tests and gather your data

When it’s time to close out your tests, you’ll ideally have a full array of data and results. Remember to compare this information to the benchmarks you’ve established and referred to. 

By comparing your results with your predictions and benchmarks, you should be in a good position to analyze your findings and make a few informed conclusions about your CRO efforts. Even if your hypothesis was proven wrong, that’s okay! That’s still useful data you can use going forwards.

A negative result just means you can test another idea and hypothesis. 

If your hypothesis is confirmed, though, you can proceed to the next step in your CRO process: implementing and refining your findings.

Step 6: Implement and refine

After you’ve recorded your findings and closed your tests out, it’s time to carry those learnings forward. This could mean running more tests on your pages, expanding your testing to additional pages, or coming up with a new hypothesis. 

It’s an iterative, continuous process where you build on your findings and make data-driven decisions. This can help you reach new heights and drive further business. 

We’ve said it before, but our mantra at Unbounce is clear: Always be testing.

But this is also an opportunity for you to implement your findings right away. There’s always room for improvement, so don’t be afraid to implement any positive changes to the pages you’re testing.

Really, if there’s one thing we can leave you with here, it’s that this process keeps going—it “ends” with each test, but each new test kicks it back into play. 

Step 7: Audit your CRO efforts and your process

Now, this is where things can get tricky. 

Auditing your CRO means you’re undertaking a pretty comprehensive assessment of conversion rate performance and effectiveness. 

And we get it—the word “audit” can be a scary term!

But a CRO audit really just means you’re going over aspects of your website, landing pages, and assets with an eye towards design, user experience, navigation, content, and (of course) your conversion funnels. 

Your goal in a CRO audit is to identify areas for improvement in these elements that may be hindering greater success. As we mentioned in our introduction, this is a great way to take a more strategic approach to your CRO efforts. 

That strategic approach could mean you spend more time:

• Optimizing landing pages
• Enhancing your calls to action
• Refining messaging and/or copy
• Implementing and refining your testing strategies

If we had to TL;DR it, a CRO audit is a way to help you unlock your site’s full conversion potential, in turn driving better business results. 

Recommended reading: The Unbounce guide to conducting a CRO audit