Written by Administrator Monday, 09 August 2010 16:26
Don't be afraid of yet another acronym - CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is actually a lot more common sense than experts can make it out to be. Conversions are the current parlance for a sale, or a sign-up, a phone call, or whatever your site's goal is.
As for the "rate optimization", let's get metaphorical: imagine if your website was an actual physical store. If Search Engine Marketing is something like the ads you put in the yellow pages, and Search Engine Optimization is like the word-of-mouth talk of your store from happy customers, combined with the visibility of your storefront from the highway, then Conversion Rate Optimization may be something like the layout of your store.
Are people entering your store and tripping over piles of clothes, or piles of code? Are they so overwhelmed with choices that they get distracted and leave, or are they frustrated trying to find what they came for? Does your store look shady, like it's a front for some less virtuous business happening in the back room?
The questions that you ask a traditional store can translate interestingly to a website - but in a website, fixing them can get a little more technical.
As a user of the internet, you probably already have an intuition for what makes a good site and a bad one - after all, the tenets of conversion rate optimization were formed by observing what someone, or a million someones, choose to do on given websites. Expressing and recognizing these intuitions, however, may be like a fish trying to see the water it lives in. You may have a website for years, oblivious to the confusing welcome message that the web designer wrote years ago, or the navigation that would leave any customer who didn't already know everything about your business dizzy.
Think of my own hastily created site, for example, that you're reading right now. In what ways does it make you trust or distrust me, or want to give me a call, bookmark it for later, or vow never to come near it again? While some of these answers are personal (I won't take them personally, though), most are predictable. My clients have found me completely capable of offering quick insights for how to improve the "conversion rate" of their pages - which means, customers who come to the site actually make you money.
I've also regularly worked with testing software on clients' sites that bring real, usable data about what variation on your site brings about what kind of success. Guessing at something like color scheme doesn't appeal to me - but seeing an actual measured change based on you making the "Add to Cart" button a little easier to find seems worthwhile.
If you're interested in talking about these services, which I would recommend at least a little of to almost all online businesses, contact me.