Most businesses treat traffic as the goal. More visitors, more clicks, more impressions – the assumption is that growth follows automatically. Unfortunately, you could have fantastic on page content, be ranked for some high volume keywords, and have incredible creative with your paid ad campaigns and still not achieve what you want.
These days, traffic alone isn’t enough and all the visitors in the world won’t guarantee you conversions. It’s not just about getting people to your website, it’s about what their journey looks like when they get there.
If the gap between visitors and conversions is growing, now’s the time to review your conversion rate optimisation (CRO). Ironically, a few small changes, a little bit of testing, and some careful adjustments can transform those numbers, close the gap, and help get you (and your business) where you want to be.
What CRO Actually Is and How It Fits Into a Broader Digital Strategy
If you aren’t quite sure what this looks like, it’s essentially the principles you apply to improve the percentage of visitors who take the action you want. It’s as relevant for lead generation as it is for ecommerce, no matter whether your goal is getting someone to sign up to your email list, or ordering from you online you need a good CRO strategy backing you. All of this is done with the logic being you don’t need more visitors, you just need to cater to your existing visitors in the right way. It’s not separate to the rest of your marketing efforts, it operates alongside it.
Think of your digital strategy as a pipeline. SEO, paid ads, social and email marketing all work to fill the top of it. CRO is what happens to that traffic once it lands, right from the page your customer lands on, through to the forms they fill in, how they add things to their cart, and finally what the checkout looks like. Every facet of that journey either moves them towards your end goal, or it lets them drift away.
Why Converting Existing Traffic Is Often a Better Investment Than Chasing More of It
When you consider that every new visitor costs money to acquire, whether that’s through ad spend, content production or time spent on outreach, CRO strategy becomes that much more important. Something as small as a 1% increase in converted site visitors from a few adjustments can come from something as simple as optimising the layout of your checkout process. Not optimising is leaving customers (and revenue) behind.
The Common Conversion Leaks We See
Each website (and business) will have their own “cracks” to fill when it comes to CRO. In saying that, there are a few common things that crop up a lot and are the easiest places to look at first.
Mobile UX
Think about how many hours you rack up on your phone everyday. Between a quick Google here and a few minutes of scrolling there, it adds up. And, your customers are doing the same, which is why a mobile responsive site is so essential. In fact, most traffic now arrives to your website from a phone, but many sites are still built and tested on desktop first.
Having a website that looks great and is easy to navigate on mobile matters, and small factors can result in losing interest. Whether there are buttons that are too small to tap accurately, menus that don’t collapse properly, or simply text that’s too difficult to read easily, any number of seemingly minor things can be the reason your website visitor decides to leave.
Page Speed
Every extra second a page takes to load costs conversions. Visitors don’t wait around to find out if a slow site is worth it; they assume it isn’t and move on. Simple changes like compressing images and checking whether you have apps that are slowing things down (or need updating to a new version) can all help.
Checkout Friction
This is arguably the most essential part of your website to review as a part of your CRO strategy. If you’ve got people interested, they’ve stuck around to look through what you offer, added a few things to their cart, but are met with something messy, you can lose them at the last minute. Consider whether you really need those extra form fields, forced account creation, or ambiguous shipping costs that appear late – chances are, you can clean those bits up very quickly. They all act as make or break moments where someone could hesitate, which in turn can lead to losing sales.
Upselling and Shipping
Outside of making the path from adding to cart to checking out as smooth as possible, having a few extra components can help boost cart value. Serve up some of your best sellers that are at an accessible price point, or have a tally that shows how close they are to getting free shipping. Equally, making it easy for your customers to edit their carts can help, so having a simple interface that makes it possible to add, remove, or adjust the number of any given item is worth doing.
Having trust signals spread throughout the journey is another huge factor in getting your conversion rate up, particularly amongst warm leads who haven’t ordered from you before. Reviews, UGC, product details regarding materials or who it’s best suited to, shipping insurance for higher ticket items, and information regarding returns should be visible and easy to find.
None of these are hard to diagnose. They’re just easy to overlook, because they don’t show up in a traffic report (and numbers are great, but they aren’t the whole picture). Instead, look at heat maps, abandoned carts, and try A/B testing with your theories. The worst case scenario is you learn what you’re currently doing is OK, the best case is you find a better way to get your customers over the line.
How CRO Acts as a Multiplier That Makes Every Other Channel Work Harder
While the process might sound intensive, it doesn’t just help your ads, or your organic performance, it’s a positive across the board. Instead of throwing more budget into your ads, or trying to write more content with more keywords, you’ll be scaling up without the time or money you might have anticipated needing.
If your SEO and copywriting strategy is bringing in ten thousand visitors a month, a better-converting site turns more of them into customers, for the same organic effort. If your paid media is generating leads, a faster checkout means more of those leads become sales, for the same ad spend.
That’s the real case for treating CRO as core to a digital strategy, not an occasional add-on. It’s the difference between generating traffic and generating results – and it’s usually sitting right there, waiting to be fixed, in the pages you already have.
If you’re not sure where to start, the team at Reform are happy to help. Get in touch for a free audit and we can go from there.
