Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of making your website work better for your audience’s needs, while accounting for your specific business goals. This seems simple enough on the surface, but the practice of CRO is actually complex and has many layers. So, what is CRO and why is it important for business health? Let’s dive in.
Conversion Rate Optimization: What Is It?
Since we’re e-commerce marketing experts here at Omnitail, we’ll focus this blog on e-commerce website optimization. But, keep in mind that CRO is for any website regardless of industry, vertical, etc.
Let’s look more into the question “What is CRO?” In short, CRO is a goal-oriented, strategic website experimentation framework that guides your decision-making process with data. The intel collected from your website tests helps you understand what changes will aid in your business goals, and what optimizations are likely to fall short, or even put your brand at risk.
Despite its label, “conversion rate optimization” isn’t just about conversion rates and optimizing for them. CRO is actually a complex, robust process that provides your brand with strategic direction on what website changes you should make based on business goals. Because of this, CRO provides strategic value to your brand—the framework helps you identify issues and points of friction on a website, develop solutions to resolve them, and ensure that these implemented optimizations (or solutions) have a positive business benefit.
When we say “positive business benefit” or “business benefit,” we’re not alluding to “winning tests.” We mean any change or lack thereof that either improves your site’s monetization or saves you from wasting resources on a solution that may negatively impact your brand or bottom line. For example:
- A positive increase in a metric you track (like AOV)
- Improving the usability of your checkout page so it’s ADA compliant
- Saving your team’s time and money by catching “bad ideas” before they are implemented on your live website
Why Do E-commerce Brands Use CRO?
It can be costly to implement changes on any business website, but for an e-commerce brand, the stakes may be even higher since their livelihood depends on a well-designed, well-built, and maintained website. But what happens when you aren’t sure if the change in question will hurt or improve your revenue? This is when CRO swoops in to help your brand save time, money, and headaches by providing a strategic decision-making framework around e-commerce website optimization.
From the data-driven insights it provides, e-commerce brands use CRO to improve their website monetization without the added hassle (and resources) of internally trying to figure out what works on their site and what doesn’t.
CRO offers solutions that aid in achieving business goals, so if you’re an e-commerce brand looking for a way to improve your website’s monetization, this may be the process framework you’ve been looking for.
The CRO Lifecycle
When we talk about e-commerce website optimization, making improvements to your site can look like the following: improving product pages, simplifying homepage designs, and fixing points of friction in your navigation. While there are many other areas of your website that impact its usability and monetization—and hundreds of optimizations that can be implemented to address its issues—it’s important to focus on prioritizing tests that work toward your business goals.
To do this, the CRO lifecycle is used to keep experimentation focused:
The Omnitail Difference
Omnitail is disrupting the digital marketing landscape with our unique profit-driven approach to e-commerce marketing. But annual growth requires your e-commerce business to continuously improve on these three metrics: Increase traffic, improve monetization, and boost margins.
Lucky for you, we’re ready to get all three of these back on track for you. We increase traffic by sending the right traffic at the right time using our profit-driven performance marketing strategies. We improve monetization by continuously researching, designing, and testing to give you clear instructions on how to enhance your campaigns’ conversion rates. And we boost margins by accounting for the metrics that ad platforms usually miss: COGS, variable overhead, returns and cancellations, and more. Give us a shout today to learn more.
