Why Is Conversion Rate Optimization Important?

Most search marketers are obsessed with data that includes website traffic like unique visits or keyword rankings. However in any real business, the ultimate success of any search marketing strategy will judged by bottom-line revenue and ROI. One of the fastest ways to improve ROI with an online marketing strategy is to improve conversion rates from the current traffic. Even a 0.5 5-1 % conversion rate increase can have dramatic results in the overall profitability of a company.

Definition of Conversion

Conversion can be defined as the number of people that take an action that you want them to take divided by the total number of people available to take that action. Conversion rate can be further segmented into micro-conversions and macro conversions. Macro conversions is typically how a site makes money overall, while the micro conversions are all of the user value actions leading up to the overall conversion. Conversion rate optimization or CRO is the process of increasing website lead generation or sales by influencing more of your visitors to take an action that you want them to take. While there are thousands of ways to make this happen, conversion rate optimization is an improvement process that requires planning, measurement, implementation, and more measurement. CRO is simply figuring out why visitors aren’t converting and finding a way to fix it. Simple.

Conversion Rate Optimization In Practice

There are many opinions on how to best improve conversion, and no single philosophy will cure each and every site. While not all sites have a traffic problem, every site does have a conversion problem unique to that web property. Some CRO search marketers will be more focused on active testing on the best way to get a website, a campaign or a landing page to increase conversion rates. A/B testing, awesome copy-writing, stunning design techniques are often used here. Other search marketing professionals will invest a considerable amount of time to understand the audience and then create a targeted message that appeals to that target audience before taking any action at all. Only after this CRO planning will they be prepared to even start testing to increase conversion rates. The real best conversion rate optimization practice is not about a particular set of tactics, it’s using a well-defined systematic CRO process with clearly defined steps along the way.

Blueprint for CRO testing

• Focus on the visitor experience
• Define the test that you will measure
• Clarify the visitor action, what does success look like
• Do the work
• Monitor and measure
• Repeat

Does it look like real work? It should because it can be, conversion rate optimization requires intuition, knowledge, and expertise in all areas of online marketing to be successful. While much of this seems obvious, many marketers forget about it. Experienced online marketing people understand that focusing on conversion and the few that are active in CRO make a lot of money by improving conversions.