Conversion Rate Optimization
The most important key performance indicator for a websites health.
The core of any businesses online lead or sales generation machine is the website. It is the metaphorical engine in the car and if it isn't running smoothly revenue suffers. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a strategy that focuses on increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into a customer, a lead, or tasks any action which the website is built for. There are several factors which go into a CRO strategy including:
Benefits of CRO
While CRO is not a measure of inbound traffic generation efforts like SEO, content marketing, or paid advertising its benefits go beyond traditional website analytics. Two of the benefits of CRO is that it helps you better understand your customers and what motivates them to buy your product or service. It is also directly related to website ROI. Increase your conversion rate and your ROI goes up as well.
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Setting Goals in Analytics
Whether you want to sell products, generate leads for your business, increase awareness of a cause or any other goal correctly configuring your web analytics is an important first step. It starts with the Average Lifetime Value (LTV) of a lead or product category. Once that is determined it can be entered into the analytics platform as the value of a goal (sale/lead gen) and the value passes to other pages in the site as determined by how often a page is viewed as part of the conversion funnel.
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Conversion Rate
An e-commerce website's conversion rate is the number of times a visitor completes a goal (a unique purchase) divided by the total number of visits to the site (sessions). If the website sells subscriptions or generates leads, then the conversion rate should be based on the number of unique users divided by the number of conversions. CRO is a measure of a website's effectiveness.
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A Practical Example (below)
One of the more simple ways I've tracked funnel conversion rates is with a simple spreadsheet below. The sample data below is easy enough to pull from a Marketing Automation Platforms like Pardot, Hubspot, Eloqua, etc. Understanding where website visitors are in the conversion funnel gives insight into how the funnel is performing and where bottlenecks occur and where to focus optimization efforts.
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Case Study
Lead Process Flow Chart
This flowchart is part of a presentation I made to the C-suite about how we can improve our marketing/sales integration and lead management.
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It starts on the left with the hub & spoke marketing strategy with a Facebook ads strategy above it to illustrate an inbound lead path.
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The leads flow from left to right, from inbound lead generation through the website, into the marketing automation platform and into the CRM system and back to marketing if necessary.
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No Leads Lost.
Assigning a lead score to a lead is another project which should be handled with data. I've seen instances of lead scores given because somebody on the team thought that action A should be worth more than action B without having any data to back up those assumptions.
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