Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is at the core of any successful digital marketing strategy and is used to increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired action (conversion) on your website. It will, essentially, encourage more of your website visitors to become engaged followers and purchasers.
It can be challenging to start a conversion rate optimization strategy, but the benefits it offers can help you:
- Understand your customers better
- Improve customers’ on-site experiences
- Maximize your PPC spend
- Maximize sales
- Increase return on investment
Before we dive into exploring how CRO works (and offer 8 great tactics to guide you), let’s look first at what a conversion is.
What is a conversion in digital marketing?
Many marketers associate a conversion with a sale. However, conversion is actually any desired action that visitors take on your website. This desired action is very often a sale, but it could also be a smaller action that moves a person further along the sales funnel toward a purchase.
A conversion action might involve a customer doing one of the following:
- Clicking a banner ad or a text ad
- Clicking through to a webpage
- Downloading a report or whitepaper
- Subscribing to a newsletter
- Completing an online form
- Signing up for a webinar
Whatever the desired action may be, it’s valuable to your business and it’s measurable.
Definition of conversion rate
The conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors to your website who complete a conversion. So, if all visitors complete conversion, the conversion rate is 100%. If it’s only a quarter of visitors, then the conversion rate is 25%.
What is a good conversion rate? According to Larry Kim, founder of WordStream, the average landing page conversion rate across industries is about 2.35%. However, the top 25% of companies have a conversion rate of 5.31% or higher. And the top 10% are converting at a rate of 11.45% or higher.
You should aim to perform better than the average performers and try to break into the top 10%. You need a conversion rate of 11.45% to do this. A good CRO strategy or program can help you double or even triple your current conversion rate relatively quickly.
