Barriers to implementation: 4 Reasons why your CRO strategy testing must change

It’s never been more important to look after your leads, and CRO is an essential means of ensuring that you’re winning the conversions that your business deserves. Whether you’re intent on gaining more sales, downloads, or email signups, conversion rate optimisation helps to ensure that you’re making a strong impression with your audience and boosting revenues in the process. 

However, as competition among online businesses continues to intensify in the wake of Covid-19, and global financial downturns impact the pockets of consumers, many marketers are set to be facing up to the fact that their CRO strategy testing just isn’t up to scratch. With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look into some common pitfalls and how to overcome them:

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Firstly, let’s explore how we define conversion rate optimisation. Popularly abbreviated to CRO, conversion rate optimisation focuses on the process of bolstering the percentage of a company’s online traffic and users in order to deliver greater volumes of decisive actions like sales, mailing list sign ups, specific website clicks, or downloads. 

Boosting conversion rates generally involves marketing directly to your users and attaining a comprehensive understanding of their wants and needs. This requires marketers to understand how they interact with their website, its content, and what encourages them to make conversions online.

© StewArt Media

Above, we can see an illustration that breaks CRO into three steps, ranging from traffic to lifetime value. Each step includes factors that are ripe for optimization, like referrals, social advertising, newsletter optimisation, reviews, reselling, and referral nurturing. 

How to Calculate your Conversion Rate

Before we look at how to optimise your CRO strategy testing, it’s worth looking at the formula to calculate your rates. Your conversion rate is calculated by dividing the volume of your conversions (which can be just about any metric you see fit) by the total number of website visitors you receive before multiplying by 100 to gain a percentage reflection. This means that the formula itself would look like:

Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions ÷ Total Number of Visitors x 100

Let’s take a hypothetical example. If your website made 20 sales from 600 visitors in the past month, your conversion rate would be 20 ÷ 600 x 100 = 3.33%

Are your conversion rates decreasing or plateauing over time? It may indicate that there’s something wrong with your CRO strategy testing. With this in mind, let’s take a look at four common pitfalls and explore how to remedy them:

You’re not testing enough

One of the biggest pitfalls of CRO strategy testing stems from a lack of clarity about when enough is enough. Although many business professionals will tell you to continue testing until your results provide a ‘statistically significant’ set of results, this term can be difficult to interpret. 

Fundamentally, statistical significance means that you’re confident that you have the results you need in order to make an informed decision. Whether this means that your A/B testing has delivered a conclusive result, or other experiments have provided you with a leading solution, depends on the types of assets that you’re testing.

However, for larger sample sizes, it’s essential to alter the scale of your testing. It’s possible to gain averages from running tests for an hour–but the results will be far from conclusive. In a nutshell, the longer your test, the greater the sample size that you can experiment with. 

When working out how long your testing should run, look at factors like your page’s daily views. In that regard, a test that receives an average of 50 views per day would require 150k views to attain a 95% confidence level in results–this is a huge sample that could take years to reach a consensus on, so it pays to spend as much time as you’re willing to spare in order to gain the right insights. 

© Metadata.io

One way of achieving a greater consensus in a shorter time frame is by adopting multivariate testing instead of traditional A/B testing. This can enable you to test different elements of your pages all at the same time to really get to grips with what your visitors engage in the most. 

You’re failing to learn from your successful pages

When things are going well it can be easy to become complacent over your best performing pages. However, what many marketers forget is that CRO can often make your most successful pages even better. 

It’s essential that you avoid only acting on your strongest pages when their popularity begins to wane. Continue to test and analyze the insights that they provide. By working out what’s making them so effective, it’s possible to identify the winning formula and transfer it to other pages that aren’t as successful at winning conversions. 

You’re not conducting prior research

There’s little point in running CRO tests if you’re unsure of what you actually want to learn. Should the images on your landing page be altered to something different? If so, what? Should you add more emotive language to your headline? Is it worth altering the navigation framework of your website? The only way you can hypothesise improvements for your pages is through research. 

There can be many ways to research the elements of your site that can be improved. Heatmaps, scrollmaps, analytical audits, surveys, user testing, and biometric testing methods can all be incorporated into gaining a greater understanding of what your audience actually wants to see from your site. The information you gain from this should help to provide a solid foundation from which you can construct page concepts and test how well they will be received by visitors. 

You may find that a brainstorming session can throw up many fresh hypotheses that you could want to test on site. It’s through prioritising those that are backed by sufficient data points that you can build a solid foundation in which to build on. 

You haven’t utilised technology to your advantage

What many marketers forget is that technology is all around us and always on-hand to help. Optimisation technology can help users to better identify problem areas faster, and solve issues quickly. 

There are countless data points that can be analysed in depth when CRO strategy testing, with software like LogRocket, InVision, Fullstory, and Justuno just some of many excellent UX, DX, and front-end monitoring platforms to aid you in scouting for barriers to completion, failing calls-to-action, and various other bottlenecks. 

It’s also essential to tap into Google Analytics regularly to delve deeper into the insights that are available to you. Here, it’s possible to look at CRO percentages that can be broken down by mobile visitors, specific browsers, and many more demographics. 

You don’t even need to adopt technology for insights alone. It’s equally useful to utilise tools around you such as website builders and even wordpress hosting platforms like Hostinger or Blue Host to improve the efficiency of your site processes.

Whilst the task of winning conversions online is set to be tested further as online businesses face a cost of living crisis that could impact consumer spending power, strong CRO strategies can help to mitigate the impact of a market downturn. 

By dedicating the necessary time and adopting the right technology to support well-researched hypotheses, it’s possible deliver a winning CRO strategy that helps to support your company’s bottom line throughout uncertain times.