Conversion rate optimization is all about increasing the number of site visitors who complete a site goal, no matter if it’s a purchase, a download or a sign-up. No matter how much extra traffic you generate, it is meaningless if your site isn’t up to scratch. If a website doesn’t match expectations or engage your users then, no matter how stunning your ads are up to this point, your traffic will bounce, maybe never to return.
Modern shoppers live in a world full of options and distractions. A user can start browsing from a desktop, leave the office and continue from a smartphone and come back on a desktop a few days later. The marketing funnel provides a great indication of behavioral patterns and trends, but digital marketers need to dig deeper into the thoughts and distractions present in the life of a potential customer. User journeys have increased in complexity, but so have the tools we can use to process and map masses of data points.
What can CRO do for your business?
There are three key areas for uplift in the conversion rate optimization activity:
Efficient acquisition
A positive impact compounds and ripples across others channels, improving the efficiency of paid media activity by reducing your cost per acquisition (CPA) and pushing you ahead of competitors. Making the most of your existing traffic is a highly cost-effective way of increasing sales and revenue, whilst maximizing return on investment (ROI).
Revenue growth and retention
An uplift of even a 1 percent improvement by channel, device, visitor type at each step of the site journey blend to unveil huge uplifts in both sales and revenue. There’s also lots of potential for growth through retention as an enjoyable user experience (UX) is bound to attract visitors back to your online business.
Customer insights
By applying a conversion rate optimization strategy, you’re getting a consolidated view of your marketing activity and its effectiveness, expanding the knowledge of your business and audience by combining various data points. This way, you can determine the best landing pages to drive paid traffic to, understand the content that resonates the most with your audience and apply these learnings to other areas of the site.
What opportunities are you missing?
A lot of online businesses are guilty of a major sin: sweeping under the rug the site speed. Google has been insisting on mobile, and even for the tech-savviest of companies, it seems to have fallen on a secondary place. Users browsing behavior keeps on changing and mobile becomes more important each year, step by step taking the place of a desktop as a favorite device.
A one-second delay in mobile page speed load time can impact conversions by up to -20 percent. Think of all of the efforts that went into building the landing page and all the money spent on acquisition campaigns. Visitors are five times more likely to leave your site if it isn’t mobile-friendly, which has a huge drop in page views and customer satisfaction.
Speed makes or breaks your CRO!
If you think that landing pages, copywriting, the right Call-To-Actions and color of your buttons are enough to get more clients, think again! Let’s make a test! Try putting your website and a few competitors into a Google mobile speed test and give the revenue impact calculator a go.
What can you do to improve speed now? A good starting point is to optimize images. Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a page. Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data and improve website performance. With Google even offering the solution themselves with their newly launched image compression tool, Squoosh, there’s no excuse not to improve the speed of your website and by doing so, the users experience.