During talks with your colleagues or in marketing meetings, everyone uses the same acronym: CRO. This acronym can even be replaced by the term “experimentation”. But what is it exactly? Let me tell you.
1. CRO? What does it mean?
CRO aka Conversion Rate Optimization is a marketing strategy that comes straight from the United States. It is intended for e-commerce sites or applications wishing to increase their profitability by transforming website users into customers. This is called conversion.
It involves analysing and transforming the user experience to optimise the number of visitors becoming customers
Why integrate experimentation into your marketing strategy?
a. The conversion rate issue
The percentage of visitors who have carried out an action on your site is measured in conversion rate. Optimising a website means increasing this rate. Indeed, a better conversion rate is synonym of a better profitability. For major stakeholders in e-commerce, the improvement of one conversion point corresponds to several million additional sales.
The challenge is therefore to analyze and understand the evolutions of this conversion rate while precisely monitoring factors that influence the website users’ behaviors.
b. A true marketing strategy complementary to the SEO
This new experimentation marketing technique complements the now well-known SEO (short for Search Engine optimization). SEO is a method that uses the best key words to reach a good position in the search engine results pages.
SEO gives good visibility to your website. Hence, more users visit the site. However, to increase our revenue, you cannot just wait for new visitors. You have to CAUSE their visit and above all to turn these visitors into customers. This is where the CRO comes in.
CRO requires to build a real continuous approach, based on expert tools that make quantitative and qualitative analyzes of users to propose appropriate optimization actions.
AARRR strategy for monetising a website.
As you can see, the CRO intervenes at all stages of the chain.
2. How does CRO work?
The operation of CRO is essentially based on data analysis. This analysis gives us a better understanding of our public in order to propose a new user path, known as a funnel, which is more likely to transform visitors into customers.
The CRO rest on the analysis of 4 parameters:
- Quantitative data: this data is delivered by collection tools such as Google Analytics which analyse the flow of visitors to the site as well as their characteristics.
- Qualitative data: qualitative data provides information on the behaviour of site users (purchase, bias, etc.) to understand their actions via tools such as ContentSquare or Decibel for example.
- Cognitive or field data: this data corresponds to the user’s feelings when using the solution. Collected during individual or group interviews, it provides a more subjective view of the user experience.
- Technical performance: thanks to the analysis of technical performance, we can highlight the technical difficulties encountered by users (slow loading, frequent 404 errors, etc.).
The intersection of these four parameters allows us to identify the opportunities as well as the obstacles to improving the site.
How is this data used?
The analysis of this data is part of a conversion rate optimization process. The conversion rate optimization process is an ongoing or ad hoc process that will lead to the implementation of actions. Each action, which is included in a roadmap or action plan, responds to an identified problem. These actions are prioritized. In an e-commerce context, the actions implemented following an analysis phase can ask for tools and expertise around A/B testing, personalization, ergonomics, content, acquisition, etc. All these levers are activated by profiles with very specific skills, each of which will contribute to the building of the site or the traffic to generate the hoped optimization.
The value proposition Canvas is a useful example to prioritize the potential product’s ameliorations
Now that you know everything there is to know about CRO, let’s see how to simply create this conversion rate optimization process called CRO approach (see our article about CRO approach) to reach your goals.
For more information, you can watch the webinar lead by Alexander, expert in CRO, and Guillaume, Datama’s founder which developps today algorithms dedicated to CRO. In this webinar, Guillaume and Alexander describe their audit CRO approach and their tools to accelerate your CRO process and your decision-making.
