Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): The Beginners Guide

28 min readAug 2, 2019

This article contains an in-depth knowledge to help you convert more passive browsers into leads and customers engaging with your offerings.

You will walk through the basics of conversion, conversion rate, and conversion rate optimization. Then, you will get informed about web elements benefiting from CRO and primary factors influencing CRO operations.

There are also some suggested strategies to follow to apply a successful optimization to conversion rate.

Furthermore, the process that you will need to examine into while making CRO efforts and tools that ease your job in the way of CRO is explained.

Because you cannot improve something you did not measure, CRO metrics to make an efficient conclusion for your future moves are formulated and textualized.

And lastly, the CRO experts to follow continuously to build your knowledge up are presented.

To drive your insights and boost your conversion rates, all you need is to go over this article.

Enjoy!

https://popupsmart.com/conversion-rate-optimization-guide/

What is Conversion?

Conversion is attaining an aim: a user completes one of your site goals.

There are two types of conversion: micro conversion and macro conversion. Micro conversions usually lead macro conversions because a lead becomes a customer as he knows your company culture, your brand, and your products well.

Micro-conversion

A micro conversion, on the other hand, means a potential customer has engaged in your brand.

Examples of micro-conversions:

Subscribing to your email list
Signing up for an account
Following your social media accounts
Adding a product or service to his shopping cart

Macro-conversion

A macro conversion occurs when a visitor engages in a primary offer on your website. A macro conversion is also known as the primary goals of a company.

Examples of macro-conversions:

Buying a product from your website
Requesting a quote
Making a reservation
Downloading your application
Registering to a primary service

What is Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the number of times that the desired goal achieved divided by the number of users creating site traffic. For instance, if your conversion goal is to sell a product, you can calculate the rate as the number of sold goods in each visit divided by the number of different times a user occupied your site.

The vital thing to know here is that every visitation, every unique customer counts as one conversion. It does not matter whether the visitor purchased three things or left the website without converting. For example, a customer buys two shirts online; it still counts as a single conversion.

Conversion rate differs from conversion optimization and paid ads statistics because they focus on which of your keywords are traffic-driving, how many clicks you get through organic search, and how many users come to your website organically.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate?

(Total Attributed Conversions / Total Measured Clicks) * 100

To textualize the formula, think of like that if your conversion rate is 30%, it means 30 out of 100 people visiting your website convert.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

CRO is the ongoing process of using analytics and regarding customer feedback to increase the performance of your website. CRO focuses on improving the user experience on the site.

Key performance indicator (KPI) is a way of defining your unique objectives in the process of collecting information to have data-backed insights. In other words, it means the goals of your company for website improvement efforts, such as acquiring new customers, increasing sales, registrations, downloads, collecting personal information, and so on.

Furthermore, know that CRO is not a magical fix; it is just a formula to improve your website. Even if your website is conversion rate optimized, you still need to provide differentiated value to obtain more and loyal customers.

Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization

It does not matter whether your current organizational goal is to increase the readability, the amount of time a visitor reads one of your blog post, and the number of backlinks to your site (SEO Goals) or to boost your sales, and the number of customers registering to a service (Business Goals). There are plenty of reasons for you to have conversion rate optimization:

Because quality is more important than quantity in acquiring customers, finding the right customer for your business helps you to achieve your goals better than getting lots of customers. CRO offers you the ability to understand customer insights and their language.
It is cost-effective because you will probably pay for traffic to your website, and a high rate of conversion means a better return on investment.
Turns passive browsers into leads because it figures out which type of users are looking for what kind of experience on your site or what is stopping them from taking the desired action.
By figuring out how to get a higher conversion rate, you will have most of your acquisition efforts (high ROI) without incorporating new customers into the play.
CRO enables growth without running out of resources and with an increased number of customers because it has the power of turning browsers into potential customers.
You will have happy customers due to their pleasant user experience on your website; hence, CRO studies on what works on your website and how to expand on it. Satisfied customers, on the other hand, will engage with your brand more, bringing you the success of reaching business goals.
It provides a defense against the limited patience of users because, with CRO, you will able to provide what users want and expect from your website.
An increase in conversion rate by CRO leads to a decrease in customer acquisition cost (CAC) — the cost of obtaining a new customer.
The better your conversion rate, the more traffic your website gets; the more visitors you have, the more engagement you receive; the more desired action you gained, the more your profit will be.
If you can deliver a visible service quicker and better than your competitors will, users would take the path with you.

Webpages and Webpage Elements Affecting CRO

Homepage

Homepage of your website not only makes the first impression on browsers but also creates an opportunity for you to guide those visitors further into your website. To increase user experience and lead to conversions, you can;

Emphasize links to the products page,
Present a free sign up button,
Comprise a chatbox,
Show your top-selling products,
Offer more ways to order a product
Show video content,
Have the support and contact page.

In other ways, ornament your webpage immensely, so that the visitor would be willing to see other pages on your website as well as to take the desired action.

Product Search Page

The product search page is the page that a visitor decides on whether to purchase your product or keep browsing. Therefore, showing your customers why they should make a purchase would increase your conversions. You can;

Test your search options for accuracy,
Create an intelligent search covering singular, plural, misspelled words,
Implement auto-suggestions to help a user find other relevant keywords,
Present video content for your best selling products and your successes,
Show social proofs and testimonials to prove your reliability.

Product Page

Dynamic product pages carry the power to show your visitors the appearance of a product and present its differentiated value from your competitors. To have a converting product page, you can;

Implement auto-suggestions to help a user find the related products,
Generate detailed, benefit-focused content about your products,
Use more than one high-quality image for every product on your page,
Offer free shipping,
Show each product’s delivery time clearly, and give a chance to select delivery date,
Enable out of stock notification,
Encourage users to leave their insights about your brand,
Sort category structure by popularity and additional filtering options such as price, not to show out of stock products, color, and size.

Pricing Page

Pricing page of a website is usually the make or break pain point for many visitors, so applying CRO with clear descriptions of products and some testimonial comments would beneficial in the way of boosting conversion rate. Also, you can;

Don’t make surprises with your prices,
Modify pricing intervals such as price per year,
Highlight the benefits of making a purchase,
Make your CTAs visible and well-designed,
Enable comparison between options easy,
Offer a free trial for your service initially,
Support the purchase activity with live chat,
A/B test your pricing page.

Checkout Page

Checkout page is the page where people mostly tend to leave without any conversion. To optimize your checkout page for maximized conversion rates, you can;

Offer a persistent shopping card,
Don’t ask for the same information twice,
Demand for validation of personal data,
Mark the questions as mandatory or optional clearly,
Present input examples to each field,
Have auto-fill feature when a user enters a zip code,
Generate linear formed questions list,
Be specific in your calls-to-action,
Ask for following social media accounts,
Don’t complicate password selection,
Never make surprises by presenting extra costs,
Give brave and irresistible guarantees,
Have a link or call-to-action clearly showing your refund & shipping policy.

Blog Page

If contents in your blog page can use CRO wisely, you may convert your readers into leads. Applying CRO in blog webpages is often experienced with an alluring call-to-action of an e-book or industry report inviting readers to learn more about the subject. Then, the user would give his personal information like email address, telephone number, and his age in exchange for this valuable offer.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are designed for browsers to take the desired action of the related webpage. You can optimize your website with a relevant video, free resources, attractive images that encourage users to engage with the brand.

Note that a study by Word Stream showed that using long-form landing pages increases conversions by 220 percent. Instead, a short form only asking for necessary data would be perceived as more doable by the user.

Call to Action

Call to action (CTA) is a button asking the user to take action leading to a conversion. For instance, “Sign Up Now” button in a popup, “Buy Now” button in Amazon.com, and “Download Now” button in an E-book distribution page are examples of different calls to action. To increase the conversion rate, your call to action needs to be clear, well-placed, and attention-grabbing.

Graphics

Presenting graphs on a website is a very efficient way of building trust and increasing credibility in the eyes of visitors. Therefore, using data reflecting your achievements is a good idea to reflect your brand success on your website.

Your graphics in pages must be relevant, easy to find, clean, unique, and very understandable to enhance conversion rate.

Page Speed

If you are not able to retain a visitor just arrived on your website, you would not succeed to increase your conversion rate. Hence 40% of your visitors leave from a page if the web page’s load speed is more than 3 seconds, you need to build a better mousetrap in your page speed.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO operations augment your visibility on search engines. If SEO efforts are accurately expended, people looking for something that your website offers will find the desired page easily. On the other hand, if SEO operations are not managed well, people looking for something that you do not offer on your website may come and leave immediately, which leads to lowering the conversion rate.

To offer a better user experience in your website corresponding with SEO;

Titles in your website must be accurate, clear, and informative, reflecting the subject in your content.
Images need to be downloaded to the website with correct names and keywords.
Meta title and meta description of your content should be proper and include relevant keywords.
Content of your webpages must be current, attractive, worth-reading, informative, and straight.

Usability

Usability of a website is determined by some key features of your website. To have a high conversion rate, you need to keep those characteristics as favorable as possible.

The number of key activities for a user to satisfy the desired action should be little.
Amount of pages a customer faces in the purchase process needs to be low.
The payment process of a product must be easy to complete.
Contact information of your company should be visible.
Registration or sign up for an account needs to be easy.

Mobile Responsiveness

Having mobile responsive webpages is a fundamental element in conversion rate optimization because you don’t want to miss the chance to convert mobile browsers into customers, which generates 63% of all US online traffic.

Furthermore, all your webpages should have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) integration to get a high conversion rate.

AMP is an open standard for any website to have pages load quickly on mobile, designed by Google.

Customer Testimonials

People are more tend to make purchases from brands that have been able to satisfy their previous customers with a service or a product than brands with no testimonials. Social proof is a powerful conversion rate driver.

Therefore, you can present opinions and comments of customers on your website to raise your conversions.

22 TIPS for Successful Conversion Rate Optimization

1. Gather Necessary Human Resources

Conversion rate optimization is a continuous and cross-functional process, so a professional team or person should manage the optimization requirements and processes. Required knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to handle CRO operations are;

developing a plan for CRO program,
continuously observing user behavior insights and the website’s current data,
designing conversion-increasing webpages,
creating persuasive contents that leads to taking the desired action,
and determining variables with optimized code for A/B tests.

2. Identify Your Target Customers

Before determining your digital marketing strategy for maximizing your CRO, you have to make sure that your target market in your business is clearly defined. Otherwise, without specifying your ideal customers, you won’t be able to display an ideal service.

3. Collect Data

To boost conversion rates, you need to collect information about how your visitors behave, who your customers are, and how your CRO performance is. Data collection can be done basically in two ways: qualitative (customer satisfaction surveys, market research, secondary data explication, etc.) and quantitative (bounce rate, exit rate, A/B test results, etc.)

4. Conduct Survey on Users

Surveys are a pleasant way to know of a customer in terms of his wants, expectations, needs, and favors. You may boost the website conversion rate by serving according to the demand after having precise information about who you will be serving.

5. Create Perfect Page

Your page content needs to be perfect — free of errors, compatible, unique, and attention-grabbing. You may use Grammarly to correct your language, and apply an A/B test to your body copy. Also, images on the page must be suitable for SEO practices — unique, colorful, and well-placed.

CTA design, content font size and color, and images on a page have a great impact on conversions, so you should be very careful while designing a page providing a perfect customer experience.

6. Have Calls to Action

People tend to ignore the call to action due to their common approach of banner blindness. That phenomenon leads to lack of attention for taking the desired action of business. This is why your call to action should be clear, well-placed, and very attractive. You may use the button on your landing page, blog posts, and popups to increase website’s conversion rate.

7. Form Mobile Responsive Pages

A study by Techjury claims that 63% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. You do not want to miss the chance to convert mobile users into leads; therefore, you must generate mobile-responsive pages.

Moreover, if all your webpages have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) integration, your overall conversion rate would be higher due to mobile-friendliness.

8. Present User-Friendly Webpages

A user-friendly webpage works on a user’s way because it offers excellent accessibility, visual clarity, time-saving shopping experience, exclusive support, and so on. Especially websites having enormous pressure due to intense competition need to design a practical, goal-oriented, and very user-friendly webpages.

9. Test Page Speed

Once a visitor clicks on a CTA and comes to your landing page, you should make him stay there. Good load speed is 2–3 seconds, according to Google. After that, the 40% of your visitor gets bored of waiting for your page to load, and leaves from the page. This is the reason why page speed matters a lot. Without having customers on the website, there is no chance to maximize your conversion rates.

10. Offer Something Valuable

Offering something valuable to a visitor in exchange for obtaining her personal information or for taking the desired action is the initial way to communicate with the target customer directly. Building a solid start with the user will ease the job on the way of maximizing conversions.

11. Guide Your Customer

Directional indicators like calls-to-actions and navigational panels help your customers to find whatever they are looking for. Therefore, you have to be strategic about the placement of these indicators.

12. Write Compelling Headlines

The headline of your page must be attention-grabbing to make the user read the next sentence. Headlines with intriguing premises, and with question words concentrating to the point are very effective strategies.

Moreover, you must be careful about having only one H1 in each of your webpages to stick with SEO operation rules which are very beneficial for increasing conversion rate.

13. Chat with Website Visitors

It is possible to chat with your visitors in real-time by using one of the message tools. Adding message capability to the high performing web pages leads to an increase in conversion. You can automate chat notifications action-based. For instance, someone spending more than two minutes on your product page would get an offer for help.

14. Include High Converting Popups

Conversion popups are designed to grab the attention of a visitor and offer differentiated value to a user. You may purchase a special popup appearance depending on your goals: slide box in corners, full screen, or slide bar.

Furthermore, applying customization in your popups for the different segmented audience is also a right way of encouraging clicks and turning them into customers.

15. Insert FAQ and Answers

If your visitors have difficulties in finding the exact answer to their questions and are needed to browse too much, they may leave the page leading to a decrease in your conversion rate. Therefore, generating a FAQ page would help you to build trust, to save the time of your customer, to show some characteristics of your brand, and to make them take the desired action.

16. Have Relevance Between Your Ads and Corresponding Landing Pages

You have probably experienced that clicking on a call to action to make a purchase leads to an irrelevant page. In this case, a majority of browsers tends to leave the corresponding page and decrease the website’s conversion rate relatively. This is why you have to be very careful in the process of call-to-action link building on different webpages.

17. Generate Creative 404 and Not Found Pages

No matter how hard you put efforts on ensuring your webpages never goes down, it might loom in the end. However, you can make your website downtime a less painful by presenting a creative error page. This makes browsers wonder and smile, so they would tend to click on call to action in your error page to stay more on your website.

18. Generate Pay per Click (PPC) Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements can be a cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website because you only pay if a browser reaches your website, creating an opportunity to convince him to convert into a customer.

19. Run Heatmap Analysis

You may run a heatmap analysis on pages like product pages and landing pages — deserving special attention. The analysis results will show you where people spend most of their times on a single page, so you will understand which of your strategies attract more attention.

20. Run Tests Regularly

You should determine the most fundamental elements affecting your conversion rate directly and regularly apply A/B test to them — website design, page design, questions on a form or questionnaire, images, content, calls to action, etc.

The testing process is essential because you need to be able to measure how your CRO efforts impact your actual conversion rate and what generates the most customers.

21. Retarget Your Visitors to Re-engage

You can re-engage with a visitor who has left your website by remarketing. (also called retargeting) — The process of tracking visitors and presenting them online ads and banners as they browse on the web. To see how retargeting has an impact on conversion rate, you may initially apply this method to your high-converting pages.

22. Analyze Data

After collecting data, you should be able to interpret the results to determine in which page your focus must be to maximize your conversions, what your strengths are, which strategies are working for your business, who your target customers really are, and so on.

Conversion Rate Optimization Process

Note that copying a CRO strategy that yielded effective results for your previous or your competitor’s projects do not always work. Each CRO process simply goes through 5 phases to effectively increase the conversion rate and manage optimization campaigns:

1. Research

You should derive quantitative and qualitative data to understand what your visitors are doing when they land into your website — heat map analysis, interview feedbacks, bounce rate, surveys, webpage analytics, and so on.

Then, you need to determine how the different elements of each page influence user behavior in terms of engagement. Obtaining such insights would enable you to eliminate unwanted features and focus on converting ones.

2. Hypothesis

Using the collected data, you can form a proposed statement explaining the particular change due to the specific effect or reason in the specific webpages. While generating your hypothesis, you may apply an A/B test to see how proposed changes will affect your conversion rate.

3. Prioritization

Due to limited resources, it may not be possible for you to optimize every webpage on your site. In this occasion, you need to point out the potential of webpages (that are performing bad but can be significantly improved), the importance of webpages (that are getting high traffic but have lowest conversion rate), and the easiness of making a change in those pages. Then, you

4. Testing

A/B testing usually fits changes for CRO operations due to its simplicity. However, if you want to make multiple changes on a page, and you want to test each combination separately, then the multivariate test would be more appropriate.

5. Learning

Now, you can conclude from your test results. By considering the possible outcomes (cost, human resource, customer insights) of applying or not the suggestions of the test, you would have a new perspective on how to optimize website conversion rate.

An expertly planned, good-designed CRO process helps you to identify improvements and implement optimization operations to get higher conversions, and relatively more revenue.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

Traffic Analysis Tools

This type of tools allows you to monitor and examine the amount and the kind of traffic that your website has got. Additionally, you would interpret the traffic results depending on different webpages to make your website more appropriate for your target audience and to focus on the areas requiring improvement.

Customer Survey Tools

Customer surveys are a perfect way of communicating with your audience about their pain points, satisfaction levels, compliments, suggestions, feedback, and comments! Having and interpreting such results coming directly from your customer creates an opportunity to improve your way of engaging browsers.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

SEO tools assist you in working smarter and faster with SEO in your online marketing efforts as well as CRO operations.

Keywordtool.io — offers hundreds of keyword ideas based on the keyword you typed.
Google Search Console — shows website analysis, alerts, and error reports.
Ahrefs — makes a comprehensive link analysis, on-page analysis.
Moz — presents an overall view of your website, pages, and links.
SERP — represents your web pages like they are in Google’s search results.
Schema Creator — enables you to paste schema code to customize your appearance in search results.
Similar Web — generates site statistics for any domain.
XML Sitemaps — builds website maps.

Heat Map Analytic Tools

These specialized tools will provide information on how website visitors are behaving by tracing mouse moves, keystrokes, and clicks. If you want to get a complete picture of how browsers use your webpages, you would love the results obtained from Heat Map Analysis interpretations.

Instant Messaging Tools

Instant messaging (IM) is the fastest way of communicating with your visitors in digital. Also, providing a customized service (e.g. appealing to a user with his name) to the user would increase the chance of engagement and the conversion rate relatively.

Multivariate (MV) and A/B Testing Tools (H3)

A/B test is a method of comparing two different webpages to determine which one performs better for a specified conversion goal. Multivariate testing is very similar to A/B testing; whereas MV can be applied to multiple combinations. The main objective of both testing tools is to find the most efficient webpage design.

Mobile-Friendliness Test Tools

These tools provide the score of your website in terms of mobile responsiveness. Recently, Google has put a penalty on websites offering a poor experience to their mobile users and determined that mobile-friendliness of a website affects its overall ranking criteria.

Remarketing Tools

Remarketing or retargeting tools enable websites to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time, which leads to maximizing conversion rates compared to regular ads such as social media ads or PPC ads.

The Best Popup Builder

According to AKA Marketing, popup ads are 50% more effective than banner ads in taking attention of browsers. If the design of your popup is engaging and compelling enough, you will notice the increase in your conversion rate.

There are many businesses providing popup service, but I have wanted to advise you the best of them:

Popupsmart

Easy Customization: Popupsmart offers an uncomplicated and straightforward system to let you customize your popups without the need of a developer.

Fully Responsive Design: Popupsmart offers the best popup view at any dimension with responsive designs that are compatible with mobile, tablet, and computers.

Display Sounds & Effects: Popupsmart provides spectacular popup campaigns by integrating sounds with impressions.

Privacy Policy & GDPR Ready: Popups designed with regards to the new GDPR rules that reach all requirements.

Exit Intent Triggers: Detects user’s mouse behavior and show them a targeted message as they are leaving.

Integration: By using popupsmart, you will have unlimited possibilities with Zapier integration.

Actionable Insights: You can measure the performance of your popups with clear metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Additionally, popupsmart offers fresh, modern, stylish, and beautiful popup designs to make your conversion rates skyrocketed with advanced targeting features with affordable prices!

Page Speed Measurement Tools

It is proven that websites with higher load times can obtain benefits from higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, higher SEO ranking scores, longer duration of visit on webpages, and better overall engagement. This is why you need to achieve optimal performance on your webpage’s speed.

Landing Page Builders

Landing pages serving specific customer needs are more efficient than generic homepages. However, managing and optimizing multiple landing pages to obtain better performance in conversion rates can be very challenging. This is why you need to use a platform enabling you to maintain everything from a single dashboard.

Usability Test Tools

These tools help you to offer better user experience and aid users in completing the desired action while increasing your website’s overall conversion rate.

Data Analysis in Conversion Rate Optimization

You need to make sure what to optimize, where optimization will be made, and for who to optimize to have high conversion rates.

There are two methods to analyze the data and improve your conversion rate practices:

Quantitative Data Analysis

To conduct the analysis, you need some numbers showing how people behave when they are on your website. Those numbers can be obtained from web analytics platforms tracking your conversions such as Google Analytics, and Next Analytics. The information gives you insights on where you have to put efforts and resources on. Moreover, it requires an objective approach.

Analytics-based CRO provides information like;

Which webpage users visit firstly,
Where do they spend their time most on your website,
From where they have found your website and clicked on a link,
What type of devices and browsers that your visitors use,
Who your potential customers are,
After which activity, your visitors leave your website.

Of course, the statics are not directly telling you all the information explained above. You are required to know some analytic language!

Qualitative Data Analysis

Qualitative data focuses on improvements to offer a better user experience with a subjective approach. The information can be obtained from on-site questionnaires, satisfaction surveys, and testimonial testing. The online reviews would be prepared using tools like Google Forms, Smart Survey and Survey Monkey.

Because conducting a study on all users is not possible in terms of time and resources, ideal users should be chosen very carefully. While selecting your focus group on research, you should take your attention on characteristics like;

The purpose of the survey,
How well you know the targeted individuals,
Whether to offer an incentive,
How often they make purchases,
How regularly a user visits your website,
How likely a customer recommends your site to his connections.

After the data collection process, you will have information about users such as;

Why they have engaged with your goals or not,
Which one of your differentiated value made them stay awhile,
What made them have a better experience compared to your competitors,
Which words they have used to define your products, services, and pain points,

By combining this information with your quantitative data, you would gain a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and an opportunity to engage the target audience with optimization.

Furthermore, few surveys are not enough to have relevance and robust data; real gains would be achieved if and only if you would have a crafted and regularly reviewed data in your hand.

Conversion Rate Optimization Metrics to Analyze

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors leaving after opening a single page. The lower a bounce rate, the better it is because this means people could not be able to find what they were looking for in your website, so they left immediately.

The bounce rate of your website is calculated as;

Total Number of Webpage Visits / Total Number of Entries on Webpage

Here are — some advice on how to lower the bounce rate of your website;

Provide content having high readability and relevance,
Don’t disrupt the user experience with unnecessary ads,
Have attention-grabbing and creative calls-to-action buttons,
Keep your webpages updated according to industry changes,
Create mobile and user-friendly webpages,
Make your webpages load skyrocketed.

Exit Rate

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors leaving after scanning the page (last page that users were in before moving on their browse activity). The less an exit rate, the better it is because a low exit rate means the page is one of the favorable webpages on your site.

Exit rate of your website is calculated as;

Total Exits from Webpage / Total Visits to Webpage

Here are — some advice on how to decrease the exit rate of your website;

Segment your customers according to their traffic driving behaviors,
Optimize your conversions initially for your most liked webpages,
Create exit surveys to figure out why a browser leaves without taking the desired action,
Provide a differentiated value in your webpages,
Trigger exit popups with different persuasive contents,
Always apply an A/B test to your webpages.

Engagement Metrics

Average Time on Site

Average time on site is the average duration that people have viewed a single page. A high bounce rate means a low average time on site — users are not staying enough to take the desired action for achieving the business goal.

Average Page Views

Average views on-site are the average amount of people viewing a single page. High average page views is a good sign as soon as there occur conversions because it leads to customer engagement.

Value per Visitor

Value per visitor metric shows how much an average visitor costs to your business, so you may know how much digital marketing budget you need in the next period.

Formula for value per visitor is provided below;

Total Number of Visitors / Total Revenue (during the same period)

To textualize the formula, think like that if your webpage had 50.000 visitors during this month and you made $50.000 net profit; the value of one visitor is $1 on average.

Segmenting your visitors according to traffic source, pages, and demographics is also a good idea to determine the attributes you need to focus on.

Cost per Conversion

Cost per conversion metric provides information on which traffic channels are generating profit.

Let’s suppose there are two traffic sources: one costs $10 per conversion, and the other costs $50 per conversion. Which would you choose to pay particular attention to?

You would go for the one with a higher traffic source and the lowest cost per conversion. In this case, you need to develop strategies to even lower those numbers and to dominate your market better than your competitors.

Time on Site (TOS)

Time on site metric refers to how long a visitor spends his time on one of your pages averagely. Of course, it depends on the type of webpage. For instance, you want your readers to spend more than 10 minutes on a well-written blog post page.

The average number obtained from this metric signals Google how well your website is. Therefore, the more time you convince people to spend time on your webpages, the better it is.

To improve your average TOS, you may;

Writing compelling, relevant and attractive contents to your webpages,
Do A/B testing on your webpages to see whether or not regeneration is necessary,
Add video content to improve this average time.

Page Views

You need to know how many visitors have come to your site independently of your webpage type. This metric shows you how many people have visited your website and taken the desired action, and how many of them left without converting.

For instance, if your monthly page views are around 10, and your conversion rate is 60%, it shows two things:

1. You are able to convert your visitors into customers.

2. You are lack of ability to draw the browser’s attention into your website.

After completing your conversion rate optimization operations, to have excellent conversion rates, you need to enlarge your social networks, email list, and search engine optimization efforts to better your page views.

Traffic Acquisition

This metric indicates how your visitors came to your website — through social media, direct clicks, organic search, email newsletter, etc. It enables you to put the effort and the energy more on which way of digital marketing. For example, if your social media campaigns brought you 1% of your total traffic, you need to notice that making a strategy change is a must.

Build Up Your Knowledge: CRO Experts

Growing your knowledge of CRO is strongly recommended for you. The way is simple: follow industry leaders producing excellent contents. Here is a list of CRO experts you ought to follow definitely and their companies:

1. Daniel Burstein
Title: Senior Director
Companies: MECLABS Institute | Marketing Experiments | MarketingSherpa
Twitter: @MECLABS
LinkedIn: Daniel Burstein

2. Emily Crume
Title: Strategy Director
Company: Social Media Examiner
Twitter: @SMExaminer
LinkedIn: Emily Crume

3. Suneet Bhatt
Title: CEO
Company: Crazy Egg
Twitter: @CrazyEgg
LinkedIn: Suneet Bhatt

4. Nathan Collier
Title: Managing Editor and Lead Strategist
Companies: CollierMarketing | The Content Marketing Lounge
Twitter: @NathanCollier
LinkedIn: Nathan Collier

5. Tiffany daSilva Title: Founder
Companies: Flowjo | TiffanyDaSilva | Mashable
Twitter: @bellastone
LinkedIn: Tiffany daSilva

6. Gianpaolo Lorusso
Title: Web Marketing & Usability Professional
Companies: GianpaoloLorusso | AdWorld Experience
Twitter: @Gianps
LinkedIn: Gianpaolo Lorusso

7. Alaattin Emre Elbeyoglu
Title: CEO
Company: popupsmart
Twitter: @popupsmartcom
LinkedIn: Alaattin Emre Elbeyoglu

8. Michael Duquet
Title: Director
Company: Absolute Software
Twitter: @absolutecorp
LinkedIn: Michael Duquet

9. Mike Zhmudikov
Title: SEO Executive
Companies: SEOlogist | OneCore Media
Twitter: @sirmichaelby
LinkedIn: Michael Zhmudikov

10. Lenny Manor
Title: CRO Strategist
Company: Medium
Twitter: @LennyManor
LinkedIn: Lenny Manor

11. Oli Gardner
Title: Co-founder
Company: Unbounce
Twitter: @unbounce
LinkedIn: Oli Gardner

12. Peep Laja
Title: Founder
Company: ConversionXL
Twitter: @conversionxl
LinkedIn: Peep Laja

13. Brian Massey
Title: Founder
Company: Conversion Sciences
Twitter: @bmassey
LinkedIn: Brian Massey

14. Joanna Wiebe
Title: Co-founder
Company: Copy Hackers
Twitter: @copyhackers
LinkedIn: Joanna Wiebe

Wrapping Up

Now, you have required knowledge to build and stick to a CRO plan the right way. There is always room for improvement, so always follow the industry changes and make new decisions accordingly to stay in the game.

Don’t forget that to have sustainable growth; you should practice the ongoing process of CRO regardless of initial results.

Also, you need to continuously test your actions, and set goals depending on the metrics results. Never guess anything, calculation and interpretation of analytics would provide you the desired success.

I hope this content is able to answer all your questions related to beginning conversion rate optimization for your website!