CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION: DEFINITION,ROLE AND STAGES

If you want to increase the traffic to your website, Conversion Rate Optimization is something you need. CRO is the process of turning the visitors of your website to your potential customers who will take the desired action.The main goal of every business must be creating value for its customers. That means to adopt changes in order to please them. The constant practice of CRO will guarantee you that. Now let’s explore the world of Conversion Rate Optimization. There are four major steps in the CRO process:

Step 1: Data Collection
Step 2: The hypothesis creation
Step 3: The hypothesis testing
Step 4: Conclusion about the hypothesis

Let’s discuss each of them separately.

The first step of Conversion Rate Optimization is data collection. The higher the quality of your collected data is, the better insights you will have. There are two ways for data collection: quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative data is all about numbers. You can get it through Google analytics and segmentation. Google analytics will identify your main traffic sources and monitor your metrics. Segmentation will provide you with the information about your users categorized by age, gender, nationality, race, etc.
Qualitative data will aid you in finding out why the numbers add up the way they do. You can do that by conducting surveys, implementing face to face interviews, writing emails, calling your customers, trying out usability tests, etc.
And remember there should not be assumptions. There must be facts.

As long as you have collected your data, you should come up with the hypothesis. You try to find some common trends in the statistics. The deep insight into the quantitative and qualitative data will help you make an assumption about the segment of your website that needs to be optimized. That can be anything related to UX/UI Design, website content, mobile friendliness, URL structure, etc. For example, you noticed that your visitors do not fill in the free trial forms because it is too long. You realize that the number of fields should be shortened.

After having a hypothesis, you should test it. The aim is to understand whether the change you are going to make will yield better conversions. One of the most popular and widely applied tactics is A/B testing whereby you compare two variants and choose the one that is more effective. Or you can use multivariate testing which is based on multiple variables.
People use to jump to this stage without performing the first two ones. However, the things are not always the way they seem to be. As has already been mentioned, everything should be based on facts.

After testing your hypothesis, you will come up with either of these options:
1) The hypothesis was correct.
2) The hypothesis was not correct.
In the first case, you can be proud of yourself as you were able to find the right field for changes. All is remained to do is to implement those changes and enjoy increased conversions.
The second case indicates that you missed something out which resulted in the wrong hypothesis. This happens quite often. You should not give up. Instead, you need to learn lessons from the failed tests and go through the same process again.

That’s all and remember that conversion rate optimization is a constant and continuous process.