Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your website or landing page experience based on website visitor behavior to help improve the probability of the visitor taking the desired action. The desired action can include signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, making a purchase, or any other action that you want your visitors to take.
Let's break it down:
A conversion is when a visitor to your website takes a desired action. This could be
Most of the time, the conversion is about making a purchase. How to track conversions? You can use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any other tracking tool to track conversions.
But how quickly implement the conversion tracking; this simple but very important action sometimes takes too much time from site owners, because it is a little bit technical, but at the same time we can't ignore it.
We have explained it as to 5 years in another article. You can read it How Track Conversion The Simplest Way.
Shopify wants to trap you in their ecosystem, so they have their own tracking system, but it's not enough, because you can't track the whole customer journey, you can't track the whole funnel, you can't track the whole customer behavior.
So, though we like Shopify we must to admit they made the covnersion tracking a little tricky with their recent updates in Checkout 2.0 upgrade. How to move to new checkout and keep tracking the conversions, you can read in our insight on How to move to Shopify Checkout 2.0 and keep tracking conversions.
Though first it might sound like a mathematical term, it's not that complicated.
The rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who take the desired action. For example, if 100 visitors come to your website and 10 of them make a purchase, your conversion rate is 10%. As simple as that.
100 / 10 = 10%
Not complicated, right?
Optimization is the process of making changes to your website, product page, cart or checkout pages or any other part of your website to improve the likelihood of visitors taking the desired action. This could involve changing the layout of your website, adding a call-to-action button, or improving the user experience of your website.
Simple Example, we have very small ugly ATC button, and we see we have 100 visitors and only 10 of them clicked on the ATC button, after we have changed the button to be bigger and more attractive, we see that 20 of them clicked on the ATC button. This is the optimization. So we have doubled the conversion rate.
Very simple, no need to be a rocket scientist to understand it.
CRO is important because it can help you improve the performance of your website and increase the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts. By optimizing your website to better meet the needs and preferences of your visitors, you can increase the likelihood of visitors taking the desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
CRO can also help you identify and fix issues with your website that may be preventing visitors from taking the desired action. By identifying and fixing these issues, you can improve the overall user experience of your website and increase the likelihood of visitors converting.
CRO involves a number of different steps.
People used to think that is CRO is just about data analysis and A/B testing, but it's much more than that. First of all CRO is about to illuminate the most important parts of your website, and then to make them more visible and more attractive to your visitors.
Once you have fixed all the essential sections and issues in the website, then you can start to analyze the data and make A/B tests to see what works better for your visitors.
Shopify stores are not that different from other ecommerce stores, but when you do CRO for Shopify store, need to know all the specifics of Shopify platform, because it has its strengths and weaknesses. Examples: