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Conversion rate optimization 101: the user-centric approach to CRO
Whether you own an ecommerce website, manage an online marketing team, or are responsible for your brandâs SEO efforts, youâll know how vital conversions are to your business. Conversion rate optimization practices maximize your potential for drawing in customers.
This 10-chapter guide dispels a few myths about conversion optimization, shares tips from 20+ conversion experts, and gives you a free, three-step CRO plan to help you gather the high-quality data you need to improve your conversion rates over and over again. It all starts here in Chapter 1, with an in-depth introduction to user-centric CRO.
Summary
Conversion rate optimization definition: CRO is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired actionâor conversionâon a website.
Step 1: identify important conversions. Decide on the desired action you want to target, depending on your business.
Step 2: analyze your conversion funnel. Conduct funnel analysis to identify factors that make visitors leave before converting.
Step 3: gather user data. Gather as much information as you can about your users to understand their drivers, barriers, and hooks.
Step 4: create hypotheses. Use the insights you gathered to hypothesize what funnel features to add, adjust, or remove.
Step 5: test your hypotheses. Implement data-driven optimizations and A/B test web page variants.
Step 6: review and iterate. Continuously review everything youâve done and mark the effect your tested changes had on your conversion rate.
CRO best practice tips: thereâs no single, guaranteed CRO solution that will work for every business. Your usersâ needs, pain points, and motivations should ultimately dictate your CRO program.
Use Hotjar on your site to see what's really happening, identify problems, and increase conversions.
What is conversion rate optimization or CRO?
Conversion rate optimization is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions, also called conversions, can include purchasing a product, clicking âadd to cartâ, or filling out a form. Successful CRO strategies aim to increase conversions by focusing on the customer experience.
Why you should take a customer-centric approach to CRO
Youâll notice many conversion rate optimization strategies concentrate heavily on percentages, averages, and benchmarks. While improving conversions is the ultimate goal of CRO, taking a purely numerical approach wonât get you very farâthe more you look at spreadsheets full of data points and actions, the less you consider the individuals behind them.
A holistic approach to CRO puts people front and center by trying to understand what drives, stops, and persuades them to convert.Â
That said, letâs dive into six easy steps to kick off your customer-centric CRO strategy.
CRO quick start guide: 6 steps for success
We canât say it enough: the winning approach to CRO involves understanding your customers and using the insights you gain to build an optimization strategy that improves your business and the user experience. We explain how to do this in practice in the CRO program chapter of this guide. But for now, letâs take a look at the steps and tools that will get you there.
đ Note: Hotjar provides an entire suite of customer-centric analytics tools you can effortlessly access from one platform (one of them is Hotjar Feedback, that red button to the right of this pageâclick to let us know what you think of this page and help inform our CRO efforts!). Throughout this piece, weâll use our tools as examples of how to conduct a truly user-centric optimization process.
When our users have a better experience, it benefits our conversions and ROI as well. Hotjar helps me identify bottlenecks and deliver the experience people want when they visit our website.
Step 1: identify important conversions
Conversionsâor the specific actions you want more users to takeâlook different from business to business and will vary depending on your goal. If you run an ecommerce site, a conversion might be a completed purchase; for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, it might be signing up for a free trial.
Once you identify the desired action you want to target, itâs time to optimize the rate at which visitors complete said actionâin other words, your âconversion rateâ.
Calculate your conversion rate
To optimize your conversion rate, youâll first need to know how to calculate it. Itâs pretty simple: divide the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors and multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if your web page had 18 sales and 450 visitors last month, your conversion rate is 18 divided by 450 (0.04), multiplied by 100 = 4%.Â
Most CRO tools will do this calculation for you, but it helps to understand the math behind it.
đ§ What is the average conversion rate?
Depending on the sources you consult, the average conversion rate is anywhere between 1% and 4%.
But weâll be the first to say it: this figure is sort of meaningless. Thatâs because
Every website, page, and audience is different
Most businesses don't publish their conversion data anyway
Good conversion rates differ wildly depending on the conversion goal (ad clicks, checkout completions, newsletter signups, etc.)
Averages may be useful as starting points for benchmarking, but what do they really have to do with your website? Youâre better off focusing on developing an in-depth understanding of what actually matters to your users, so you can give it to them. Conversions will naturally follow.
Step 2: analyze your conversion funnel
Next, itâs time to take a magnifying glass to each page of your conversion funnel. đ This process is called funnel analysis, and the goal is to identify factors that make visitors âdrop offâ and leave before converting.
You can calculate your conversion rate and find out where and why people drop off with a web analytics tool like Hotjar Funnels that visualizes how traffic moves through your site.
Funnels lets you pinpoint high-exit pages and analyze every step of your conversion funnel, enabling you to get to the bottom of low conversion rates with additional help from integrated behavior analytics tools that capture how real users interact with your website, like heatmaps and session recordings.
You can dive deeper and filter conversion data by key demographicsâlike geographic region or social media trafficâto segment users and tailor your funnels to fit each target audience.
Step 3: gather user data
After you determine key drop-off points in your funnel, start gathering as much information as you can about your users. This is arguably the most important step in any user-centric CRO strategy, and youâll find that not every conversion blocker is quantifiable or clear-cut.Â
Yes: sometimes an issue is as simple as one bug preventing 80% of your users from taking a desired action. But other times, your site might function perfectly, and people still donât convert. When this happens, youâll need to keep exploring the why behind the data and focus on your usersâ needsâthatâs what CRO is actually about.Â
Focusing on the final actionâthe conversionâis obviously important, but in reality, a lot happens before that point:
Specific drivers bring people to your website
Specific barriers make them leave
Specific hooks persuade them to convert
đ Drivers
Determine what factors lead people to your site by analyzing funnel website traffic data or running a traffic attribution survey to account for offline drivers like word-of-mouth referrals.
Even better, follow the steps outlined in our article on creating user personas that represent your user base and their motivations, then organize all the data you collect into a list of the main things people want to accomplish on your site.Â
Hotjar Surveys is a great tool for running online surveys that get to the root of who your users are and what brings them to your businessâyou can embed a survey directly on a page to target visitors at key conversion moments, trigger a pop-up poll when they first land your homepage, or send existing customers a more in-depth questionnaire via email.Â
AI for Surveys will expedite the research process by generating a goal-oriented survey for you in seconds. Once responses start rolling in, youâll get a tailored summary report that presents actionable takeaways from the feedback you collect, so you can focus on translating conversion insights into practice.
âïž Barriers
If people arenât converting at the rates youâre aiming for, thereâs bound to be a hurdle or two standing in their way that you can work to remove. To find out what might stop potential customers from converting once theyâve landed on your site, you can turn to user behavior analytics tools like Heatmaps and Recordings.
Hotjar Heatmaps gives you powerful user insights by visualizing what users do on your pagesâwhere they click, how far they scroll, and what they look at or ignoreâso you can remove friction and identify features theyâre missing on both desktop and mobile devices. Hotjar Recordings integrates seamlessly with Heatmaps to give you the full picture of people interacting with your site in real-time.
Heatmaps đ€ Recordings: a match made in CRO heaven
If your heatmap in Hotjar shows a trend of increased rage clicksârepeated, frustration-induced clicking on a specific elementâover time, zoom in on individual usersâ journeys by watching companion session recordings that reveal what these users were doing at the moment they encountered a barrier along their journey.
Click 'View recordings' to go from a point of interest in a heatmap to its companion session recordings
Similarly, if you notice a user struggling to perform an action in a recording, zoom out in a single click to view the related heatmap and determine whether multiple users are facing the same blocker. This way, youâll clear the path to potential conversions.
đȘ Hooks
What better way to determine which factors âhookâ people in than to consult the ones who are already hooked? Ask your existing customers what persuaded them to convert, and what almost caused them not to, so you can have a solid grasp of what went right and what to avoid along the conversion funnel.Â
Running another on-page or external link survey would yield helpful results, but if you want to gather even richer data, try interviewing your users. Hotjar Engage offers the full package for conducting user interviews, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording. Engage will automatically transcribe your conversations, and you can chat, highlight key clips, and add notes to keep your team in the loop.
Once youâve spoken to real people from your customer base, compare what persuaded them to convert with the factors that blocked them so you can start reflecting on what features to lean into and away from.
Step 4: create hypotheses
The next step is tying together all the insights from the data you collect in step 3 by developing hypotheses and determining what funnel features to add, adjust, or remove to increase conversions.Â
It may seem daunting to draw sound conclusions from such a wealth of data, but thatâs what the next step is for: testing your hypotheses to determine which changes lead to impactful results and which changes you should scrap. Youâll have to do some trial and error to confirm your hypotheses, so donât stress too much about getting things right on the first tryâCRO is an iterative process.
Step 5: test your hypotheses
Now itâs time to put your theories to the test and implement data-driven optimizations geared towards increasing conversions. When it comes to CRO tests, quantitative and qualitative metrics should be intertwinedâone gives you the what, while the other gives you the why.Â
A/B testing variants of each web page is an excellent method for trying out new UX page designs and sales funnel flows.Â
đ Read our comprehensive guide on A/B testing to come up with a game plan and figure out which modifications drive conversions.
đ Did you know? Hotjar Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback integrate with traditional A/B testing tools, like Optimizely and AB Tasty, to help you understand how your variants perform. Combine these tools for deeper context, and learn invaluable CRO lessonsâeven from your losing variants.
Step 6: review and iterate
The last (and continuing) step is to review everything youâve done and mark the effect your tested changes had on your conversion rate. Conversion rates will improve incrementally the more you iterate, so keep monitoring your conversion rate and decide which areas of your funnel need addressing with an ongoing CRO program.Â
A tool like Hotjar Dashboards helps you effortlessly stay on top of your CRO metrics, visual insights, and user feedback. Dashboards doesnât just give you a bird's-eye overview of your most crucial metricsâit also allows you to effortlessly zoom in to the specific session recordings, heatmaps, or user feedback impacting these metrics.
CRO tips and best practices
If youâve already done some research into digital marketing strategies, chances are youâve come across a few âbest practiceâ lists. Best practices, within the context of CRO, are commonly held beliefs that a particular optimization will guarantee an increase in conversion rate.Â
Suggested optimizations might includeÂ
Using a strong color for all call-to-action (CTA) buttons
Relying on urgency (e.g. time-limited offers) to drive sales
Always displaying testimonialsÂ
But are these best practices always good for improving your conversion rate? Debatable.
First of all, best practice isâby definitionâpast practice: it's something that worked in the past for someone else. You canât guarantee itâs going to work today, and just because it worked for someone doesnât mean itâs going to work for you.
In the long term, blindly applying best practices wonât lead to your full potential for growth.Â
There is, however, one core principle we can recommend as always valid: spend time understanding your users and customersâor, as we like to say around here at Hotjar, build a customer-centric culture by obsessing over your users and customers. Fixate on their needs and desired outcomes, learn as much as you can about their concerns and hesitations, and then deliver solutions that address them.
Use Hotjar on your site to see what's really happening, identify problems, and increase conversions.
đ Your CRO journey has just begun
We have so much more to show you. The following chapters of this guide cover
Our three-step CRO program: a free, downloadable CRO process that helps you understand the drivers that bring people to your site, the barriers that stop them from converting, and the hooks that persuade them to stay
Landing pages: a practical guide with case studies on how to optimize a landing page and drive conversions effectively
20+ expert CRO tips: 20+ expert CRO practitioners answer the question: âWhat's the one thing you recommend to people working on improving their conversion rate?â
10 CRO tools: find out which popular conversion rate optimization tools will help you improve UX and increase conversions
6 benefits of a user-centric CRO approach: youâve done the hard partâgetting potential customers on your site. Now, discover what you stand to gain from a higher conversion rate.
How to perform a successful CRO audit of your website: a nine-step guide to a proven CRO audit method to identify opportunities to improve your siteâs conversion rateÂ
7 CRO strategies for ecommerce businesses: improve the UX throughout the entire ecommerce conversion funnel, from pricing and product pages to the checkout process, to turn site visitors into paying customers
10 key conversion rate optimization metrics and KPIs to track: from bounce rate and CTR to user behavior metrics like click and scroll depth, learn about the most important metrics to keep an eye on for CRO
CRO glossary: an explanation of the most commonly used terms and messaging in CRO, from split testing and CTA buttons to multivariate testing