Conversion Rate Optimisation (or CRO) is one of those scary acronyms used by experts to show how much they know – however, it is not as well-known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and this is potentially one of the most dangerous trends in marketing today.

SEO – creates traffic (which you are hoping is quality and relevant) CRO – is assisting with converting traffic to actual sales

With SEO being such a hot topic, people end up spending a lot of money on it, but this just means that you are driving traffic towards your site, without closing the sale when they get there this is just a wasteful use of budget. So how do you change this trend? How do you turn all of these people visiting your site into valuable pounds?

Well the greatest key to this process – and to getting it right – is understanding customer behaviour on your site and the simplest way to understand this is to use Google Analytics. By analysing the sales funnel with visitor behaviour, you can see exactly where you are losing customers in the buying process and if you understand where, you can try and solve the why.

Providing you are getting suitable levels of traffic into your site, there are (broadly) 3 stages of the sales process where you could lose them:

If traffic is arriving on site and leaving immediately then this would suggest your visitors are not interested in what you are selling (are therefore not the right traffic).
If traffic comes onto the site, stays for a while but leaves without entering the sales funnel then it would suggest that something in your site is wrong – layout, customer journey, ranging, pricing.
If products are being put into baskets but then not following through, it would suggest that something is putting them off such as delivery costs, delivery times, trust in purchase process, complexity.

Improving with CRO is therefore a process of investigation, understanding and then change. However, it would be foolish to make all of the potential changes at once, so it’s important that you tweak individual elements first, refining the process and reanalysing at every stage until you have got it right.

CRO is not a destination or a singular solution but a process that should be carried out often to ensure that you are consistently turning those people visiting your site into sales pounds.