Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization for Online Stores

Conversion rate optimization (often referred to as just CRO) is pretty easy to get your head around. It’s simply the process of optimizing your website design for more conversions.

A conversion can be any valuable action, such as signing up for a newsletter, following your brand on social media, or filling out a contact form. However, in ecommerce, making a sale is typically seen as the most valuable conversion.

So:

Conversion =  when a customer does something valuable 

Optimization = improving your website to drive more conversions

How To Calculate Your Conversion Rate

The “rate” part of CRO is simply how conversions are measured. The most widely accepted calculation for your conversion rate is:

For example, if your website gets 500 visitors a day and makes 10 sales per day, you would calculate the conversion rate like this:

(10 ÷ 500) x 100 = 2% 

…this means you convert 2% of your site visitors into paying customers.

The Importance of Conversion Rate Optimization

There are many benefits of conversion rate optimization. Improving your ecommerce CRO will:

• Ensure you have a sustainable revenue model
• Drive profitability
• Improve user experience and increase customer satisfaction
• help you create a better return on investment (ROI) from your sales and marketing

In this section, I’ll offer some insight into the key areas that can be analyzed, tested, and improved to help boost your conversion rate.

Website Design and User Experience

How your website looks and how users interact with it will have a drastic impact on your conversion rate. If buyers find your site slow or confusing to navigate they’ll lose trust and patience and shop elsewhere.

Here’s what you can do:

• Develop a mobile-friendly website with a responsive design
• Build a clear and intuitive website navigation bar to help visitors find their way around the site
• Use consistent branding and high-impact visual elements across the site
• Improve your website load time

Clear and Compelling Product Pages

Product page optimization is a key part of converting customers. In fact, 85% of customers base their purchasing decisions on product photos and descriptions. Here’s how to make your product pages stand out:

• Use high-quality product photos and videos showing all angles of your product
• Write engaging product descriptions that focus on benefits rather than features
• Leverage customer reviews and add testimonials to your site to develop trust

Call-to-Action Optimization

Calls to action are incredibly important when it comes to optimizing your conversion rates. After all, it’s the exact wording you use to ask a visitor to click that all-important button or do that all-important ‘thing’.

When writing your call to action text, you should:

• Use clear and concise messaging
• Keep wording short and to the point
• Place it in a visible position on your website
• Use A/B testing to find the combination of placement and messaging that works best

Trust and Security Factors

When someone buys online, they’re trusting the store to keep their details safe and secure. Here’s how to limit friction and develop trust in your site from your customers:

• Use trust badges and certifications such as an SSL
• Implement a secure payment processing system
• Publish a clear and easy-to-understand privacy policy and data protection policy

So, now you understand which areas of your website you can optimize for better conversions, it’s time to take a look at some of the specific conversion rate optimization strategies and approaches you can take to help improve these areas.

Gather and Analyze Data

We no longer live in a world where we make business decisions based on a hunch, a feeling, or a coin toss. Moving our businesses online allows us to tap into a range of data to help inform our choices.

You can gather and view this data by connecting your website to an analytical tool such as Google Analytics, or by using the built-in analytical tools that come with your chosen website builder.

These platforms allow us to draw data that can tell us important things, such as where in the sales funnel visitors are stopping, or which product pages perform the best. By tracking user behavior across your site, you can see which user journeys result in a conversion and which don’t – helping you better understand how to improve performance.

Experiment With A/B Testing

A/B testing is the process of testing two variations on your website in order to see which one performs best.

For example, you may test two product pages that are identical apart from the CTA wording. By using analytical tools, you can then see which of the two CTA options performs better.

When A/B testing it is important to remember two things:

1. Only test one aspect of a page, otherwise, it becomes impossible to tell which aspect has impacted the performance of the page.
2. Aim to have similar numbers and types of visitors go to each page to ensure a fair test.

Personalize Your Site For Different Customer Segments

With so much noise in the digital world, we like it when a brand or online store is able to create a personalized shopping experience using tailored suggestions and speaking to us directly – it helps us feel valued and understood.

This is why personalization and segmentation is such a powerful tool. This can be applied in various ways including:

• Dynamic content tailored to the visitor viewing
• Automated recommendations based on personal information and past purchases
• Using a CRM to ensure that all customer service reps have access to all relevant information
• Using email and data segmentation to ensure advertisements are relevant

Find Out More

• Discover specific strategies for online stores in our full guide to Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization so you can boost your sales.
• Learn about Product Page Optimization specifically, to get more conversions on your product pages.
• Need some concrete proof? Have a look at our Top 5 Conversion Rates Examples you can replicate.

In this section, we explore some of the best ways to implement your CRO efforts and how to measure the impact they are having on your business.

CRO Implementation Process

Ready to get started with implementing CRO across your website? Here is a simple process to follow:

1. Set your goals and objectives. For example, you may set a goal to increase your conversion rate from 1% to 5% in six months. Follow the SMART structure for setting these objectives.
2. Conduct a website CRO audit. This will help you understand exactly where your website currently is. It may also help you identify areas for improvement.
3. List optimization areas. Prioritize these based on what you believe will have the biggest impact on the conversion rate.
4. Implement your changes and make improvements

Key Performance Indicators for CRO

Once you have followed the implementation process outlined above you’ll want to ensure that you’re tracking the most relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPI) on your site. This will allow you to monitor progress and adjust your processes and tools accordingly.

The primary KPIs used in this area include:

Conversion Rate

We have already discussed what this KPI is and why it is important. To calculate it simply:

(Number of conversions/Number of visitors) * 100

Average Order Value (AOV)

This KPI will highlight how much the average customer spends on each order. To calculate it, use this formula:

(Total revenue / total number of orders) * 100

Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

Your bounce rate reflects the number of visitors that visit your website but leave after viewing only one page. Your exit rate on the other hand tells you exactly how many people have exited your website from a page, even if they visited other pages before that.

These two KPIs help you understand where visitors are leaving your site before making a purchase.

Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Your CTR can relate to any button or hyperlinked text on your website. It is simply calculated by dividing the number of times the link is clicked by the number of page visits.

This can be applied to any conversion which requires a link click and will demonstrate how well that link is performing.

Tools and Resources for CRO

Here are some helpful tools to help you get started:

• Web analytics – Google Analytics and Hotjar 
• A/B testing – Optimizely and VWO
• Heatmaps & session recording – Microsoft Clarity
• Customer feedback and survey tools –  Survey Monkey and HubSpot 

CRO is absolutely essential for businesses that want to generate a better return on their time and financial investment. Without considering CRO, your efforts in web design, marketing, and smart product selection can be wasted.

By comparing your website against our five elements of CRO, you should be able to identify the areas to improve, whether that’s your checkout page or your product descriptions. Our conversion rate optimization checklist is a great overview of the steps you can take to improve these issues. If you need some help, browse some real CRO examples in action and see how you can apply them to your own store!

Finally, remember to track and analyze any changes you make to your store, and don’t be afraid to experiment!