6.3 How does conversion rate optimization work? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Very much related to A/B testing</v> is conversion rate optimization. So you can can think of every page on your website as being an offer, an offer to your customers to engage and possibly to convert. And so in order to progress people through your website, you have to answer their questions. As they're moving through their buyer journey, they have questions, they have objections, they have obstacles, they have things that get in their way that prevent them from making a decision to buy. And the sales process is all about overcoming those objections. It's about getting their questions answered. So how do we answer our customer's questions? The way to do that, if you think about it, is through optimizing the experience on your website. And when we talk about conversion rate optimization, sometimes they abbreviate it CRO. When we talk about CRO, there's actually lots of different optimizations that might be part of the process. So we all know about search engine optimization, and I'm sure you've optimized your website for performance, for speed, and have you optimized your pages through A/B testing? We also talk about website optimization. That might be talking more about your journeys or e-commerce optimization where we're thinking about how to get all the information to your customer that they need to make a purchase or a related purchase or a cross-sell, upsell opportunity. Any of these things could be part of conversion rate optimization based on your website. But what is optimization itself? When we throw that word around, what do we really mean? Well, optimization is different from maximization. Maximization is the best possible outcome with no constraints at all. And it's fairly rare in business that you have no constraints at all. You usually have time constraints, you have budget constraints, there're all sorts of things that constrain you, and optimization is the best under the constraints. So one of the reasons that's important is because one of the things you might notice about all the different optimizations we just talked about is that sometimes, they conflict with each other. Sometimes, having better content on the page that will help answer more questions actually means the page loads more slowly. So how do you make that trade-off? That's what optimization is really about. We've got certain constraints and the idea is to have the best possible outcome within those constraints. So as we mentioned with A/B testing, you can focus on page or an entire journey when you're trying to optimize. And A/B testing is actually one of the ways that conversion rate optimization is done. There are other things you can do but maybe the safest way to optimize conversion rate is through A/B testing because that way you're always sure that you're making progress. You're not just making changes and hoping for the best. You're checking your work. Now, you can make changes and look at how the analytics are affected. That's called a before and after test. The problem with that is there might have been other factors that changed in addition to the one that you intentionally changed. You could have a different mix of customers coming to the site. There's all sorts of things that could be different between one day and the next. And so having an A/B test where people are simultaneously being shown different pages or different journeys just randomly as they come to the site, it controls for many of the other things that could go be different if you do a before and after test in different time periods. So what kinds of things can you test within a single page? Well, you could change the media. So you could perhaps change a text block into a video. It may have mostly the same words but someone will be speaking them, maybe there'll be something else on the video of visual interest, rather than having people read text. You could have a change of the content. It could be the exact same format but you changed the copy in the text, for example, from one message to another. It could be a change in the design. This is probably one of the simplest ones where maybe you change the color of the button or you just change the appearance of the page. A more sophisticated change in the design might be in placement of the objects on the page. So maybe you move something from the top to the bottom of the page. Maybe you change the size of it. All of these things are ways of testing different changes on a single page. And you don't have to necessarily change the entire overall journey. How do you test calls to action? Calls to action are probably one of the most important things that you can test because that's the place where the rubber meets the road where you actually have to get your customer to click on that button. So there's a few different things you can think of. One is you could change the media. So if we use the same example that we were using before, the same construct of media, content, placement and design, how would that work with a call to action button? So the media could be a link or a link in the text or a button. The content could be the words that are on the button. The placement obviously is the location and possibly the number of occurrences. Maybe you put a button above and below the form. And the design could be the size or the color. If you change the size, that's actually something that's called Fitt's Law. This almost sounds like a joke but Fitt's Law says that the larger you make the button, the more likely it is people will click it. I didn't know we needed a law for that but there is one and so I guess you should make your button as large as it fits. And so you can also improve the journey through the site. So you don't necessarily have to change any of the individual pages but maybe you could eliminate a step or add a step or reorganize it so that it flows differently. You obviously can change the pages as well, which might make it easier to do some of these things. But focus on not just changing pages but changing journeys and A/B testing that as well. When we audited the journey for one of our clients, we found all sorts of problems that you can see listed on the left but the thing that we did was as we reviewed the journeys, we saw that there were a large number of pages and about 87% of them had at least three issues on the page that affected the user experience, the content, the code on the page or the way the analytics were placed on the page. And so that's a pretty high percentage of problems, and so we were very hopeful that when we made recommendations for improvement that we would see some kind of improvement in the conversion rate, which is the goal. So for this particular client, we reorganized the journey. It was 22 pages before and afterwards, four pages but as we've mentioned, it's not always the best to make the journey shorter. But in this case, it really was. This journey was about getting someone to convert by filling out a form that signed them up for a free trial of a piece of software. And after we changed the journey, we expected that we would see an increase in the conversion rate. We expected that we would see an increase in the number of people that filled out the form for the free trial. And we did. We saw an 84% increase, which was very, very happy making. Now, the other thing that happened, which we did not envision at all is that the very next step in the journey, which is for the client, the perspective client to start using the free software in the trial, that is something that went up 460%. Even though we hadn't changed that at all. And so momentarily, we were confused and we didn't know why that would happen but as we thought it, we started to realize that it could be that the old journey was just wearing people out. That by the time they fell over the finish line and completed the form for the free trial, they're like okay, yeah, now I'm gonna go take a nap, and I'm gonna come back tomorrow and I'll figure out how to use this software. And you know what? A whole bunch of them never did. But when you made the conversion easy, when they weren't tired by the time they converted, then they immediately started using the software in their free trial and that's what led to that 460% increase. So one of the things to pay attention to is that sometimes, you can have a salutary effect on conversion rate, even when it's something you didn't change because you changed something else. And so paying attention to all the steps of the journey might help you find some value that you didn't even realize would be there. So the goal in improving conversion rate is to just make a lot of changes and as you do, keep score. So you can change your products, your content, your prices, your policy, your experience and then change them again. It becomes a lot of fun when you can keep score. It's not as stressful as it might be for you today if you don't know if making a change is gonna make things better or worse. That's very stressful. By using A/B testing in your conversion rate optimization, you can always be confident that you are actually making a change that works, and by doing so, you're gonna rapidly improve your conversion rate and your marketing effectiveness as a whole.