What To Look For During A CRO Audit?

As a digital marketer, my job responsibility is simple: produce results. You too. You’re likely familiar with questions like, “How many leads did this generate?” or “How much revenue did this produce?” etc. Unfortunately, most online marketers stumble over their answers because they aren’t able to support their efforts with hard data – numbers. Yes.

In light of that, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a web marketer’s one-stop solution. It gives us a way to experiment, analyze, and optimize ideas, then produces real results that are easily measured using tools like Google Analytics or through a marketing automation platform like HubSpot or Salesforce.

If you aren’t familiar with the world of CRO, this is the right place to start. Follow these guidelines to learn how to conduct a CRO audit, and soon you’ll be improving results and influencing ROI.

What Is A CRO Audit?

A CRO audit is a comprehensive website gap analysis to discover why visitors on your website aren’t converting. Following the audit, you make modifications based on what you have found and track your experiments while you increase the conversion rate. It sounds complex but simply put, there are a number of easily traceable reasons to figure out why your visitors are leaving your website or not performing the action you desire.

The CRO Checklist

One of the best ways is, you’ll need to do a top-to-bottom analysis of your website. Let’s use this checklist to get started.

Gather Information

• First, take note of your current overall goal conversion rate. For example, what is your visit-to-lead ratio? And what is your lead-to-customer ratio? These are the two most important metrics to keep in mind throughout the auditing.
• Take note of your top five most popular landing pages. These are where you should initially give attention because they represent the bulk of your website traffic.
• Establish the goal of each selected page. The goal could be to simply learn more about your company, or it could be to fill out your “Contact Us” form. Don’t move on until you make sure that every webpage has a goal.
• Next, collect data. How many page views is each of these five selected website pages getting? What is the bounce rate? What is the percentage of new traffic? How much time is being spent on each page? How many are currently hitting your goal (what is your current goal conversion rate)?
• As you complete the breakdown of data at the page level, queries should start arising in your head. You may find out indications like, that visitors are only scrolling through the top 20 percent of your page or primarily visiting your website via mobile device. Try to recognize where the friction is. What is the reason any number of visitors aren’t hitting your goal?

Test Your Theory

Prepared with data and information, now you can start testing. Based on the goal of the landing page and the current behavior of your page visitors, make changes to your website pages that influence the conversions.

• Majority of the website visitors coming from mobile or not? Make sure every section of the landing page is optimized for that platform. Use forms smartly to shorten the forms on landing pages when viewed from a mobile device.
• Are visitors only scrolling through 1/3rd of your page? Rearrange of sections or move CTAs higher up. Allow your visitors to take action as per your goal above the fold.
• Which landing pages are getting the most attention in terms of views? Try repositioning your forms on these pages to increase your conversion rate. Also, try presenting the forms as concisely and gracefully as possible.
• Are you asking for too much information from the visitors? Use progressive profiling techniques to collect data gradually and strategically from the visitors throughout their journey.
• Is the headline of the page confusing your visitors? Rephrase it out in more enticing language.
• Do visitors feel an emotional attachment to your offer? Modify the action verbs used in your CTA copy and landing page content.
• Have you tried different CTAs? Use a few designs and try links instead of buttons in some cases.
• Is your form inappropriately stood? Try moving it above the fold or transforming it to a sticky form.
• What do your images say about the landing page? Use images logically, making sure they are high quality and aligned with the message.
• Have you tried swapping your content? Use language that resonates with your buyer persona or target audience.
• Are your visitors using the site the way you planned it to be used? With Google Analytics, you can track the path (i.e., conversion funnel) your visitors took through your website.
• What are visitors actually clicking on within your site? Remove or replace the sections of your website that aren’t engaging or creating friction in the buyer’s journey.
• What pieces of content are performing the best or presenting your USP or representing your value proposition nicely? Feature these first in your landing page wireframe.
• How far are visitors scrolling down your page? Update sections of your website where they became disengaged without deteriorating the website’s structure and functionality.
• How many opportunities are you giving your visitors to convert? Try increasing conversion chances, or even decreasing (refrain from overdoing it), if the call to action isn’t clear.

Analyze Results

Soon after implementing some of these hypotheses, you’ll have more data with a clear direction at your disposal. Then, you can use a variety of tools during your CRO audit to continue to analyze, tweak, and improve the performance of your landing pages or the entire website.

One of the best available tools for conducting, analyzing, and optimizing the test results is Google Analytics. Its free version will be more than enough for many like me. Now, there’s no need for me to dig deep all that Google Analytics can do, but keep in mind that this tool isn’t just important for forming a website’s benchmarks at the start of a CRO project’s initial stage. It’s also just as important once the user data allows you to see how website visitors are behaving and converting on your site. Google Analytics is just as important once you understand why users are acting in a specific manner on your site’s landing page. That context we like to get from another type of research at the final stage of the CRO project.

One of the common CRO mistakes to avoid is relying only on A/B testing predominantly. Although A/B testing is certainly necessary and very much effective on top of acceptable to many quite easily, it’s only one piece of the CRO jigsaw puzzle. You should also consider usability testing, customer journey mapping, personalization and segmentation tools, event-triggered emails, copy optimization, and sundries of multivariate testing. If you focus too much on A/B testing, you will actually limit the possibilities of your website in terms of reaching the optimum level of CRO.

Final Thoughts

Lastly, remember to be a little patient. It usually takes weeks (or in some cases months) before you start seeing the output of your CRO effort, but when you do, it will be beneficial. If you’re interested in learning more about CRO, subscribe to our blog.