There’s no time like the present for marketers faced with rising acquisition costs and falling search traffic.
CRO is not a shiny new tool or technique (yes, there are AI tools that can help with heuristic evaluation). Rather, it reveals a problem that many marketers have faced over the years – they know the value that user research and website optimisation can bring, but they don’t have the time or resource to give it the focus it needs. In the current marketing landscape, focusing only on the top of the funnel may be an unsustainable approach.
Here are some of the reasons to invest in a CRO roadmap right now.
To make the most of what (traffic) you have
If you’ve read CTI’s guide to GEO and AI search, you’ll know that there’s been a reckoning afoot for a good 12 months when it comes to informational searches on the web.
In simple terms, AI is great at summarising websites. Naturally, this has impacted search referral traffic for many businesses. That may be because your SEO-focused efforts no longer draw visitors into the top of the funnel. Or it may be more fundamentally that customers are doing their research within ChatGPT or on the search engine results page.
As many marketers have pointed out, this dynamic could be impacting traffic, but the other side of the coin is that it may also hone visitor intent. AI summarisation has given the searcher what they need to consider your products, so more folks are arriving who are already set to buy. “Take my money,” if you will, rather than “show me your wares”.
In these cases, there’s a whole lot more customer context for marketers to uncover. And context here is just a fancy way of referring to longer, multi-step search queries. So your website still caters to people who have searched for ‘best budget running shoes’, but also to those who search for ‘best budget trail running shoes for overpronation that I can try on in Manchester’.
Your web pages must make it as easy as possible for these highly discerning potential buyers to find what they need as quickly as possible. And then allow them to take action without losing any of their buying momentum.
To shed light on your internal design processes and carve out time for discovery
There are often some telltale signs of a business that could benefit from some focus on CRO:
- Design changes may be based on one person’s opinion, not data or heuristic evaluation.
- Tests may have been rolled out with no discernible results.
- There may be a lack of testing ideas.
- Conversion rates may have dropped.
- There may be a desire for an outside perspective.
CRO can be seen as a microcosm of an organisation’s appetite for innovation. Testing means carving out time for some marketers and developers to focus on discovery, not delivery.
To provide validation, risk mitigation, and a structure for growth
If you’re currently resourcing a CRO roadmap, it’s useful to clearly outline the benefits. Conversion optimisation helps build a picture of how people use your website, and helps you spot opportunity. It sheds light on what’s not working, generates hypotheses to experiment with, and provides a structure for growth.
Lee Preston, Head of CRO at CTI Digital, gives a handy overview:
“CRO adds a layer of validation so only winning design changes get developed, and risk is mitigated from things that don’t work. Ituncovers opportunities, fixes friction and stops teams shipping changes hastily and uncritically.
“When we work with businesses on CRO, our aim is to help them make better decisions, balancing iteration with innovation.”
Because your competition is doing it
There are lots of reasons to start now. The main one is that CRO can offer competitive advantage.
Increasing conversion rates will generate more revenue with fixed acquisition costs, and therefore will translate through to increased profit. And your ROI will effectively grow over time, especially if your design improvements hold as your traffic scales.
For businesses with growth targets, CRO can be a powerful growth lever when it’s done right.
As a spur to audit your analytics setup
CRO may start with a data and analytics audit to identify gaps in tracking, specify what needs to be tracked, and to liaise with developers to ensure robust hooks are available to track events.
With tag management also in hand, your site setup can be future-proofed, providing full visibility of customer interactions.
To better understand your customers
Research is a fundamental part of CRO which reveals how people really use a site and why they’re leaving. You can then make informed organisational decisions and experiment to see if they make a real difference to your revenue.
Research might take the form of design validation – used for low traffic sites or for low risk changes to clear a backlog. This involves showing design variants to a sample of real people to sense check whether it is likely to make more people convert. Activities could include card sorting to define information architecture
Alternatively, more rigorous A/B testing can be employed on high traffic pages to statistically isolate the performance impact of changes.
These changes could apply in a whole range of areas, from CTAs and navigation, to checkout design, product page information or intelligent search.
Find out more about CTI’s UX and CRO services, or contact us to request an audit.
Content marketing manager at CTI, Ben is a writer and editor with 15 years experience in the marketing industry.