Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) & Analytics

Posted on Mar 5, 2025 in Business Management and Marketing

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion is the general term for a visitor completing a site goal. Goals come in many shapes and sizes. If you use your website to sell products, the primary goal is for the user to make a purchase. There are smaller conversions that can happen before a user completes a macro-conversion, such as signing up to receive emails. These are called micro-conversions.

What is a Conversion Rate?

Your site’s conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a goal divided by your site traffic. If a user can convert in each visit, divide the number of conversions by the number of sessions. If you sell a subscription, divide the number of conversions by the number of users. Conversion rate optimization happens after the visit makes it to your site. This is different from conversion optimization for SEO or paid ads, which focuses on who clicks through to your site from the organic search results, how many clicks you get, and which keywords are driving traffic.

Strategies for Re-engaging Bounced Users

The three core content strategies for re-engaging users are:

  • A reminder: “You tried to do this thing and you didn’t finish. Want to finish?”
  • Something has changed: “Since the time you tried to book, prices have come down. Want to try again?”
  • There’s more information: “Looks like you stopped at this step — did you know that it’s optional?”

5 Ways CRO Benefits Your Business

  • Improved customer insights: CRO can help you better understand your key audience and find what language or messaging best speaks to their needs. It focuses on finding the right customers for your business.
  • Better ROI: A higher conversion rate means making more of the resources you have. You’ll get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers.
  • Better scalability: While your audience size may not scale as your business grows, CRO lets you grow without running out of resources and prospective customers.
  • Better user experience: When users feel smart and sophisticated on your website, they tend to stick around. CRO studies what works on your site and expands on it.
  • Enhanced trust: For a user to share their credit card, email, or any personal information, they have to genuinely trust the site. Your website needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to answer all your customers’ questions.

How to Reach Bounced Users

There are essentially three re-engagement channels:

  • Emails/push notifications: Simple, effective, but easy to abuse.
  • Retargeting: Paid ads that target site visitors.
  • Calls: Calling prospects that have dropped off.

Metrics and Dimensions in Google Analytics

Google Analytics reports are made of dimensions and metrics. Metrics are the quantitative measurements of data, and dimensions are the labels used to describe them. Metrics are always expressed by numbers (number values, %, $, time), while dimensions are expressed by non-numerical values.

What is a Dimension in Google Analytics?

Dimensions are the attributes that can be used to describe, segment, organize, and sort data. Examples of dimensions include:

  • Medium
  • Browser
  • Country
  • Language
  • Campaign
  • Device Category

Each dimension accepts different values. For example, the dimension ‘Device Category’ indicates the type of device used to visit a website, accepts ‘desktop, mobile, and tablet’ as values, and can help sort traffic between the three devices.

What is a Metric in Google Analytics?

Metrics are expressed through numbers (number values, %, $, time) in a Google Analytics report. They are quantitative measurements of data and show how a website is performing in relation to a specific dimension. For example, the number of ‘Users’ who came from desktop, mobile, and tablet devices and their ‘Average Session Duration’ are metrics for the Device Category dimension.

Types of Website Traffic

1. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic comes from search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). When people click on a search engine results page (SERP) listing, that visit is counted as organic traffic. It’s the main reason why content marketing is so important.

2. Direct Traffic

Direct traffic comes from people directly typing or entering your website’s URL in their browsers, or by using bookmarks. It’s usually an indication of brand awareness.

3. Social Traffic

Social traffic comes from social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, etc.). This happens when people click on a link shared on these platforms.

4. Email Traffic

Email traffic comes from your email campaigns. To track this correctly, integrate your email marketing software with Google Analytics or use UTM parameters, ensuring the medium parameter is exactly “email.”

What is a Lead?

A lead is a user interested in your value proposition and exhibiting buying behavior. This interest is expressed by sharing contact information, like an email ID, a phone number, or a social media handle.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) Actions:

  • Downloading trial software or a free ebook
  • Filling out online forms
  • Favoriting items or adding items to a wishlist
  • Adding items to the shopping cart
  • Repeating site visits or spending a lot of time on your site
  • Clicking on an ad to find your site
  • Contacting you to request more information

How To Identify Marketing Qualified Leads

All businesses need to develop a definition because not all MQLs are the same. Consider these factors:

  • Use your buyer personas as a starting point.
  • Get feedback from sales.
  • Determine demographic/firmographic qualification factors.
  • Determine behavioral qualification information.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Leads that have expressed enough interest in your product or service that they’re ready to move into your sales process. Examples:

  • Arriving at your site from a referral that has shown to produce SQLs in the past.
  • Responding to your cold email with questions about your product.
  • Contacting you directly via email or your website’s contact form.
  • Registering for a webinar or upcoming event.
  • Revisiting certain pages of your website multiple times, such as your product or pricing page.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a marketing automation technique that seeks to organize and prioritize leads. It’s a methodology based on the fact that we have limited resources. It consists of assigning a score to each lead according to the actions they have or have not taken. The higher the score, the more likely they are to purchase.

Company Growth Stage and Lead Scoring

The structure and strategy for lead nurturing and lead scoring depend on a company’s growth stage:

  • Early Stage: Seeking product-market fit.
  • Growth Stage: Expanding markets, growing demand, and scaling processes.
  • Maturity Stage: Focusing on optimization and efficiency.

How to Get Leads

Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is an offer that marketers present to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. Lead magnets usually offer digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, whitepaper, or video.

What Makes a Lead Magnet Irresistible?

  1. High value: It should have both high perceived and actual value.
  2. Solves a real problem.
  3. Promises one quick win: It should help them easily achieve something.
  4. Super specific: The more specific, the better it will convert.
  5. Instantly accessible: People love instant gratification.

Inbound Lead Magnet Strategies

  • Content and SEO
  • Website
  • Social media
  • Email marketing
  • YouTube
  • Optimize for long-tail keywords to get more qualified leads
  • Blog

Lead Generation Outbound

  • Email Marketing
  • Display Ads
  • Retargeting
  • Events
  • PPC
  • Sales representatives

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects throughout the customer journey. The goal is to get prospects to choose your brand when they are ready to buy. It keeps potential customers in your sales funnel by engaging and educating them, providing value, and building awareness about your products and services.

What is Retention?

Retention is a measure of how many users return to your product over time. Even the best products lose the majority of their users in just a few days. Improving retention is crucial for sustainable growth.

N-Day Retention: The proportion of users who come back on the ‘Nth’ day after first use.

Retention Curve: A line graph depicting the average percentage of active users for each day within a specified timeframe.

Cohort Analysis

A cohort is a subset of users grouped by shared characteristics. In business analytics, a cohort usually refers to a subset of users segmented by acquisition date. A cohort analysis allows you to compare the behavior and metrics of different cohorts over time. You can then find the highest-performing (or lowest-performing) cohorts and identify the driving factors.

How to Improve Retention

  1. Improve your product — deliver more value for users.
  2. Improve your onboarding — connect more users to existing value.
  3. Make it stickier — make the value hard to give up.
  4. Catch users before they leave — give them an excuse to stay.
  5. Remind users of your value — deliver value more often.
  6. Bring back users after they’ve gone — remind them what they’re missing.
  7. Change your users — target a more suitable audience.

User Onboarding

User onboarding is your user’s initial experience with your brand, product, and people. It spans from the moment someone starts to sign up for your product until the moment they realize how your product is going to improve their life—also known as their “WOW” or “aha” moment. An exceptional customer onboarding program involves step-by-step tutorials, unlimited guidance and support, and milestone celebrations.

Attribution Models

Last Indirect Click: Direct traffic is discarded, and 100% of the conversion value is attributed to the last channel the customer clicked on before converting. The direct channel only receives credit when it is the only channel that participated in the conversion.

Google Ads Last Click: The last click on a Google Ads search ad receives 100% of the conversion value, regardless of its position in the conversion path.