Beyond A/B Testing: What is CRO and how can it help you?
For the uninitiated, when you hear about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), your mind may immediately jump to A/B tests — wondering if one version of something is better than the other, testing them against each other, and figuring out which variation of the test converted more visitors on your website — you’re not wrong, that’s definitely a part of CRO work. And it certainly is an important part of CRO work too. But that’s not all there is to it.
For the initiated, you know that there’s so much more to CRO than A/B tests, and that all the hard work actually comes way before an A/B test is ever created. Peep Laja, founder of CXL says “80% of conversion optimization is actually research, gathering data, analyzing data. And the other 20% is testing”.
So, why so much research? Well the simple truth is, you can’t fix what’s wrong until you discover what’s actually wrong and why it’s not working. Yes, we’re really going with the old adage of asking a whole lot of who, what, when, where, why, and how? Who are the users coming to visit your website? What are they coming to your website for? When are they converting after visiting — the first visit, second visit, fifth visit? Where are there possible problem areas? Why aren’t they doing what you thought they would do? Of course these are only some of the questions we ask ourselves. But the key to practicing good CRO is curiosity, and following up on that curiosity — hence, research.
What you want to discover depends on the kind of research you do, and to be clear, doing one method of research won’t allow you to discover and fix everything. Different research methodologies all work harmoniously together, creating a clear picture of who’s visiting your site, what they’re looking for, how they’re browsing, and what you can do to make a better experience for them. Here at The Vaan Group, we have years of experience behind UX audits and developing successful ecommerce stores, and we continuously try to make them better through CRO research and A/B testing. In this multi-part blog series, I’ll be explaining to you the different research methodologies we use to create robust and successful CRO testing plans for our clients. The different methodologies you’ll be hearing about are:
Surveying and Polling
- Learn about what your customers and visitors are looking for on your website. What kind of information are they looking for, what can’t they find, what’s stopping them from making a purchase, or even why they made a purchase at all. This leads to the creation of customer personas of who your customers actually are, not just who you want them to be. You’ll be able to hone in on your acquisitions targeting as well as learning about how to speak with your customer.
Heuristics & UX Audits
- Learn about what your customers and visitors are looking for on your website. What kind of information are they looking for, what can’t they find, what’s stopping them from making a purchase, or even why they made a purchase at all. This leads to the creation of customer personas of who your customers actually are, not just who you want them to be. You’ll be able to hone in on your acquisitions targeting as well as learning about how to speak with your customer.
Analytics
- We all love and hate it, data is important and in our day-to-day we rely heavily on it to inform us about how our business is doing. The most important thing of all is whether or not you trust the numbers you see. An analytics audit is both important to you and to us, so when we start A/B testing we can trust the data that is coming through, and you trust the data you see helping you make your next data-driven decision. Once we’re sure your data is accurate, we dig deep into the numbers to corroborate on the possible issues identified from survey data and UX audits. Combine that with the next research methodology…
Heatmaps, Scrollmaps, Session Recordings
- Visualize behavior and track how your real website visitors are interacting with the different elements on your site: buttons, sections, pages, etc. Every microinteraction like a click, hover, and scroll, combined with research from your surveys, data analysis, and UX audits begin to paint a picture of what issues your website may have, and begin to give you ideas of what you can do to address these issues.
Usability Tests
- Usability tests can help confirm the issues you believe your website may have through moderated or unmoderated usability testing. You can ask users from your target demographic directly to browse your website and perform tasks you direct them to, with feedback from them every step of the way (if they’re good at verbalizing their thought process). With live feedback from a real user, you might even discover pain points in your website you hadn’t even considered before.
After all this research, hopefully you’ll have a good idea of what your website’s issues are, and what are the possible ways you can address them. But how do you know your solution really will really move the needle on your website’s conversion rate? This is the part where we finally get to A/B testing. If you just start A/B testing without all this research, it’s akin to throwing everything at the wall and trying to see what sticks. You’ll never really know why something worked, or didn’t work. And if you don’t know why something did or didn’t work, how do you figure out how to improve on that? All this research allows great data-driven, hypothesis-driven testing to occur, giving you the chance to really move the needle for your store.
So stick around, and learn more about all the work that we put in before launching that first A/B test.
