Forget about best practices and quick hacks: to increase website conversion rate, your best move is to understand your visitors, users, and customers, and give them what they need.
In this guide, we dispel a few myths about conversion optimization, talk to 20+ conversion experts, and give you a free, downloadable 3-step CRO plan to help you gather the data you need to improve your conversion rates over and over again.
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart’, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
A more user-centric definition of CRO
Standard definitions of CRO, like the one we just wrote above, place their focus on conversion percentages, averages, and benchmarks. This emphasis on a numerical approach comes with a downside—the more you look at spreadsheets full of conversion data points and actions, the less you think of the individuals behind them.
Here is an alternative, more holistic and user-centric way of defining CRO: think of it as the process of focusing on understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your users, so you can give them the best user experience possible—and that, in turn, is what makes them convert and ultimately improves your website conversion rate.
Why do we think this second definition works better? Because focusing on the final action—the conversion—is obviously important, but in reality, a lot happens before that point:
- Specific DRIVERS bring people to your website
- Specific BARRIERS make them leave
- Specific HOOKS persuade them to convert
When you’re working to improve conversions, not every problem is quantifiable, backed by hard numbers, and with a clear-cut answer. Yes: sometimes, an obvious bug is blocking 80% of your users from doing something, and fixing that one bug will save your entire business; other times, your website functions perfectly and yet people still are not converting. When this happens, you’ll need to dig deeper to understand the why beyond the data you have—you’ll need, in other words, to focus on your users first. And that’s what we at Hotjar think CRO is actually about.
Whether you own an eCommerce site or manage online marketing or SEO (search engine optimization), CRO will constantly be a top-of-mind topic to help your organization grow.
How to calculate conversion rate
Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (desired actions taken) by the total number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if your web page had 18 sales and 450 visitors last month, your conversion rate is 18 divided by 450 (0.04), multiplied by 100 = 4%.
What is the average conversion rate?
Depending on what you read, the average conversion rate is anywhere between 1% and 4%.
But let us come out and say it: this figure is sort of meaningless, since:
- Conversion rates differ wildly depending on the conversion goal (ad clicks, checkout completions, newsletter signups, etc.)
- Every website, page, and audience is different
- Most people don’t share their conversion data publicly anyway
Averages may be useful as starting points for benchmarking, but what do they really have to do with YOUR website?
There is no actual, ultimate industry figure you can rely on or compare yourself against with 100% confidence. Obsessing over an average percentage figure, and trying to squeeze as many conversions as possible just to stay in line with it, is not the best way to think about conversion rate optimization. Once again, you’re better off focusing on developing an in-depth understanding of what actually matters to your users, so you can give it to them—and then, conversions will naturally follow.
Important Conversion Optimization Terms
1. Eye-tracking definition
Eye-tracking technology helps observe and measure eye movements, pupil dilation, point of gaze, and blinking to see where subjects of a study focus their visual attention, what they engage with, and what they ignore.
2. Micro-conversion
Micro-conversions are the completion of small steps or secondary actions by a website visitor that indicate that they are going to convert. Though not considered part of a site’s overall conversion rate, micro-conversions are a strong indicator of the effectiveness of your funnel.
3. Macro-conversion
Macro conversions are the primary goals of a website. Examples of macro conversions for SaaS, eCommerce, or any other online enterprise could be revenue, contact us, request a quote, and free-trial.
4. Multivariate testing
What is multivariate testing? Multivariate testing, or MVT, is the act of combining and testing multiple variables on a website as part of a controlled experiment, to determine which combination produces the most conversions. Multivariate testing enables companies to validate hypotheses before implementing them at scale, reducing risk and improving upside.
5. Statistical Significance
What is statistical significance? Statistical significance measures the probability that a difference in conversion rates between Version A and Version B of a split test or A/B test is not caused by random chance.
In other words: if your A/B test results show a winner at 95% statistical significance, there is a 95% chance that the result is correct and you indeed have a winner—and a 5% chance that, if you repeated the experiment, you’d get a different winner or an inconclusive result.
Conversion optimization best practices—and why they’re dangerous
In the world of digital marketing, a CRO best practice is a commonly-held belief that a particular optimization action will guarantee an increase in conversion rate, for example:
- Use a strong color for all CTA (call-to-action) buttons
- Place CTAs above the fold
- Use urgency (e.g., time-limited offers) to drive sales
- Always display testimonials
- Use fewer form fields on your forms
Are these best practices good for improving YOUR conversion rate? Debatable.
First of all, best practice is—by definition—past practice: it’s something that worked in the past for someone else. You can’t guarantee it’s going to work today.
Second, just because it worked for someone else, doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.
Blindly applying existing best practices puts companies in a perpetual state of playing catch-up—while more progressive and experimental businesses are busy improving and making the changes that will be recognized as ‘best practices’ in a few years.
There is, however, one core principle we can recommend as always valid: spend time understanding your users and customers—or, as we like to say around here at Hotjar, build a customer-centric culture by obsessing over your users and customers. They are the people who matter to your business and have the answers you need to improve it. Fixate on their needs and desired outcomes, learn as much as you can about their concerns and hesitations, and then deliver solutions that address them.
In the long term, what leads to growth is not blindly applying best practices that you see on other blogs or hear from your boss(es). The winning approach is investing in understanding and learning from your users and using the insight to build an optimization strategy that continuously improves your business.
How to do this in practice is covered in the 3-step CRO program chapter of this guide; before then, let’s take a rapid look at the tools that will get you there.
The best conversion rate optimization tools
It may sound weird coming from a company that sells a tool that helps people optimize websites—but, as a principle, we believe that the best optimization tools are free.
Your brain, ears, eyes, and mouth are the primary tools you need to understand your customers, empathize with their experience, draw conclusions based on the data, and ultimately make the changes that improve your product conversion rates.
(Sidenote: here is a great example of what can happen when you don’t use these tools, make assumptions about what people need, and build something that nobody uses.)
How do you use these free tools?
- Listen to what your users have to say about your website
- Watch how people use your website
- Immerse yourself in the market
- Talk to whoever designed and built your site (and your product/service)
- Speak to the staff that sell and support your product/service
- Draw connections between different sources of feedback
All the other, traditional optimization tools are simply the means that help you do it. And they help in three ways:
1. Quantitative tools to uncover what is happening
Quantitative tools allow you to collect quantitative (numerical) data to track what is happening on your website. They include:
- General analytics tools
- Website heat map tools
- Funnel tools
- Form analysis tools that track form submissions
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) tools that measure customer satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 10
- Tools that use the Net Promoter System to measure the likelihood of people recommending your website/product to someone else on a scale from 0 to 10
2. Qualitative tools to uncover why things happen
Qualitative tools help you collect qualitative (non-numerical) data to learn why your website visitors behave in a certain way. They include:
- Website feedback tools (on-page and external link surveys) where visitors are asked questions about their experience
- Website session recording/replay tools that show how individual users navigate through your website
- Usability testing toolswhere a panel of potential or current customers can voice their thoughts and opinions on your website
- Online reviews where you can read more about people’s experience of your brand and product
3. Tools to test changes and measure improvements
After you’ve collected quantitative and qualitative feedback and developed a clear sense of what’s happening on your website, testing tools allow you to make changes and/or report on them to see if your conversion optimization efforts are going in the right direction. They include:
