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Frequently asked questions
Answers to your conversion rate optimisation queries.
Getting started with conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
You can manually calculate your conversion rate using the following method. This will tell you your user conversion rate (what percentage of your users converted).
- Identify the number of conversions (such as enquires or orders) within the time period you want your conversion rate to reflect (e.g., 1 month).
- Divide the number of conversions by the total number of users to your site within the same time period.
- Multiply your answer by 100.
You can find your session conversion rate by substituting the number of users for the number of sessions. You may find it more helpful to think in terms of a session conversion rate if you are also using session based metrics in Google Analytics, such as Engagement rate.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) improves your website performance by improving the user experience. When users enjoy using your website they stick around longer and are more likely to buy from you. With CRO, every change you make to your website is calculated for its potential benefit. Changes are tested, so your overall website performance only ever improves.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) changes the content and structure of your website so that it is ranked favourably in Google search results. SEO can help you get more organic traffic to your website.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tests hypotheses for improving the performance of your website. It improves the user experience so that more of your traffic converts (this usually this means making a purchase).
When you hire a CRO agency to improve your site they will go through a CRO strategy with you where they analyse your site, suggest ideas and generate hypotheses, and test these.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can work well together as one gets you more traffic and the other helps you convert that traffic.
However, sometimes SEO can mean copy is modified in such a way that it harms user engagement, reducing the chance of conversion. This means that more traffic is coming to your site, but you are actually making less money.
The best way to ensure your website is performing optimally is to choose SEO and CRO agencies that are happy to work together to achieve the best possible outcome for you. At Credo we actually prefer to work with everyone else you have helping you with your site. We believe the best results come out of collaboration.
The best way to improve your website is to do it piece by piece and to test the impact of each change. If you change too much at once, you won’t know which change made your website perform better. Or worse, which change had a negative impact on your website’s performance.
If you really don’t have the time to test individual elements, you can group similar changes together. Focus on one part of the user journey (such as product pages on an ecommerce website) and monitor the impact. Did the changes improve performance (such as increasing add to basket rates) or reduce performance?
Sometimes, a full redesign is required. This is the riskiest way to improve your website. It is very possible that the new design will not address the problems of the old design. So your new website converts the same as, or worse than the old version. A complete redesign is risky as it usually takes a lot of time and money. However this risk can be reduced by bringing in CRO experts to help. Speak to us about reviewing your new designs to learn more.
You can also help reduce the risk associated with a complete redesign by identifying your existing website’s problems with a CRO Audit. Knowing what issues you are trying to fix will make it more likely your new design will work well.
Making a decision to hire a conversion rate optimisation agency is a big step towards a better performing website. But naturally, you may be having doubts if CRO is right for your business.
We understand that there are reasons why you may be unsure if CRO is the right path for your company right now. These include:
1. Needing more insights into your users and customers before making decisions about the future.
2. Having a grand vision for the future which means introducing entirely new offerings.
3. Feeling like your site needs a full redesign rather than iterative testing.
4. Having low amounts of traffic that could make getting enough data a challenge.
If any of the above resonate with you then our research service or design review service could align more with your needs. Our research service helps you understand your users on a deeper level, and our design review service ensures your new designs are CRO friendly from a UX and copywriting perspective.
We understand that not every company’s situation aligns with the requirements or principles of traditional CRO. That’s why we offer services which can be adapted to your unique needs.
Credo offer FREE consultations where we talk about your business and help you understand if our services are right for you at this time. We only work with clients we believe we can help. The worst case scenario is you leave the consultation with a better understanding of where your company is at and when CRO might become a suitable option for you. The best-case scenario is that you feel reassured you are doing the right thing for your business by beginning CRO or a related service.
Get in touch with us to discuss your needs.
Conversion rate optimisation services
As a specialist conversion rate optimisation agency, our core service is CRO.
We recognise that CRO is not always the most appropriate service for every company, so we also offer CRO Website Audits and a research service.
Our most chosen service, CRO helps to improve the user experience and the performance of your site through an iterative test and learn process.
CRO is popular with companies that want to see test result data and quantifiable improvements.
A CRO Website Audit is an in-depth evaluation of your key user journeys.
These audits pull together user behaviour data, best practice and user psychology with analytics added if you choose our Full CRO Audit.
This combination of insights results in a one-of-a-kind CRO report that (as far as we know) is the only one within the CRO industry to provide such a deep level of understanding.
The report identifies problem areas, highlights those with the most severe implications, and suggests practical steps forward to resolve the issues discovered.
The reports are written in a way that is easily understood by anyone in your company.
Sometimes you need a deeper understanding of your users and customers than analytics, heatmap data, and user recordings can provide.
We will work with you to understand your research goals and overall aims as a company and then strategize a research approach to get the answers you need.
Specialist conversion rate optimisation agencies often charge £10k per month for CRO work.
Our services are highly competitively priced, with most clients paying between £2.5 and £3k per month. The actual amount will vary depending on the service provided and scope of work.
Our CRO audits offer an in-depth and bespoke analysis of your site and start from £1,495.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is an ongoing process as what is deemed the “optimal” user experience changes along with society and technological advancements.
How long it takes to move your website closer to optimal performance is a little easier to quantify. But it can still vary greatly due to a number of factors. We have seen improvements recorded a couple of weeks after our Full CRO Audit was handed over, and we have seen improvements take a few months to take effect.
To improve your website through CRO you must:
- Identify where your opportunities for improvement lie with a website review or audit.
- Formulate a hypothesis based on your findings and create the elements required for testing. Depending on the hypothesis and your resources, this could be as quick as one week.
- Run a test to see if your hypothesis is true or false. The amount of time this needs to run for will largely depend on traffic volumes but we aim for 4 weeks.
- Roll out the changes that were implemented during a successful test. This can be done as soon as there is a definitive test result or probability in favour of the winning variant.
We usually see positive improvements in performance whilst a test is running, but the biggest impact comes once the change is rolled out to all users.
Once you have received your CRO report you will have a list of issues with your website that are stopping it from reaching its potential, and the actions you could consider taking to remedy these.
The next step is to prioritise and group these actions. We suggest giving each issue and its associated action a score. We recommend the ICE scoring method. You will be able to see which actions will have the greatest payoff based on their total scores.
When deciding on an order of play, you should take into account dependencies and possibly group a small number of changes that could be made at once together.
We don’t recommend changing too many things at once as it makes it difficult to see what impact each change had.
Ideally, every little change should be tested individually, but many growing companies do not have the luxury of time to do this.
If this all sounds a bit much, don’t worry. When you have a CRO Audit with us and decide to come on-board for CRO, we take care of all the planning for you.
Every client is unique, and so our approach to CRO is agile.
But there are some industry specific strategies that guide our strategy for CRO and our other services. Because we know that your industry has specific challenges and opportunities, we offer our services in a way that target the factors that are important to you within your industry.
Find out more about CRO for e-commerce, SaaS and service companies. If your company doesn’t fall into one of those sectors, don’t worry, we’ve worked across lots of different industries and we are sure we will be able to apply CRO to your company too.
We are a small agency and as such, every client we work with is special to us. You can believe that we will always be working hard to champion your brand and deliver results.
You will have a dedicated project lead who is always there to talk you through what’s happening and collaborate on projects.
We are also extremely proud of the results we achieve for our clients and look forward to achieving similar huge wins for other fantastic brands.
When you work with us you will always have a dedicated project lead to help you feel informed and part of the journey every step of the way.
Whether you want to bring in your own designers, developers, and copywriters is up to you, but we are happy to provide these resources if you don’t have them or your team is busy working on other things.
Take the first step to a better performing website today