0115 6777 917
Frequently asked questions
Answers to your conversion rate optimisation queries.
Getting started with conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
You can manually calculate your conversion rate by:
- Identifying the number of conversions (such as enquires or orders) within the time period you want your conversion rate to reflect (e.g., 1 month).
- Dividing the number of conversions by the total number of users to your site within the same time period.
- Multiplying your answer by 100.
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 hypothesises 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).
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.
You can 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.
Credo offer FREE consultations where we talk about your business and work out 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.
We recommend that you begin CRO with a CRO Audit. We offer this as a stand-alone service, so you can decide to take your report and implement the findings yourself if you wish to with no ongoing commitment required.
Conversion rate optimisation services
As a specialist conversion rate optimisation agency, we offer 2 core CRO services.
CRO Audits
Our most popular service is a bespoke CRO Audit. This is an in-depth evaluation of your website resulting in a comprehensive written report.
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.
These reports combine knowledge and expertise in 3 specific areas under the unique Credo framework. Your report is born out of user psychology, Google Analytics data, and user behaviour tracking. 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.
Ongoing CRO
Many of our CRO Audit clients choose to work with us on a longer-term basis.
Depending on your internal goals, we can help you incrementally improve your site (this is always the path we recommend the most), or redesign your site with the foundation of the CRO Audit to guide the way.
Redesign without a basis in CRO can often result in poorer performance. We help our clients avoid this costly mistake and instead, make sure that they see a strong return on their investment.
Learn more about CRO Audits and ongoing CRO services.
Specialist conversion rate optimisation agencies often charge £10k per month for ongoing CRO work.
Our services are highly competitively priced, with most clients paying just £2k per month. The monthly cost of your ongoing CRO with Credo is based on a day-rate charge, and as such can be adjusted to meet your business’s needs.
Our hugely popular CRO Audits typically range from £2.5k-£5k depending on the complexity of your site. Unlike other companies, we offer our CRO audits as a stand-alone service, making them an affordable way to introduce CRO into your business.
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 CRO Audit was handed over, and we have seen improvements take a few months to take effect.
To improve your website you must:
- Identify where your opportunities for improvement lie by auditing your site. This typically takes about a month of gathering data.
- 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.
- Roll out the changes that were implemented during a successful test. This can be done as soon as there is a definitive test result.
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 all the 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 recommend giving each issue and its associated action a score for impact, cost, and time. 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 ongoing 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 CRO Audits and ongoing CRO. 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.
An example of this is optimising product page layout for ecommerce and writing concise informative service descriptions for agency websites.
Find out more about CRO for ecommerce, SaaS and service companies.
Take the first step to a better performing website today