What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)? A lot of people mix it up with a/b testing. Knowing the different can help you know when you need to use both to grow your revenue.

What is the major difference between a/b testing and conversion rate optimization? I often see people get it wrong and use the term interchangeable, which is causing more confusion in our industry.

Why Do We Test?

We believe there is always room for improvement, if you have enough traffic to run tests! Some classic reasons in favour/against testing include:

Pros:

  • Increased performance
  • Customer insights
  • Rotate offers

Cons:

  • Risk of worsened performance
  • Not enough traffic

You cannot reap the benefits from testing (your ads, your site, your marketing messages) if you don’t take the risk and test in the first place. Whenever I see people say they have maxed out how they can grow an advertising account, testing wasn’t always done on the ad account. Never leave revenue on the table. Always be testing!

What Is A/B Testing?

  • Goal increase your conversion rate

Whether you are testing your ad copy or a landing page. You simple want to find which one is going to give you a higher conversion rate. The winning version is going to let you decided what you test next and continue to move your conversion rate in the right direction. Now a higher conversions rate doesn’t always mean you will see a higher life-time value or a large jump in your revenue. You usually will see more of the same customers sign up for your product or service.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

CRO as a whole is designed to make a better user experience, and part of creating a better customer experience (on your site or mobile app) means working to remove the friction on your platforms. This friction is usually inhibiting people from buying from your brand, and could be buttons that don’t work in some browsers or devices, for example. It could be copy on your site that is ambiguous and hard for your target market to understand.

Running polls, talking to customers and watching heatmaps are some of the ways you can try to understand what is stopping people from converting. That being said, talking to customers and doing it on a regular basis is one of the best ways to make sure your site stays up to date. This covers before someone buys from you but also the post purchase experience if you are in SaaS or B2B.

Removing this friction can lead to a higher lifetime value (LTV) or Average Order Value (AOV )from customers because they have a better understand of your brand and want to stay with you. You may even see a higher conversion rate from your work but that is not the goal. That is a by product at best.

Make sure you know when to use a/b testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO) when you want to take your marketing up a level and make your customers happy.

That is it for this week. See you next time.