What is CRO in Digital Marketing

You may have seen reference to the acronym or term CRO. Long story short, that stands for conversion rate optimisation, and CRO is really the process by which your website, typically your landing pages, convert better. So, you’ve got a website for your business, and people are arriving on that website via different channels and different tactics. You might be running Google Ads, doing SEO, or running Facebook Ads. Whatever the case may be, how do you turn more of your website visitors, who are hitting your site or specific landing pages, into more leads, sales, revenue, and profit for your business?

So, that’s what CRO refers to. If a digital marketing agency or freelancer pitches to you the idea of CRO or somebody’s told you, ‘Hey, you should look at CRO for your business website because we think that it’s not structured to convert very well,’ basically think along the lines of trying to get more results out of the existing traffic that’s already coming to your site.

Generating More Leads

If you want to generate more leads for your business, there are really two ways to look at it if you’re just talking about something simple like having a website for your business and you have an inquiry form on the site, and you want to go from, say, five inquiries a week to ten inquiries. So, you want to double your inquiry volume.

Yyou can think about it in the context of, ‘Hey, I’m already getting a certain amount of traffic coming to my site; could I double my conversion rate?’ Now, doubling your conversion rate is not easy to do. I have seen it happen in the past. I’ve seen even greater results than that, but oftentimes that’s because somebody’s done a sort of CRO or conversion rate optimisation piece of work that fixes something that’s actually broken with the site.

Importance of CRO

Going and looking at your site and making sure that all your contact forms, sign-up forms, checkout processes, and so on work correctly—that’s the kind of thing CRO gets down to. Right down to the nitty-gritty of where buttons are placed on the site, what colours and fonts you’re using, and the exact wording you use on landing pages, lead forms, and so on.

CRO also plays a role from the perspective of the advertising you’re doing and the channels and tactics you’re using as well. So, it’s not just about what you put on your website or landing pages; it’s also about what you put in your ad copy as well, if you’re running Google Ads or Facebook Ads and so on.

So, yeah, CRO basically refers to conversion rate optimisation. That’s what it stands for. It’s the process of trying to convert more traffic or visitors to your site or landing page or clicks on your ads into a greater number of leads, and then turning those leads into more sales, revenue, and profit for your business.

Combining CRO with Scaling

What I would suggest, if you’re interested in CRO and if you’ve been pitched on it, is to combine CRO with actually trying to scale the volume side as well. What I mean by that is, unless you have totally tapped out all of the advertising and digital marketing you could be doing, you should combine that with actually looking at how you would improve the conversion rate of your website and landing pages. Doing both at the same time tends to yield the best possible results.

But equally, you might only have the budget to do one or the other, and maybe doing CRO or improving conversion rate is the way to go. I haven’t really explained much about how to do CRO or conversion rate optimisation in this video; that’s sort of beside the point. The main thing is to explain what the concept is in general terms.