Conversion Rate Optimisation  Plan

Conversion rate optimisation planning is all about giving your CRO campaign the best chance of success.

The first part of your conversion rate optimisation plan is to lay the foundation – What are you measuring and what will drive the conversions?

Let’s say you are looking to increase the sales of a single product through your website – Firstly, what drives this conversion? Testimonials? Trust signals? Referrals?

Rightly so, it could be all 3 plus many more factors, however you will need to isolate them to find out the real effect of each.

So a simple test plan may look like this:

You want to increase the number of sales of a single product

You think that by adding trust signals that sales will increase

You decide to A/B split test a page where you include visa & PayPal logos versus a page where you do not.

You will measure results from each and see how adding trust signals affects the number of sales of a particular item.

Before you run any tests you will need to work out where you currently stand. What’s your current page? Is it with or without the trust signals? And what is the current conversion rate of that page as it stands?

You will need to dive into your analytics and other tools to work this out, but if you know that 1 in every 100 people who visit your page that currently has zero trust signals on it, then that is the baseline you work from.

The next thing you will need to do is set up your variation page with your trust logos on. Let’s say you add a visa & PayPal logo beneath your “check out” button.

Once this is added and you have 2 variations of your page one with & one without then you need to set up your split test and decide on the metrics you will use to conclude the test a success.

You now need to run your test and measure the results. Google Analytics allows you to do this rather simply. You set up a new experiment, set the URL for your 2 pages and set a metric you wish to monitor, in this example: number of sales.

If your test is a success, then great, why not try adding another trust logo to your page, why not experiment with their position and size to see how that affects your conversion rate?

Failure?

If your test ‘fails’ then great! It can still be considered a success as you have found out one element you do not necessarily need to focus on any further in the future and can move on to testing other elements that may work. Go back to your planning, find a new element to focus on and run a new test to start lifting your conversions.

That is how you set up a conversion rate optimisation plan, hopefully after reading this article you now see how important a conversion rate optimisation plan is and the benefits of one.

Your Thoughts?

Is there a planning technique that has helped you plan better? What’s your favourite piece of this article?

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