Do you need a conversion rate optimization consultant?
Do you need a conversion rate optimization consultant?
If you are a founder, cmo, growth marketer and you are having trouble finding diminishing returns through your core marketing channels (usually SEO, SEM, paid social, email), it may be time to consider conversion rate optimization. A good signal that you should devote resources to CRO:
You are hitting your creative benchmarks (CPC, CTR) and driving traffic through an efficient cost per visit (CPV).
The efficient traffic is not translating to down-funnel profitability (ROAS, CPA, CAC)
To understand where to get started with CRO, there are a few core areas to consider.
What is a conversion rate consultant?
A CRO is someone that has a high level of expertise in a few areas:
Customer journey mapping
Marketing funnel analytics
Landing page optimization
A/B testing
You will find conversion experts come from any type of digital business, a few common industries that have a focus on CRO include:
Ecommerce
B2B (with a heavy focus on lead generation)
SAAS
What does a conversion rate optimization consultant do?
Pathing Analysis
A CRO is going to start by asking you a lot of questions. Notably they are going to ask what you know about your customers: Who are they? How are they introduced to your business? What are they doing on your website?
Most importantly, a CRO needs to fully understand user pathing on your site. In order to do this they will leverage your analytics tool of choice, likely GA, to run a pathing analysis to understand drop off. A great tool for this is the behavior flow report:
This report can be found in GA under behavior reports:
Based on this analysis, a CRO will figure out where they need to focus. Areas of focus depend on where customers are dropping off your site.
High Bounce Rate
If you have a high bounce rate, above 55% according to most sources, here is where to focus for CRO:
Landing page optimization
Page speed
Low bounce rate, low conversion
When users are not dropping off of your first page and have greater than one pageview per session, then you want to focus on your mid-funnel pages. These are pages that help inform customers about your value proposition, product set, key differentiators. Examples of mid-funnel pages are:
Shop all pages
Services pages in SAAS
About us pages
Heat Mapping / User Research
Once you have determined where users are dropping off, it is time to figure out why. There are a number of great tools in the market to help determine exactly how users are interacting with specific pages.
Hotjar has a great tool for mapping click volume against specific elements of pages. Here is an example:
This tool will help inform future testing you will conduct to improve the usability of your pages and prioritize which content to feature.
Another great tool from Hotjar is their session recording tool. It will enable you to record video of user sessions within your site. It takes your learnings from heatmapping and translates it into real recording of user activity on your site.
Landing Page Optimization
Any business leveraging digital advertising needs to consider the health of their landing pages. Think about it, you have done a lot of heavy lifting to get a user to click on an ad and they end up having a poor experience on your website then bail, you have squandered an opportunity to generate a lead, customer, etc. If you do not have a finely tuned landing page experience you are setting yourself up for failure in the following ways:
You are paying Google and Facebook to send users to your site that are almost certainly going to bounce.
Users who land on your site will likely have a negative opinion of your brand in the future.
You lost money
Enter: landing page optimization. Here is where a CRO will put their learning into action. Based on findings from the pathing analysis they conducted, they will scope out landing page concepts that will help drive customers through your marketing funnel. There are a number of tools at a CRO’s disposal, but the market leader and least expensive option is Unbounce.
Elements of a good landing page
Clear and effective copy
Imagery that supports story-telling
Limited call-to-action
Continuity between advertising
A/B Testing
The value of A/B testing cannot be overstated. This is where a CRO can really flex their creative muscle. Whether it is testing new layouts, imagery, messaging, you can make up a lot of ground against your goals with testing. Before putting ideas into action, you need to be sure that you have the proper tools in place test.
A/B Testing Tools
Analytics - Before you test anything, you need to make sure your analytics platform of choice is set up properly. Google Analytics requires some lift to setup proper tracking to unlock the most possible value out of A/B testing. Make sure to invest the time here before jumping into a testing roadmap.
Wireframing Tools - Being able to come up with quick design concepts is key to scaling up your A/B testing roadmap. Absent a budget for this type of tool, you can leverage Google Drawings for wireframing.
Testing Platform - There are a number of A/B testing platforms out there, the most popular are: google optimize, optimizely, VWO. Google Optimize happens to be free, which makes it the most viable option for most start-ups and SMBs.
Once you have the right tools in place, it is time to start testing. This is where a CRO will lean on their ability to measure tests as they are running. They will need to be empowered to take results and decide which tests yield clear conversion rate optimization and which do not. Any given test may change your testing roadmap and with the right information a CRO will help steward these efforts.
Where does a CRO sit within an organization?
Depending on how your organizational structure is setup a CRO consultant can sit in a few different places. The key complementary functions to CRO that need to sit within the same org (or at least have cross-functional resourcing) are Engineering, Product, Performance Marketing.
Performance Marketing: A CRO needs to be able to lean on performance marketing to fully understand the type of customer a business is driving to their site. This helps inform the type of messaging that site pages will convey.
Engineering: This function helps a CRO execute testing ideas and shore up back-end reporting. Ideally a CRO would have back and front-end engineering resources to execute optimizations.
Product: Depending on how a product team is leveraged in an organization, they can help fit CRO into a holistic product roadmap. This includes prioritization of CRO-related project within a product roadmap.
How much does a CRO cost?
Depending on the scope of a CRO engagement, you can expect a few different pricing models:
Hourly: Assume a VP/Director level hourly rate as CRO requires a high-degree of expertise.
Project-based: If you are only need a few quick wins to get your organization started with conversion rate optimization, this may be the best option
Retainer: A flat monthly fee makes the most sense for an ongoing, in-depth engagement with a CRO. This will help both the brand and CRO dig deeper on strategy and setup a long term roadmap for success.
Is now the time to consider CRO?
If you are a business that has seen growth flat-line and diminishing returns coming from paid and organic marketing channels, the time to start focusing on CRO was some time ago. Do not wait any longer to develop this channel as unlocking it will provide immense value to your bottom line.