What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)? Strategies and Tools

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) turns your website’s visitors into customers or leads.Instead of spending your precious time and money attracting new traffic, boosting your conversion rate will produce more value from your existing users.This guide explains CRO in simple terms, shows you how to calculate your conversion rate, and gives you some basic conversion optimization tasks to start with.

What is conversion rate optimization?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a marketing strategy that aims to increase the percentage of an audience that performs a specified action, known as a conversion.

A conversion could mean making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or simply clicking on a link. You might pursue several types of conversion within a single website or marketing campaign. For example, a social media ad conversion could be defined as a click-through to your website, while a conversion for your product page could be defined as a user adding a product to their cart.

To implement CRO, you first need to calculate your website’s current conversion rate. Then, you’ll need to test your new solution against the existing content. To do this, marketers use multivariate, split, and A/B testing—more on those later.