Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is becoming part of every online marketer’s vocabulary and soon will disseminate into the general working public’s vocab too (just as SEO and PPC have). For those of you who don’t deal with websites much, SEO is search engine optimization (trying to get your site to rank on the first page of Google, Bing & Yahoo), and PPC is pay-per-click advertising (all those great banner ads all over the web and text ads you see when you search on Google). SEO and PPC are used to drive traffic to a website or blog, while CRO is focused on what happens when those visitors get to the site.
Getting people to visit your site can be expensive, so you want the people coming to your website to be happy with the content they find. A conversion is a transaction that you want your site visitors to perform: placing and order, submitting a form and commenting on a post are all common examples. After you decide what you want your visitors to do, you should optimize (the “o” in CRO) your site to convince people to convert. The more you pay for your visitors, the more important CRO becomes to your business. This is why companies using PPC are also starting to invest in CRO.
Interested in learning more? I recently wrote a blog post about this topic, check it out: How you can use the AdWords Search Term Report and custom web forms to optimize your conversion rate