[Video] Optimizing for Conversions to Create Lifetime Value, Part 5: How Do You Measure CRO?

In Part 4: How Do You Manage CRO?, we learned about the advantages and disadvantages of going in-house or with an agency for your conversion rate optimizations and why many brands go with an agency because they offer multi-faceted, multi-skilled mindsets.

Once you’ve determined your conversion optimization gameplan and carried out some tests, the next crucial piece is measuring your results. In part five of our six-part Optimizing for Conversions to Create Lifetime Value video series, Margo Andros, Founder at LTV Approach and Brandon Howell, Website Optimization Service Lead at ROI Revolution explore how to measure the results of A/B testing and the problems CRO solves for ecommerce directors and founders.

[Video Summary] Optimizing for Conversions to Create Lifetime Value, Part 5: How Do You Measure CRO?

We’ve talked a lot about best practices and A/B testing, but what kinds of problems do A/B testing and best practices solve for an ecommerce business or website? What is the value of it?

Anyone who has an ecommerce website knows that at the end of the day the goal is to make money. We’ve all got those revenue targets and growth goals we want to hit. At the core of that is the problem that CRO seeks to solve:

How do we accelerate growth and how do we make that growth as efficient as possible?

That usually takes the form of driving more value out of your website. Your website isn’t a channel in its own right; it accentuates other channels. It makes your digital marketing spend a better investment.

Most likely, you’re running some paid search ads somewhere. Do you want to make more money off of those paid search ads and the traffic coming to your site? Increase your conversion rates. Do you want to get a 10% SEO boost without having to know or do any SEO? Let’s improve the conversion rate on your site and make more revenue off the traffic that’s already coming to your site.

There’s also the elimination of guesswork and assumptions to drive strategy and make better decisions. Say your CEO insists that your homepage needs to feature his dog. Let’s test it and prove whether that makes any sense. Maybe you have a pushy product manager demanding to have their products on the homepage versus your cleanly designed visual navigation. Let’s test it and show which one will be better for your users and make the better choice.

You can also perform tests to determine whether a website widget is worth the investment. We’ve run a lot of widget tests with surprising results. Even things that you would think are no-brainers like adding a security badge (which might help shoppers feel safer making a purchase directly on your site) might drive conversion rates down. Every time we tested this on a particular client’s site, conversions went down.

Again: Test, test, test and get ahead of the competition.

CRO may not fit within the marketing stack, but it enhances and optimizes the marketing stack – and the ROI of the marketing stack. How do you actually measure your own results? Measuring the exact impact and ROI of any investment in a way that’s black and white for ecommerce directors and founders is crucial.

At the end of your test, you get statistics that show you that during your specified time period, one of your experiences made X more dollars per person, resulted in X more conversions, X% conversion lift, etc. You know because you have hard numbers clearly showing you what makes your user experience better and increases sales. If you made more money with one test and then make that change permanently, you should see that same lift after the test. It’s black and white, it’s hard numbers, and it’s hard data. A test either wins or it doesn’t.