My CRO formula – Everything I do BEFORE I split test
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Many people consider CRO to be a mysterious and unlearnable process. They offer services for $10,000 a month, promising to improve your conversions. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and I’ll show you how.
CRO is a structured process that requires clarity of purpose for your website. Guesswork won’t lead to significant results. That’s why I created this video – to share my protocol for discovering conversion optimization opportunities, testing them, and collecting data to measure business improvement.
This protocol enables real growth, focus, and mental clarity.
Let’s dive in…
Part 1 preparation
Analytics analytics analytics.
Before we do anything we need data. We cannot improve without knowing the current real world stats on your website. If you have not already, install Microsoft Clarity. A great free analytics tool.
And now the CRO prep
What is the goal of your website? As a web developer, successful customers understand that a website’s purpose is to generate leads and sales. They also recognize that their personal preferences may not align with their customers’ needs. These businesses are the ones that succeed. So, clarify the purpose of your website. Do you want to generate more leads or newsletter subscriptions? If you have an e-commerce store, you may be aiming for increased sales or a higher average order value. This is what we aim to optimize with Cro.
Part 2 finding the funnel
Now that we know what we’re trying to optimize, let’s analyze our analytics and heat maps to discover where people are arriving on your website, the movements they are making, and the likelihood of them converting. By identifying the pages that are receiving the most views, we can determine where to focus our efforts.
Time for our first table
| Page | Visits |
|---|---|
| Blog split testing with elementor | 1297 |
| Home | 870 |
| AI conversation assistant | 600 |
Looking at this, we can see that a lot of people are arriving on a blog post. We should ensure that our blog post design and content is good.
Same goes for home page and ai assistant page. We should ensure that design and content is good. Your pages will be different based on your analytics.
We should also notice that there are a lot of common elements on these pages such as our header and footer.
Part 3 Theorizing
Everyone has a different opinion on how to theorize an improvement. But if you want to use my protocol that has gotten me real results these are my non-negotiable categories to look at.
For each page in our funnel, we’re going to run through these categories to see if we can find anything that needs improvement. Write them down as you find them and will come back to them for the final step. Here’s my simple table I use when doing that CRO thing….
| Idea | Goal | Impact estimation (0 – 10) |
|---|---|---|
| Header – reduce menu items | stay in funnel | 7 |
| Hero – less noise | Improve click through | 6 |
| Footer – add book now button | Contact us | 3 |
| Home Page sub hero add images | Improve engagement and scroll depth | 8 |
What is your Idea to improve the conversion rate, what part of your previously designated goals are you trying to optimize, and how much impact do you think it will have?
Some ideas start to seem quite obvious after looking at the data. Take the ‘easy wins’ and start building your CRO muscle. The more you do it the easier will get, until your website is really quite optimized then it will get hard again 🙂
What to look at
The first is your header and hero. The visible part of a website when the page loads, you know, above the fold. If your website analytics are showing low engagement or a high bounce rate, you will probably benefit from tweaking this.
A wild amount of people will leave your website instantly if they don’t like what they see. Make sure your header menu is clear and compact, allowing you to quickly get where you need to go, without distracting from the purpose of the page.
Next your ‘hero’ or the first section of your website content needs to explain
- What am I going to see on this page?
- Why will this help me?
- Ideally – Why are you credible in telling me this?
Next is your content. Now don’t worry – we don’t need to rewrite your entire website.
To start what we will do is we’ll look at the top of your funnel where the people land on your website and where you get the most traffic. Don’t optimize pages that get barely any traffic.
Next, lets analyze**.** Using metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and scroll depth through your analytics, you can identify areas on your website that should be prioritized for CRO. Is there something on this page that is confusing, or not to the point? Think of the problem and a rough solution and put it in your table
Content
Now for me personally this is one of those situations where I think AI is incredible. Once we’ve seen website content a few times it starts to look like the right thing to see, or maybe you wrote it yourself. AI doesn’t have any of that bias built in and can give you some great suggestions for alternative ways to word things.
I spent months working on this tool that uses openAI to give you genuinely useful split test content suggestions.
So what I do is plug into URL of the page of my funnel and see what the AI suggests. I’ve trained it to focus on making your website content more compelling but in a similar tone so as to not be out of place with the rest of your website.
There you go some more ideas, it’s AI so there is some garbage in there so filter out the ideas that you think makes sense and write them down for later. And give it my rating.
We can use the AI suggestions for all the pages in our funnel all the way to the goal.
The AI thinks about the content for us, for the usability and engagement we need to use our heat maps and recordings.
User Recordings and heatmaps
With Clarity, you can record and replay user sessions to see how visitors interact with your website. This allows you to identify areas where users may be encountering issues or experiencing confusion. By watching these recordings, you can gain insights into user behavior, identify patterns, and make data-driven decisions. Look for areas where people get stuck. and look at the users scroll depth. Your visitors may not even be seeing your content!
Your click maps will show you places where people are clicking, expecting more information. Maybe you could show it to them?
UX Best practices
When browsing a website, people often expect important information or key points to be presented in an F-shaped pattern, with the top and left side of the page receiving the most attention. Make sure your content is skimmable in this way. If not, add it to your list.
Next, make sure you have a clear call to action at the end of the page that guides the person to the next step in the funnel. Which is kind of the same as the next point…
your footer. A compelling footer will help your users continue browsing when they reach the bottom of your content. Is your call to action not quite what the user wants to do next? The footer is there to address any additional thoughts or questions that may arise.
Now we should have a lot of conversion improvement ideas. Let’s sort trough them all and see the ones that we thought were going to be most effective, this is where my rating comes in.
Now you should have an exhaustive list of things to improve on your website. That’s the hard part. You’ve done it!
Does it need a split test?
Some CRO ideas are just so obvious you should implement them right away. It might be a blatant problem where a button is going to the wrong place, or you are missing an important piece of information.
For the rest we should set up a split test
If you are using WordPress, try our plug in abspittest.com, it’s privacy friendly no remote cookies unlimited usage reasonably priced and simple as hell to use. There is a limited free version if you want to try it out, but you’ll need to go pro pretty quick once you get into testing.