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.
But let’s back up for a second. How do you decide which type of conversion to improve, and how do you know when you’ve successfully optimized your content?
How to calculate your conversion rate
You can calculate your site’s conversion rate by dividing your total number of conversions by the total number of users who interacted with your website, webpage, or piece of content within a defined period of time. Multiply the result by 100 to generate a percentage.
Conversion rate = (total number of conversions / total number of visitors) x 100
Say your store received 50 sales and hosted 1,000 visitors last month. The sales conversion rate for your store would be 50 divided by 1,000 (.05), multiplied by 100, which equals 5%.
To calculate an accurate, useful ecommerce conversion rate, be specific about the data you collect. Does an online order count as a conversion, or must the sale be shipped and completed? Are you counting sessions or unique visitors?
What is the average conversion rate?
Constant testing and tweaking are required to increase conversions for an online store. To test effectively, you need to set benchmarks for what counts as a job done well.
As you get deeper into conversion rate optimization, you can set your own benchmarks and targets based on historical content performance. But to begin with, it helps to know the average conversion rates for websites similar to yours.
If you run an ecommerce website, the average ecommerce conversion rate for orders is often said to be between 2.5% and 3%.
Either way, if you calculate your conversion rate and find that it’s above 3%, you can count yourself among the very best-converting online stores.
👀 Many CRO case studies prove that small tweaks can have a big impact on conversion rates.
Where to start with CRO
Here are three key areas of your website where you can start implementing CRO to enhance user experience and boost conversions:
1. Product pages
The backbone of any ecommerce website, product pages can greatly benefit from CRO. Test the effects of optimizing your product images, descriptions, and brand voice.
Product photography
When your customers can’t physically interact with your shop, the media you use to represent your products becomes a key conversion factor. Make sure your product photography is high-resolution and showcases each item’s most popular features.
If you can, include a 360-degree view, demonstration video, or 3D model to give visitors a full visual experience.
Product descriptions
Like the media you create, descriptions represent one of a limited number of touchpoints between ecommerce shoppers and products. While it might be tempting to write a long love letter about each of your store’s items, high-converting product descriptions balance detail with brevity.
Descriptions that lack information about construction, fit, use, or unique selling points may fail to give customers the confidence to add a product to their cart. Too much information, and shoppers may skip reading your description entirely.
Provide clear, concise descriptions that highlight both product features and benefits. Break up longer sections of text with bullet points and images to enhance scrollability.
Brand voice
Conversion rates aren’t only affected by the product information you choose to convey—the way you convey that information also matters. This is known as your brand voice.
Your brand’s voice should resonate with your target audience. A familiar, relatable tone builds trust between ecommerce businesses and their consumers.
If you don’t have an existing brand reputation, think more widely about “voice” as the overall impression your content makes.
Here are a few examples of how you can develop your brand’s voice and reputation:
- Convey social proof through customer testimonials, product reviews, and seals of approval from other trusted brands
- Offer a return policy that allows customers to try out and return their purchases with few stipulations
- Create authentic product videos that showcase your product at work in its natural habitat
2. Blog posts
Your blog posts, especially those that are search engine optimized and attracting readers, offer another opportunity to add conversions. Focus on a post’s calls to action and lead generation.
Call to action
A call to action (CTA) is an instruction to your audience about what to do next. Usually, a CTA is shared in the form of a button or link to the next stage of your sales funnel.
Successful CTAs for blog posts are relevant to the topic of the article. They also may nudge a reader to consider a product or product category, rather than ask them to make a specific purchase.
A/B testing (see below) can help you identify where to place CTAs within your blog posts, and which words and phrases most effectively attract clicks.
Lead generation
Use your blog posts to ask readers if they’d like to be sent extra content, such as a downloadable PDF, checklist, or curated selection or articles. Lead generation content tactics like these are a common way to convert a prospect into a sales lead by capturing their email address—as well as their attention.
3. Landing page
Landing pages are designed to convert visitors into leads or customers. Since a landing page is often a visitor’s first impression of your site, landing page optimization is key. You want to make that first impression count by refining your landing page information hierarchy through iterative testing.
Information hierarchy
Organize your landing page content based on its importance to readers. The most critical information, like your value proposition and call to action, should sit at the top of the page. Worthwhile but less necessary details, like testimonials or additional product information, can be placed further down the landing page.
Iterative testing
Continuously test the type, design, and placement of content on your most-visited landing page. By paying attention to website visitors’ behavior and adjusting the structure of your page accordingly, you can often achieve conversion optimization without changing the substance of your content.
10 CRO strategies to increase your conversion rate
Optimizing your online store is a continuous back and forth. You should always be learning more about your audience, then looking for ways to act on what you’ve learned to serve them better.
Here are 10 conversion tips to consider during that process. Each tip focuses on improving a specific part of your website. Combined, they make up a comprehensive CRO strategy.
1. Use Shopify Checkout
For online stores, the checkout page is where conversions happen. That makes it one of the most important parts of an ecommerce website.
You can lead shoppers through your conversion funnel with convenient CTAs, persuade them with product descriptions, and remove friction with seamless website design. But if your prospective buyer struggles to complete their purchase, there’s a good chance they will abandon their cart.
Abandoned carts aren’t the exception in ecommerce: As many as 85% of your mobile shoppers will leave your site without checking out. The key to lowering that abandoned cart rate is to ensure a smooth checkout process when your visitors decide they are ready to buy.
The best-converting checkout on the internet is Shopify checkout. It lets you build a one-click checkout that’s customized for your brand.
With Shopify checkout, you can:
- Personalize the look of your checkout to match your website.
- Accept multiple payment methods, including credit cards, gift cards, and pay by installment options.
- Add conversion optimization features such as customer accounts, loyalty programs, and personalized upselling.
- Autofill customer information fields (faster checkouts equal higher conversions).
- Add Shop Pay to offer accelerated checkout for more than 100 million users.
2. Simplify CTAs
One way to reduce the complexity of your CTAs is to spread information across text and images. In the above example, Province of Canada promotes its flagship product through two hero images that occupy the entire first scroll-depth of the homepage. Alongside that hero imagery, simple CTAs and minimal accompanying copy nudge visitors to shop the collection’s new stock and colorways.
If you’re not sure what to feature as your main hero image, it’s best to go with your bestselling or most profitable products—or trending items like new arrivals or current promotions.
3. Run A/B tests
Examples of A/B test subjects include buttons, banners, backgrounds, and email subject lines. Variants can consist of entirely new content or more subtle tweaks, such as a different font color or increased page contrast.
Ecommerce agency Fuel Made used A/B testing to increase conversion rates for men’s grooming brand Live Bearded. By testing several designs for a slide-out shopping cart, they found that a variant with extra “iconography and trust-building information” improved conversions by 18% above the baseline—demonstrating the power of small, targeted changes.
Before you conduct an A/B test (or any CRO test), make sure your website receives enough traffic to generate statistically significant results. If your sample size is too small, your results may not accurately reflect how a larger population will use your site.
4. Add pop-ups
A pop-up is a box or bubble that appears in front of a web page after it has loaded. They are commonly used to highlight information that most consumers would like to know about promptly, such as an available coupon code or giveaway opportunity. Pop-ups may also confirm actions visitors have taken, like when they make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter.
Pop-ups increase a website’s conversion rate by demanding a user’s attention. They can respond to a particular behavior, such as when a user shows exit intent by moving their cursor toward the top of the screen, or by creating a sense of urgency.
Some studies have shown that well-designed pop-ups placed at the right point in the user journey have an average conversion rate of more than 9%.
They’re also an opportunity to collect leads by offering content or discounts in return for a customers’ contact information. A few seconds after entering Our Place’s homepage, for example, visitors are served a pop-up promoting a free giveaway.
Try using an app like Privy or Powr to add a homepage pop-up that offers a discount code in exchange for the visitor’s email address.
5. Use a hello bar
Hello bars, also known as welcome bars, work a lot like pop-ups. However, whereas pop-ups can be dismissed with or without taking an action, hello bars are static on a page and cannot be dismissed by visitors.
Lots of websites use hello bars to grab visitors’ attention and quickly give them useful info. For example, you could use a hello bar to let people know about current or upcoming sales, share discount codes, or tell them about special deals. Because a hello bar appears at the top of the page as soon as someone gets to your site, it’s a fast way to communicate information and can improve your conversion rate.
For example, take another look at the Our Place homepage: It has a welcome bar that tells visitors about a discount and free shipping deal.
You can make your own non-intrusive hello bar with an app like Zotabox.
6. Share social proof
Social proof is all about encouraging people to follow the crowd. It’s a powerful tool for conversion rate optimization, making an action more appealing by showing that other people have already taken it.
If your products have been used by influencers or highlighted in known publications, display evidence of these mentions on your site. Positive reviews from previous customers are another form of social proof that can be as meaningful to potential buyers as a trusted recommendation from a friend. In fact, getting product reviews can increase conversions by anywhere from 3% to 37%, depending on how many reviews a product has received.
Shopify store owners can use apps like Yotpo to embed customer reviews into product pages. Other social proof apps like Fomo create a notification in the corner of visitors’ screens, showcasing real-time purchases. The idea here is to incite a sense of urgency while also providing social proof that other people are also interested in a product.
Social proof can be especially helpful for businesses in the beauty and skin care industry. Beardbrand, for instance, makes sure customer star ratings are featured prominently on all of its product pages.
7. Make search bars smart
Visitors who enter your site from a social media ad or search engine query may not arrive with a specific product in mind. For them and others, your navigation bar is an opportunity to convert casual browsers into interested leads.
If your store has a large amount of products, you might want to consider featuring your search bar prominently on your homepage. This search bar gives users the opportunity to head directly where they want to shop, rather than digging through categories.
Apps like Searchanise add predictive results functionality, to help your customers find what they’re looking for more quickly. Intelligent search functions suggest results and products as users are typing, while taking into account things like spelling errors and alternate product names.
Fitness clothing brand Alo uses a smart search bar to help its customers find exactly what they’re looking for. After entering a few letters, the search bar begins suggesting categories, products, and related results—which is also an effective way to upsell and cross-sell.
8. Use heat maps
Heat maps are a popular CRO tactic for ecommerce brands because they take behavioral data and turn it into a simple visualization.
Spots of engagement on your website are highlighted by warm shades, while cool areas expose inactive sections. If an area on the heatmap is warm, it represents a potential location for conversion content, such as a CTA.
Apps like Lucky Orange let you study engagement patterns across your website, including dynamic elements like pop-ups, drop-downs, and forms. Many heat map applications come with supplementary conversion rate optimization tools.
Heat map apps include features such as:
- A screen recorder to watch how visitors navigate and interact with your website
- Live view to see visitor activity in real time and even start a live chat with a visitor
- Segmentation to analyze heat map data by traffic source, device type, browser, etc.
9. Send abandoned cart emails
With abandoned carts a regular occurrence, finding ways to reach and convert dormant cart owners is a tried and true CRO strategy.
Many abandoned carts are associated with email addresses, which makes abandoned cart email campaigns a popular option. In your emails, remind customers of the items they left behind and consider offering a discount or free shipping code to incentivize them to complete their purchase.
Don’t forget about the email subject line. It’s the first thing your customer sees and can significantly impact open rates. Make it unusual but relevant—and consider implementing A/B testing.
10. Make your site fast and mobile responsive
With more than 58% of global web traffic coming from smartphones and tablets, a mobile-friendly website isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a must.
Every Shopify theme is automatically optimized for display on any device, but there are additional steps you can take to enhance your mobile visitors’ experience. Try simplifying your site navigation, making buttons larger and easier to press, and reducing the amount of text on each page to avoid overwhelming small screens.
To check your website’s responsiveness, use Google’s Lighthouse, an automated tool for improving web page quality.
Just like unresponsive sites, a slow website can drive people away, increasing your bounce rate. Faster websites not only provide a better user experience, but can improve search engine rankings. Page speed is regularly cited as one of the factors Google uses when sorting sites.
You can check your website’s load time with another Google tool, PageSpeed Insights. This free tool provides a detailed report on your website’s loading speed, including a description of issues that are slowing things down.
Optimizing your site load times can be a complex task, but there are a few key things to remember. For ecommerce sites with lots of media, image file sizes can significantly impact loading speeds.
Consider compressing every image you upload using a tool like ImageOptim. This strips away unnecessary data without affecting image resolution, helping to improve your site’s speed and, hopefully, conversion rate.
💡 Read more conversion rate optimization strategies: How to Find and Plug the Leaks in Your Conversion Funnel.
Top CRO tools
Here are some of the top Shopify apps for improving website conversion rates:
- Privy: Increase conversions through pop-ups, email, and SMS marketing.
- Smile: Boost customer loyalty with referrals and VIP programs.
- Blyp: Find hidden conversion opportunities through AI-powered tracking.
- Firepush: Remarket for cart recovery and multichannel campaigns.
- Yotpo Product Reviews: Collect and display social proof such as ratings and reviews.
- Hotjar: Understand user behavior through heat maps, session recordings, surveys, and feedback widgets.
If you don’t want to manage CRO on your own, you can hire a Shopify expert to do it for you. Conversion rate experts and agencies are ready and waiting to help.
CRO best practices
1. Utilize A/B testing to refine your website
Also known as split testing, A/B testing is a form of conversion rate experimentation. It involves comparing two versions of the same content to see which produces better results.
The goal of A/B testing is to validate a variant of your page content—perhaps its information hierarchy or call to action. The old and new variants are shown to similar sets of visitors at the same time. The version with the higher average conversion rate is declared winner and served to your entire audience.
Remember that A/B testing can be implemented for all kinds of conversions, not just sales. As long as you have a hypothesis for how to improve your content, at least one variant to test, and a segment of your audience to test the variant on, you can split test just about anything.
2. Focus on user experience (UX) design
If visitors can’t find the products they want, or browse your catalog comfortably, they’ll bounce from your site. An intuitive user experience design, both on mobile and desktop, keeps visitors on your website longer and improves conversions.
Shopify websites are built with CRO in mind. Each Shopify Theme has built-in features to support better UX, like easy site navigation, responsive design, and customizable CTAs. The checkout process is incredibly easy with Shopify Checkout, which helps visitors set up their shipping preferences and pay for purchases.
3. Implement clear and compelling CTAs
It takes just 50 milliseconds for a website’s visitor to form their first impression. So simplicity and directness are the name of the game.
Because you can’t count on our visitors’ time or patience, phrase your desired action as simply as possible and place it in a page’s highest-converting position. For homepage designs, that means putting your call to action above the fold.
4. Leverage behavioral analytics for deeper insights
Behavioral analytics means tracking and analyzing user’s interactions with your website. The goal is to understand what makes them click, bounce, and buy.
With this behavioral data, you can better understand how to:
- Market your products online
- Upsell your target audience
- Create product bundles and promos
- Increase your average order total
Using Shopify Analytics, you can understand what people do on your site by looking at your Behavior reports. Use the data in these reports to understand how to arrange your store so people buy more.
For example, if you have a search bar, you can see what people search for in your Top online store searches report. Then, you can adjust your product titles and descriptions so customers can find what they are looking for, faster.
5. Optimize page load speeds
Almost 70% of consumers say slow-loading websites influence their willingness to purchase from an online retailer. Therefore, it’s essential to strike a balance between creating beautiful and effective digital experiences.
These findings are supported by a study by Portent, which found that websites loading within one second convert 2.5 times higher than those loading within five seconds.
Optimizing your page load speeds starts with your ecommerce platform. For example, Shopify has the fastest server speed in ecommerce, being up to 2.8 times faster than other platforms on average. With Shopify, your customers get a quick load time and a better user experience, which leads to more sales.
CRO examples
Kotn
With Shop Pay, mobile shoppers can check out faster than ever before. Shopify reports that merchants, like Kotn, using Shop Pay checkouts have a 1.91 times higher mobile checkout-to-order rate than those utilizing regular checkouts.
“The majority of our customers today are discovering new products on the go on their mobile devices, and if they have to fill out a form, we’ve lost them," says Benjamin Sehl, co-founder of Kotn. “Enabling Shop Pay in our checkout has really made the most painful point of the customer experience delightful, and since it’s tied into the million-merchant ecosystem, even new customers can check out in one click.”
Pullup & Dip
A Bavarian company specializing in high-quality training equipment, Pullup & Dip faced major challenges with their previous ecommerce platform, Shopware. Complex usability, separate hosting, and checkout issues were hindering their CRO efforts.
The brand’s migration to Shopify Plus resulted in significant changes. Shopify Plus’s seamless integration capabilities, modern designs, and enhanced usability led to a 348% increase in conversion rates and a 48% increase in sales. The platform also offered flexibility to make quick tweaks, an improved checkout process with Shopify Payments, and a secure, scalable solution.
💡Read how Pullup & Dip increased conversion rate by 349% after migrating from Shopware to Shopify Plus
Filtrous
David Yadzi started Filtrous in his garage, selling laboratory syringe filters, and grew it into a multimillion-dollar global company over 10 years.
But they had one issue: Their outdated ecommerce platform, BigCommerce, lacked the flexibility it needed to create a seamless B2B buying experience. Customers were finding the website hard to navigate and would often contact customer support to place orders manually.
Transitioning to Shopify resolved these issues. With B2B on Shopify, Filtrous created a self-serve platform for wholesale buyers with faster checkout, streamlined order fulfillment, and automated back-office operations. These changes not only saved the customer service team 10 hours per week, but also boosted their organic conversion rate by 27%.
💡Read How Filtrous boosted their conversion rate by 27% weeks after migrating to B2B on Shopify
CRO and SEO
CRO and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand-in-hand. Search engines like Google prioritize site speed and user experience, meaning poor CRO practices can affect your search engine ranking.
In practice, when a search engine sends visitors to your website, they are betting that you provide them with the best experience possible. So, if they are shopping, your website needs to be easy to navigate and have a seamless checkout process.
As you build out your CRO strategy, consider the following with regard to SEO:
Integrate SEO fundamentals with conversion strategies
Any webpage you create will require keyword research. It helps you understand what terms potential customers are using.
Once you research the keywords to use, add them to your:
- URL structure
- Page title
- Meta description
- Subheaders
- Image alt texts
Balance keyword optimization with user experience
Keyword optimization is an important part of SEO. It tells Google what your webpage is about so it can rank you accordingly in SERPs.
Remember: Don’t overuse keywords, a practice known as “keyword stuffing.”
Some guidelines to avoid keyword stuffing:
- Make keywords fit naturally into the text without sounding forced.
- Give valuable information about your topic.
- Use synonyms for related terms.
- Write for humans, not search engines.
Focus on making high-quality content
Good content is important anywhere on the web. It signals to search engines that you are credible, and it shows visitors you care about their time and browsing experience.
Content can refer to anything on your website: a blog post, a landing page, a video on your homepage, or a social media embed on your product page. Make sure you are publishing Informative and well-researched content, no matter what format it’s in. That way, when visitors are on your page, they feel engaged and valued, and will trust you more as a brand.
Create a successful conversion rate optimization process today
Whether you’re a marketer or a business owner, you want people to click that CTA more than anything. That’s why every ecommerce marketing strategy needs to consider conversion rate optimization.
The CRO experiments and strategies above are a great starting point—they should get more of your website visitors to act in the desired way. From there, it’s up to you to continually test, learn, and implement changes that will make your content more persuasive.
Read more
- How To Make Your First Ecommerce Sale—Fast (Tutorial 2024)
- The Ultimate Guide To Dropshipping (2024)
- How to Invest in Your Business- What You Need to Know Before You Get Started
- Product Page Tune-Up- 9 Timeless Ways to Increase Conversions
- How To Source Products To Sell Online
- How to Get Your Products on Google Shopping for Free
- How to Start a Dropshipping Business- A Complete Playbook for 2024
- Amazon Dropshipping Guide- How To Dropship on Amazon (2024)
- How to Track Your Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics
- 14 Call to Action Examples (and How to Write an Effective CTA)
Conversion rate optimization FAQ
What are some CRO tactics?
- Improve website speed. A slow website can lead to a high bounce rate. Optimizing website speed can help improve user experience and increase the likelihood of conversions.
- Simplify checkout process. Reducing the number of steps and asking for only necessary information can help increase conversions.
- Use high-quality product images. High-quality product images can help customers visualize the product and make informed purchase decisions.
- Provide detailed product descriptions. Detailed product descriptions can help customers understand the product and its features, leading to more informed purchase decisions.
- Offer free shipping. Offering free shipping can help reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions.
- Use customer reviews and ratings. Customer reviews and ratings can help build trust and credibility with potential customers, leading to increased conversions.
- Use targeted promotions. Targeted promotions can help incentivize customers to make a purchase and increase conversions.
- Use retargeting ads. Retargeting ads can help bring back potential customers who have abandoned their cart or left the website without making a purchase.
- Offer a guest checkout option. Offering a guest checkout option can help reduce friction in the checkout process and increase conversions.
- Optimize for mobile. With more and more customers using mobile devices to shop online, optimizing ecommerce websites for mobile can help improve user experience and increase conversions.
Is conversion rate optimization hard?
Conversion rate optimization can be tough and time consuming because it involves a lot of experimentation, analysis, and tweaking to make a website or app more appealing to customers.
How do you improve conversion rate optimization?
Optimizing website elements and improving user experience can help you improve conversion rate optimization, like developing better CTAs, speeding up your site, and writing persuasive content. You can also use A/B testing strategies to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
What is a CRO strategy?
A CRO strategy is used to increase conversions of visitors on a website or app. The goal is to improve the chances a visitor will take a desired action on your pages.
How do I run a conversion rate optimization experiment?
Here’s a five-step process you can follow for every CRO experiment you run:
- Research. Run a CRO audit and identify areas of improvement in this phase. Learn what visitors are doing in your store and understand how different web page features affect behavior. You can gather data through Google Analytics, customer surveys, usability tests, and user interviews.
- Hypothesis. Based on the gathered data, decide what changes you’ll make on your pages. For example, a hypothesis could be, “We think adding a global search bar will increase conversions by two times because it helps people find desired products.”
- Prioritize. Decide which hypotheses you’re going to test first. Figure out which pages will have the most impact on growth and begin by tackling those. Look for pages that are performing poorly or have easier fixes that can more quickly bump up conversion rates.
- Test. Try out different hypotheses on different pages to see which produce better results. Implement the changes in a controlled manner, like running A/B tests or split testing.
- Learn. After testing, analyze the results and decide if a change should be made permanent. If not, consider why it didn’t work and use that to inform future experiments.
What is the difference between SEO and CRO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on increasing a website’s visibility and ranking on search engines to attract more organic traffic. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) focuses on improving the user experience and website elements to increase conversion rates.
