Ecommerce CRO Audit: 7 Tips To Increase Conversions

Every online retail store aims to achieve maximum conversions. After all, it’s the lifeblood of your eCommerce business. The complex journey from visitors to buyers can be affected by hidden friction points in the cycle. This is where comprehensive eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into play.

By scrutinizing key touchpoints and user behaviour, you can leverage valuable insights into what’s hindering your untapped growth potential.

What Is  Conversion Rate Optimization Audit?

A conversion rate optimization audit is a 360-degree evaluation of the user experience on your website. It involves reviewing your site from the customer’s perspective and identifying areas for improvement.

According to the data from Notify Visitors, “The conversion rate on desktops is 4.14%.”

The CRO audit isn’t a one-man army process. It depends on various factors; it’s a 360-degree heavy lift. The audit consists of quantitative and qualitative analytics, defining North Star metrics (metrics for determining organizational growth) for each team and SLA.

When Should Ecommerce Businesses Do A Conversion Rate Optimization Audit?

eCommerce organizations should consider conducting a conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit at various stages. It’s crucial to ensure sustained success and maximize revenue generation.

Here are the prime scenarios when a CRO audit is required:

• Launch of a new website or eCommerce platform:

Conducting a CRO audit is inevitable before launching a new website or eCommerce platform. It ensures the design, layout, functionality, and user experience for proper optimization. This upscales the conversion from the outset with guidance from ecommerce SEO services.

• New changes to the website or user experience:

ECommerce SEO pros try to integrate changes in their website occasionally. So, whether crucial changes are made to the design, user interface, navigation, checkout process, or product offerings, a CRO audit must be conducted to assess the impact on conversion rates and optimization.

• Fall in conversion rates:

Performing a CRO audit is crucial if there’s a noticeable decline in conversion rates simultaneously. It allows you to diagnose the root cause behind the reduction. You can execute the corrective measures to reverse the trend and improve conversion performance.

• Entering new markets or targeting new business segments:

Conducting a CRO audit is crucial when you’re looking to target new business audience segments. It allows you to tailor your website and messaging mechanisms to better reason with preferences and offerings.

• Seasonal or Promotional Campaigns: 

Before launching seasonal sales, promotions, or marketing campaigns, conducting a CRO audit to optimize landing pages, product pages, and checkout processes can help maximize the campaign’s effectiveness and capitalize on increased traffic and demand.

• Technological Advances or Industry Trends: 

With the rapid evolution of technology and changes in consumer behavior, conducting periodic CRO audits can help e-commerce businesses stay ahead of the curve by adopting new technologies, implementing best practices, and optimizing the user experience to align with emerging industry trends.

• Competitive Analysis: 

Conducting a CRO audit compared to key competitors can provide valuable insights into industry benchmarks, best practices, and areas for improvement, helping e-commerce businesses gain a competitive edge and capture market share.

How To Do An Ecommerce CRO Audit

Step 1: Define Key Conversion Actions

A CRO audit defines key conversion actions as the crucial steps and touchpoints within the customer journey. It directly contributes to your purpose of achieving conversion goals. Here’s how to define key conversion actions:

• Track Conversion Goals:

Just start by clearly defining the prime conversion goals for your eCommerce website. These include various elements, like:

1. Purchases
2. Sign-ups
3. Downloads
4. Form Submissions

• Map up the customer journey:

Understand the typical path users take from initial interaction with your website to completing a conversion. It includes identifying key touchpoints such as the homepage, category pages, product pages, cart page, and checkout process.

• Research User Behavior: 

Leverage the potential of web analytic tools to identify high-traffic areas, pages with high bounce rates, and web pages that tend to drop off before completing a conversion.

• Prioritize Conversion Areas: 

Based on your analysis, prioritize the key conversion areas that significantly impact achieving your conversion goals. Focus on areas where improvements can lead to the most significant gains in conversion rates.

• Consider Micro-Conversions: 

Besides macro-conversions (e.g., purchases), consider identifying micro-conversions that indicate user engagement and progress toward the primary conversion goals. Examples include adding items to the cart, signing up for newsletters, or downloading resources.

• Evaluate Funnel Performance: 

Assess the performance of each step in the conversion funnel to identify potential bottlenecks or areas of friction that may be hindering the conversion process. Look for drop-off points and opportunities for optimization.

• Assess Landing Pages: 

Evaluate the performance of landing pages, including homepages, category pages, and product pages, to ensure they effectively drive users toward conversion actions. Assess the relevance of messaging, clarity of calls-to-action, and overall user experience.

• Analyze the Checkout Process: 

Please pay close attention to the checkout process, as it is a critical stage where many users abandon their carts. Evaluate factors such as the number of steps, form fields, payment options, shipping costs, and trust signals.

• Review Mobile Experience: 

With the increasing use of mobile devices for online shopping, it’s essential to assess the mobile experience and identify any usability issues or barriers that may impact mobile device conversion rates.

• Consider External Factors: 

Consider external factors influencing conversion rates, such as seasonality, promotional campaigns, marketing initiatives, and market trends or consumer behavior changes.

Step 2: Focus On Priority Pages

When conducting a CRO audit, starting with those web pages with the highest potential to increase your conversion rate is a strategic decision. These web pages emphasize both conversions and receive great organic website traffic.

One of the most simple strategies to focus on priority pages in a conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit is the “page priority matrix.” It allows you to prioritize pages based on their importance in the conversational funnel and potential impact on overall conversion rates. Here’s a detailed strategy to utilize it:

• Track the web pages that are most critical for driving conversions. These pages can be the product, cart, checkout, or landing pages for key campaigns. You can also opt for any page linked to your website conversion goals.
• Now, evaluate the impact of each page on coverage rates. Perform this process by analyzing its role in the conversion funnel and contribution to overall conversions. Pages close to the final conversion step typically have the greatest impact.
• Consider the amount of organic traffic each web page receives. Also, engagement metrics like bounce rates, time on page, and conversion rates should be considered. Web pages with high traffic and low conversion rates may offer new optimization opportunities.
• Track any friction points or barriers to conversion on each web page. It can be related to confusing navigation, unclear calls-to-action, lengthy forms, or slow page load speeds.
• Research the potential for optimization on each page based on identified friction points and improvement opportunities. You need to consider factors like ease of implementation, potential impact on conversion rates, and alignment with a range of business objectives.
• Now, make a matrix or spreadsheet with two axes: “conversion impact” (low to high) and “optimization potential” (low to high). Plot each page on the matrix based on its position along these axes.
• Emphasize your optimization efforts for pages that fail in the high-impact, high-potential quadrant of the matrix. These web pages provide the greatest opportunity to boost conversion rates and significantly impact your business.
• Once priority pages are identified, develop actionable optimization strategies tailored to address specific friction points and opportunities for improvement on each page. This could involve A/B testing, UX/UI redesign, content optimization, or other CRO tactics.
•  Implement the optimization strategies on the priority pages and closely monitor their performance using web analytics tools. Track key metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate, and average order value to measure the impact of the changes.

Step 3: Understand User Behavior

A crucial step in a CRO audit is understanding user behavior. Analyzing and predicting customer preferences are equally important. This brings a streamlined conversion process to you. But how do you implement it?

You can create detailed customer personas and semi-frictional representations of your ideal customer. This is performed after intensive data research.

These types of personas give you a space to understand who you’re trying to attract and their needs or challenges.

You can include some crucial factors in these personas, like:

• Psychographics:

It emphasizes the psychological attributes of your target audiences, like interests, values, and lifestyles. This allows you to tailor your site’s messaging to reflect their motivation and preferences.

• Identifying customer needs:

Find out what problems your customers face and how your product can solve them. Showcasing solutions to these problems on your website makes it more appealing.

• Understanding Customer Characteristics:

Get basic customer information, like age, gender, and location. Use this information to make your website better suited to their demographics.

• Analyzing customer behavior:

See how your customers use the internet, like what sites they visit and how they use social media. This helps make your website match their preferences.

• Creating Target Personas:

Use the data you gather to create profiles representing different customer groups.

• Tailoring strategies to audience needs:

Knowing your audience helps you customize your website to meet their needs and preferences, improving your chances of converting visitors into customers.

Step 4: Gather Voice-Of-The-Customer (Voc) Insights

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a methodology that businesses use to collect and analyze customer feedback about their brand, products, services, and customer experience.

A successful VoC strategy requires buy-in from every department, as everyone plays a role in shaping the customer experience. Teams must agree on how to collect feedback, share results, and use insights to refine their piece of the customer journey.

Gathering voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights consists of various elements like feedback, opinions, and customer preferences. It allows you to understand their needs as well as their expectations. Here are certain methods:

• Conduct or email surveys to gather customer feedback about their experiences with the product or service. Use close-ended questions for quantitative data and open-ended questions for qualitative insights.
•  Execution of feedback forms on your site, mobile app, or at physical locations provides you with a way for customers to give feedback easily. You can include fields for comments or suggestions to gather detailed insights.
• You can monitor social media platforms for mentions, comments, reviews, etc. Pay attention to positive and negative feedback to track trends and areas for improvement.
• Track customer reviews and ratings on Yelp, Amazon, and other industry-specific sites. Give attention to recurring themes and sentiments expressed by customers.
• Review customer support interactions, including emails, live chats, and phone calls, to understand common issues and challenges customers face. Identify recurring questions or complaints to address.

• Analyze website analytics data to understand user behavior, such as page views, bounce, and conversion rates. Use heatmaps and session recordings to visualize how users interact with your website.
• Send NPS surveys to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Ask customers to rate the likelihood of recommending your product or service to others and gather feedback on what drives their rating.
• Participate in online communities and forums related to your industry or niche to engage with customers directly. Monitor discussions to gather insights into customer preferences and pain points.

Step 5: Identify Easy Fixes

Identifying easy fixes that can boost conversions provides quick and straightforward changes. It can be easily implemented to improve the user experience and increase conversions. Here are the crucial steps that need to be implemented:

• It would help if you stuck with the website’s conversion funnel to track the potential areas of improvement: track pages or steps where users commonly drop off or encounter friction points.
• You can look for patterns and anomalies in user behavior that indicate some new areas of optimization.
• Conduct user testing to identify the conversion process’s usability issues and pain points. You can ask testers to perform specific tasks and provide feedback on their experience.
• Set up the A/B tests to improve variations like headlines, call-to-action buttons, forms, and layouts. You can test small changes to see if they positively impact conversion rates.

Step 6: Form A Conversion Hypothesis

If you want to integrate a unique strategy to form a conversion hypothesis, you can leverage the “Fogg Behaviour Model” combined with the “Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework.” It involves understanding the motivations, triggers, and barriers that can influence user behavior. You can formulate hypotheses based on these insights. Here’s the strategy:

• Fogg Behavior Model:

The model, developed by Dr. BJ Fogg, extracts results from the interaction of three factors: “motivation, ability, and triggers”.

• Motivation: Identify what motivates users to perform a specific behavior, such as purchasing or signing up for a newsletter. This could be driven by desires for pleasure, pain avoidance, social acceptance, etc.
• Ability: Assess the user’s ability to perform the desired behavior. Factors influencing ability include the simplicity of the task, the time required, the cost involved, and the user’s skill level.
• Triggers: Determine what triggers or cues prompt users to take action. Triggers can be internal (emotions, thoughts) or external (prompts, notifications, calls to action).

Step 7: Run A/B Tests

A/B testing compares two versions of a web page or app against each other to determine which one performs better. If you’re looking to run A/B tests on your website, then you need to create two different versions of one piece of content with changes to a single variable.

Running A/B tests on your website isn’t a simple process; you need to start by measuring what’s happening on your website, finding new things to improve on, and building a room for new testing improvements.

Here’s a quick look at the process of conducting A/B tests:

• Research and only research:

This process emphasizes experimenting with theories that evolved by studying your market and customers. Both quantitative and qualitative research allow you to prepare for the next step in the process. You can use heatmaps to determine where users spend most of their time on your website.

You can assess the impact of your experiments by carefully considering a certain set of metrics. These crucial indicators offer you a room for valuable insights into user behavior and guide future optimization efforts like conversions, engagement, completion rates, single-page sessions, etc.

Conclusion:

With the help of data-driven approaches, your eCommerce CRO audit empowers you to prioritize optimization efforts strategically. Implementing these actionable tips outlined earlier can speed up the customer journey, address pain points, and drive organic traffic.

FAQ 

What should be included in a CRO audit?

In a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) audit there are some factors need to be included like:

• Key conversion actions
• Focus on priority pages
• Proper understanding of user behaviour or making customer personas
• Gather voice of customer insights
• Identify easy fixes

What does CRO mean by audit?

A CRO audit refers to assessing your website and the marketing channels that allow you to identify opportunities for boosting conversions. It provides you to room to develop a deep understanding of your customers’ likes or preferences

Why do companies use CRO?

By effectively leveraging the CRO, companies can increase their revenue per visitor. They can acquire more customers and grow their business simultaneously.

Suppose a landing page currently achieves a conversion rate of 10% with a monthly visitor count of 2000. This means the page yields 200 conversions monthly. If optimization efforts result in an improved conversion rate of 15%, the number of conversions escalates by 50% to reach 300 per month.

Is CRO a product or marketing?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a marketing practice rather than a standalone product. It emphasizes improving the effectiveness of marketing efforts by optimizing various elements of your website or digital platform. This provides room to increase the likelihood of visitors taking a desired action, like making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter.