I'm in a lot of 'mastermind'-type groups for agency owners and recently a fellow member, Kelly Bryn, reached out asking about which agency owners are focusing on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and why.
Conversion rate optimization is a core pillar of our digital marketing services so I raised my hand 🙋 for an interview.
Kelly: How did you get into CRO as an agency?
Tanya: My background is in search marketing where we're always trying to drive more traffic to the site - but at the end of the day, how many people visited your site doesn't matter. What's actually important is how those people impact your bottom line. Are they buying products or converting into leads? Most of our clients have a limited budget so as performance-driven marketers we're always looking to see what's driving the best ROI so we can increase our efforts to get more of that traffic and what has a poor ROI so we can make sure we strengthen (or remove) that weak link quickly.
K: What makes CRO important to you? Or really, what makes it important to your clients?
T: It's important because improving your conversion rate can help you get so much more out of the traffic you already have. Then when you increase traffic to your well-optimized site you can experience exponential business growth, which is what my clients want to see.
K: Do you find that your employees understand it and find value in it?
T: Mostly, yes! We have had clients who are only interested in "more traffic!" and "number 1 rankings!" despite evidence that these metrics weren't driving any actual business for them and it's those clients that have a hard focus on metrics that don't matter as much that leaves our team feeling less than enthused about working on certain projects. I've found that people get more excited about working on projects where they can see the impact they make, and reporting on changes that you're making to a client's bottom-line makes them feel accomplished and proud of their work.
The fun thing about CRO is that there is ALWAYS room for improvement and it's all about finding that magic combination of the right traffic sources + the right web/app experience + running more tests to see what else could work.
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Thanks for the chat Kelly!