What’s a good conversion rate for your website? That’s a loaded question, but a solid answer is — a rate that is better than the last time you checked. Continually striving to boost those conversion rates is important for so many reasons.

Do you know how your site is doing compared to this time last month or last year? Is it time for a conversation rate optimization audit?

A CRO audit can do a lot for you in helping you not only understand where you need to work at boosting your conversion rates but also where you are getting results so you can make the most of them. And the data you glean now can serve you down the road as you continually work at increasing the number of website visitors who become leads/referrers/buyers.

Why is Conversion Rate So Important?

The rate of conversion will help you determine where you are having success with your online marketing efforts. By assessing the rate of conversion, you can see where you’re getting good results (and replicate them) and you can see which areas of your online marketing needs tweaks.

A conversion isn’t always a sale. Conversion can mean different things based on your goals. Sometimes you’ve got a longer sales cycle with specific products or services and certain customers. You might have specific campaigns tied to gaining sales. You may want to have other campaigns tied to gaining permission to market in the future. Newsletter signups, social media opt-ins, insertion into a sales funnel and other lead-generation activities count toward your conversion rates.

Knowing what your bounce percentage is can do more than help you assess traffic and determine what visitors do upon arrival to a specific webpage. It’s also important for recognition from the search engines for search engine marketing (SEM) as well as search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

If you’re getting traffic via organic SEO and your conversion rate is low, you’ll eventually lose rankings as the search engine bots strive to improve user experience.

If your paid advertising techniques net high bounces, not only will your campaign bleed money, but it also could impact your cost-per-action, too. Paid networks want good user experience, too, and often reward advertisers like yourself with better rates and better ad placement.

10 Tips For a Successful CRO Audit

1. Check your conversion rates regularly so that you can assess new reports against old ones. Look closely at changes so you can try to pinpoint what it was that boosted conversion or that lowered your rate. The more often you look, the better you’ll be able to pinpoint the reason for change.
2. Measure bounces and conversions against goals. In your CRO audit, look at the types of conversion rates you want (a sale, an opt-in, a social media follow, etc.)  Maybe your traffic didn’t buy, but did they opt-in, share an article or follow your account?
3. Create segmented lists for targeting. Make sure you’ve identified your target customer. It’s wise to have more than one group. Your target customer list could also look like a flowchart based on geography, products and/or services. Measure CRO in stages and phases for segmented lists.
4. Study where your converting traffic comes from so you can set goals to capitalize on all those areas and make a game plan to boost rates for each of them individually.
5. Look for bad sources of traffic. Are there any trends in terms of where your bounces come from? Do you know where the biggest bounce rates come from? Perhaps you need to work on the route of entry to your site (keywords, call to actions, etc.) to ensure you’re driving the right traffic to a well-optimized landing page that delivers what that visitors want.
6. Dig into individual bounces and try to figure out why they left the same page they entered on. Eliminate ineffective click-bait and make sure you’re not promoting old offers. Look at your content and keyword rankings and optimize it.
7. Measure user experience. When looking at converted traffic as well as bounces, note where user experience (UE) might have come into play. Are you assessing the different devices (UE for desktops, mobile devices and via voice search)? Assess site load time, look for broken links and ensure your checkout process is simple and streamlined.
8. Improve your landing pages. Getting traffic is part of the battle but converting website visitors is another matter. Is it time to optimize your landing pages? Run some split tests. Look at your most successful landing pages and see what might be worth replicating.
9. Examine your competition on a regular basis to see what they’re doing well along with which areas they might be lacking, providing an opening for you to increase market share.
10. Formulate a plan and implement it. Your CRO audit has likely shown you some areas that needed improvements. Implement improvements and then make sure to set up another conversion rate optimization audit soon so you measure whether or not your efforts have paid off and what other adjustments you might need to make.

A successful online marketing strategy is made up of many chessboard pieces that can work together as well as individually to bring you success.

A Few Bonus CRO Audit Tips

• Make sure you’re considering re-targeting: Sales and leads can come by advertising to visitors on another network after they’ve left your site (Google search, Facebook, etc.).
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help: If a CRO audit is too daunting for you to tackle on your own, get some assistance. The results could be well worth the effort.