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The customer buying journey involves getting clicks on your ads, guiding customers through your website, and completing a sale. You can have all the online traffic in the world but one tiny technical error can halt that journey in its tracks. Making sure your website functions properly and running your ads efficiently is the goal of conversion rate optimization, or CRO. On this episode of J&See, Meg Goodman talks CRO with Kurt Philip, founder of Convertica. Kurt and his team of experts identify issues with existing websites and provide support to increase traffic and click-through rates. Kurt and Meg also discuss running a remote company and the future of online businesses. Read on for some of the highlights of their conversation. And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a compelling interview like this once a month.
Q: What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
A: It’s a great question. I think it will become more prominent over the next few years. As the internet marketing industry is starting to mature, there are all these new services that are coming to market. Essentially, CRO isn’t too dissimilar from someone who would buy a house, a physical property, and renovate it and then increase that house’s value but in this sense, we do it with websites. We go in and we optimize an established website, so someone who is already making sales, already has traffic, already has all the channels running well and we show them how to optimize it so they can run ads for cheaper and increase their sales from the same spend and search traffic.
Q: Why is it important for companies to pay attention to CRO?
A: A lot of people, especially 2-6 years ago, would’ve just set up a website off a standard theme that was free or paid and they haven’t really done anything from there. You’re leaving a lot on the table in terms of revenue when you’re not looking at where your users are dropping off. Why are they not going all the way through the checkout? And what are the friction points or broken parts of your website that are causing users to leave and not complete a purchase?
That’s what we do. We go through and track different areas of the website and add heat-maps to the website and see if users are confused. A big one we see is that a lot of websites are being developed on a desktop but are not optimized for mobile or tablet. Now that most traffic is on mobile or tablet, over 60-70% now, people are leaving a lot of money on the table when it comes to that.
Q: When should someone consider utilizing CRO for their website?
A: There are different types of CRO and at Convertica, we offer a few different services. We offer one where we go and preform a baseline CRO audit of a website. We’ll go through and see how it works on mobile, are there any technical issues that we can see that maybe the ads are not even showing on the device or it’s not rendering correctly, so things like that. Our other service is more for established businesses and this is true for anyone looking to do CRO and split testing, you need a lot of traffic and sales already and you’re looking to fine-tune. So, you can start CRO right at the beginning and have good baseline CRO moving forward… Everyone should look at some form of CRO.
Q: What have you learned from your years of having a remote workforce? Do you see more industries turning to remote workers?
A: As people try to clamp down on profits and businesses become more and more mature, I think it’s just naturally going to happen over time… I think in the future, there is no real need for the large expense of a corporate office. I get the argument on the other side of having everyone in one place and that it’s more efficient. Sure it is, but you can still have that with a remote team which we have been doing in our company and companies like Netflix who grew to be one of the biggest companies in the world fully remote. It can be done; it just requires a different set of skills.
Listen to the whole episode to hear everything Kurt has to say about CRO. Download J&See: Views on Marketing on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or you can listen to the episode on Google Podcasts and Simplecast. And make sure you subscribe to get a new episode every month.
Topics: Direct Marketing, Podcast, SEO, conversion rate optimization, CRO, website traffic
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