"One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions" - Admiral Grace Hopper

The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an in-depth tutorial designed to help you convert more passive website visitors into active users that engage with your content or purchase your products.

This guide will walk you through the basics of CRO-from why it matters in the first place to how you can go about building your own testing and optimization plan. You'll find information that will help you improve the performance of your website, including: optimizing your landing pages and user experience, as well as the tools you'll need to be successful.

This is a guide to help you map your way through the common CRO pitfalls and misconceptions by starting from the ground up-making insight-driven changes and then testing them for efficacy every step of the way.

First, a quick definition...

CRO is the method of using analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website. CRO can be used to improve any metric on your website that's important to your business-often called key performance indicators (KPIs)-that you're trying to improve, but it's often associated with acquiring new customers, registrations, downloads, etc. Put another way, it increases the percentage of website visitors who experience the "aha moment" (or the must-have user experience) that turns passive browsers into valuable conversions.

At its most fundamental, CRO means figuring out what users are looking for when they arrive at your site and then giving that to them. CRO takes many different forms, based on the KPI you're trying to improve. Sometimes this involves making your call-to-action more apparent or placing it on a traffic-heavy (but under-optimized) page. At other times this means removing or relocating unnecessarily complicated or time-consuming steps from your conversion funnel, as the added friction can prevent a conversion from ever happening.

Why should you care?

You should care about CRO for a few reasons. First, you are most likely paying for traffic to your site in one way or another, and a high conversion rate means a better return on that investment (ROI). It's also much more cost-effective to convert a higher percentage of the visitors you already have than to attract more visitors. In addition to improving your ROI, optimization helps to defend against the limited attention span of your average visitor by giving them what they want before they tire of looking for it and move on.[1]

CRO is important!

• Higher conversion rate = better ROI
• More cost effective than finding more visitors
• Defends against limited patience of visitors

It's important to understand, however, that optimization is about getting more of the right kind of customers-not just blindly optimizing the conversion rate of a given page or campaign. It won't do you any good if the people you're acquiring are the wrong fit for your business. It's important to keep the focus on optimizing to find more customers who will love your product and help you grow by spreading the word. Everything else is a waste of your time and resources.

Intro Notes

We'll use a lot of terms to describe conversions and the people that visit your online property. They are meant to provide an example in each instance, and are not meant to be definitive. For instance, if we say "improve the performance of your website" that could also be applied to improving the performance of your: website, landing page, web application, registration form, etc.

Likewise, when we talk about a visitor or user, we use them interchangeably (unless otherwise noted) to denote a person who is using your online property.

We've taken these liberties to improve the readability of the document and maintain flow. Please know that when the authors land on a word like users they routinely say in their head, "or visitors, or registered users, or..." Thank you for obliging us in this liberty.

[1] http://www.famousbloggers.net/conversion-rate-optimization-important.html