CRO Tests: How to Drive Conversions with A/B Testing

In the online business world, CR, or Conversion Rate, is a useful number indicating how many people visit your website and take an action you find desirable. When somebody clicks an ad, lands on your page, then signs up for emails (or buys a product or takes a survey), that is one conversion.

Conversion Rate Optimization, then, is the science of making that process happen more often or more effectively. Basically, it’s about making small changes over time to increase the amount of money, sales, and so on that your business makes.

The equation to get your CR is: how often you can get a visitor to your page to complete an action you want them to take divided by the total number of page visitors.

CR = Page Visitors Who “Do The Thing”/ Total Page Visitors 

So if on a given day you get 1000 visitors to your “sign up” page and 400 of them do the thing, your CR = 400/1000, or four out of ten visitors. Not a bad ratio. Whether you want a customer to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter, measuring how many people a given page can convert is important to the overall health of your business.

Use your noggin and come up with a hypothesis! Depending on the type of A/B test you are doing, the answer to this question can vary. But, in general, you want to think about the page you are testing from the perspective of the user.

Example Hypothesis: Making the email sign-up form shorter will increase conversions.

Experiment: A/B test the two forms—the “A” page will have the current form, the “B” page will have the shortened version.

Duration: 48 hours.

Result: The shorter form had a higher CRO, using the equation “CRO= action-visitors/total-visitors.”

The nice thing about CRO tests is how easy it is to see if they’re working. Remember, you’re only changing one variable, so you know exactly what the change is doing—increasing conversions, decreasing them, or causing no change at all.