Why the term 'CRO' needs a makeover

How rebranding to Continuous Business Growth is the solution

You may have heard me use the phrase CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) a few times over the last few years. It’s described as “a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or take a desired action on a web page.”

So, I could double your conversion rate in a week. Want to know how? I just reduce the cost of all the products by 50%.

But, that’s not really something anyone would go for!

So is it really the conversion rate that businesses are looking to improve? I don’t believe so.

It’s the same for a lead generation site. You could have more leads coming through the site, but if you are lowering the quality, then you’ve just moved the problem to another department.

So, as a blanket term, CRO has some flaws.

People want to jump on the CRO bandwagon and make some quick money. It happened with SEO and now it’s happening to CRO.

The SEO industry started out by improving website rankings to make them more relevant and appear higher up in search engine rankings.

After a while, this became more difficult and people were looking for easier ways to game the system. This is where the terms Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO came about. The terms identified people who were doing it the ‘right way’ and those that were just looking for quick hacks.

It turns out that all the black hat techniques soon became obsolete and these SEO companies who knew no different struggled to truly improve their client’s’ site with the proper techniques.

As it always has, Google wants to show people the most relevant page. Understanding what makes a page relevant to a person always beats trying to hack Google into showing your page on number one.

Paul Rouke, Founder of PRWD recently talked about how the terms Black Hat CRO and White Hat CRO can now be used to differentiate the short-sighted gains of some agencies with the long-term benefits of those wanting to do the right thing.

Good CRO is no different to good SEO.

Be relevant, helpful and informative and you’ll be rewarded.

Try any tricks and you won’t see long term gains. Yes, reducing form fields and button colours all seem like simple things — easy wins. but they don’t address the key point of optimisation. These aren’t long term techniques for growth.

Convincing visitors to take action is something that relies on understanding their needs and desires. Button colour won’t change that.

Being able to run 100 A/B tests a year won’t make you successful.

Having a process in place to identify weaknesses on your site will make you successful.

For user experience professionals, their profession hasn’t been tainted in the same was as CRO has, yet the techniques and practices are surprisingly similar.

• Understand your customers.
• Find out what they are looking for.
• Make it easy to find that information.
• Be helpful at every step of the way.

You can see how if you missed out any of those steps you’d struggle to communicate with them effectively.

That’s why you’ll never see me recommending exit intent pop-ups or any other low-level CRO tricks. I argue, if they want to leave, then the aren’t the right customer or they couldn’t find what they were looking for.

I spend most of my time understanding website visitors to know what information they need, and what they are looking for. By making this more obvious and easily accessible it improves the experience for them, and drives more relevant traffic through the site.

This is a long-term approach that gives businesses the information they need to improve. No guesswork, no ‘this worked for another company so we’re trying it’. I’ve seen that before and it doesn’t work.

You want a recipe for success of your own, not just someone else’s.

Making improvements to your site isn’t hard, but it does have to be done in the right way to generate long term and sustained success.

That’s why I believe CBG (Continuous Business Growth) as a term allows us to express these values and beliefs to you.

I spend my day finding areas to fix in people’s website. If you want to know yours and understand how to fix them.

Have a look at our Digital Strategy Reports to get you started.

(First published over on Medium)