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Q. We’re seeing a lot more companies working now on CRO. What is it and why 

is its use increasing?

Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Expert:

 Yes, it should be. Landing page optimisation 

focusses on one page. We coined the term conversion rate optimisation (‘CRO’) in 

2007 to describe the process of optimising the business itself. It’s really commercial 

optimisation. A proper job of CRO includes the review of the entire process, from the 

initial  lead-  generation ad all the way through to the  post-  sale follow-up. The real goal 

is to identify which parts of the sales funnel will yield the greatest wins with the least 

work.

That means it’s necessary to bring a lot of disciplines to the party, including under-

standing traffic sources, visitor psychology and the company’s position in the mar-

ketplace, including its core strengths and weaknesses. On top of that there’s usability 

testing, copywriting and web design factors to look at.

All these elements go into creating hypotheses for testing. We’re maniacal about 

testing, because we’ve seen too many businesses merely throw a series of ‘best prac-

tices’ against the wall to see if anything sticks. Best practices should not be the answer 

to optimising a website, but merely one starting point for formulating a test strategy.

Once we determine what truly works for a particular website, then we examine 

how our findings might be used in other media channels. For instance, a better series 

of benefit statements might be transferrable to direct mail or email autoresponder 

 campaigns – subject to testing in those media, of course.

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