Case Studies: The Potential Behind Conversion Rate Optimization

When someone comes to us asking for Internet marketing services, we often find a profit-yielding solution for them. Whether by SEO or content marketing, we love to “wow” our clients and see the results come in.

Personally, one of the most rewarding strategies and one that yields many “wows” from clients is conversion rate optimization or CRO.

Desirable outcomes from conversion rate marketing can easily be compared to finding a hidden treasure inside your own business’s website.

What is conversion rate optimization?

CRO is a tactic in which you test certain elements of your website in order to increase the rate at which someone converts, or completes a goal.

You may have several actions you would like a visitor to take, depending on what kind of website you have. For example, if you run an ecommerce website, you would want visitors to add items to their shopping cart.

Or, if you are a local carpet cleaner, you might want a visitor to call your sales phone number or fill out a form online.

There are many paths a visitor may take before arriving at these goals. Specifically, conversion rate optimization is the process of editing those paths in such a way that increases the percentage of visitors that get there.

Did you know that WebFX is a top CRO agency that can help you improve your conversion rate optimization strategy?

How is CRO done?

By testing! There are lots of different things to test on your website, but let’s say you have a button that sends visitors to a form on your website.

You always want to send more traffic to that form in hopes of more conversions, but how might you do that? Simple: create two (or more) versions of the button, and send set percentages of the traffic on your website to each one.

Then see which version sends more visitors to the form.

The version of the button that sends the most people to the form wins. Of course, there are a lot of different tools that help make this process simpler than it sounds!

Does CRO really work?

You sound skeptical… But really, I’ll show you proof of this in a second!

The fact is, there are little tiny things in our brain that subconsciously tell us to do certain things. Little things that tell us to draw our eyes to different colors, triggers that spike our interest, and cues that assure our inner selves that we should buy something.

If you want to find out what some of these different elements are, I would encourage you to download our guide that contains 25 tips for CRO.

If you are still skeptical, here are some specific case studies we’ve dug up from successful CRO campaigns we’ve done in the past!

Conversion rate optimization case studies

Triple Crown Corporation: Homepage Redesign

In some circumstances, CRO may be a bit more intensive, such as the homepage redesign that Triple Crown Corporation underwent.

Here’s what the redesign looked like:

The main goal was to adjust the homepage to reflect a more user friendly design. By making certain areas of the site easier to find we hoped to increase engagement and conversions. Doing so proved worthwhile!

The overall improvement increased conversions by 49.73%! Not only were conversions increased, but all other important website analytics improved as well. Just check out the results from the rest of the test.

• Pages per visit increased by 31.65%
• Average visit durations increased by 1 minute and 19 seconds
• Bounce rates decreased by 45.29%
• Overall conversion rates increased by 49.73%

Warren CAT: Increasing Font Size

You usually won’t need a complete site redesign to boost conversion rates like the example above.

It can sometimes be as simple as changing the finer details of the site, such as bumping the font size up a notch or two. In hopes of increasing engagement for Warren CAT, we changed the site wide font size from 10pt to 12pt.

Our hypothesis was that enlarging the font would make it easier for a user to spend extra time reading on the site. The longer a visitor spends on the site, the more open they are to considering a product purchase or inquiry.

Just for some perspective, here is the difference between 10pt font and 12pt font.

The font size on this blog is 16pt. Engagement increased and the average visit duration went up by 34 seconds. While that may not seem like a lot, the additional time on the site contributed to a 20% increase in conversions!

It’s hard to believe such a minor change could impact results, but that is exactly what happened.

Ceramcor: Above the Fold Content

While adjusting font sizes and redesigning homepages can contribute to better results, it might also be a matter of trimming things down.

In this case, Ceramcor needed to remove some distractions from their ecommerce store.

For example, when they had special promotions, a large banner would be placed at the top of each page.

The banner took up a large percentage of the screen when a user landed on a page, which required them to scroll an excessive amount until they were actually able to see any products for sale. By decreasing the actual size of the banner to just a small strip across the top (pictured below), we were able to significantly decrease bounce rates.

This allowed the visitor to see products for sale “above the fold” or before they had to scroll down the page. Consequently, this decrease in bounce rate allowed for the special promotion pages to increase page value by 75% over any regular pages.

By removing such a large distraction, the ecommerce store was able to keep visitors on their site, allowing them to find their way to a special offer and make a purchase.

In conclusion

We’ve shown you three specific examples of how you can increase conversions with CRO.

Pretty cool, right?  Unfortunately, it won’t be as easy as copying what we’ve done from the case studies above.

Every single website is different, and will require different solutions to optimize your conversion rates. If you need help with finding different areas of your site to test, read our guide with 25 tips to increase your conversion rate!