Conversion rates optimization is an art. I can name right out lots of SEO contractors and companies, recall many professional web analysts and PPC administrators. Yet, I can count on my fingers the number of true CRO experts. Many companies will approach website owners with a promise to improve the conversion rates of their landing pages, but can they really deliver?
There are all kinds of secondary solutions that may help to improve conversion rates optimization. By combining advanced SEO and proactive PPC campaigns, it is possible to make the website more visible and direct more quality traffic to landing pages. Unfortunately, this is not good enough. The wave of visitors that an SEO or web analytics company deliver to the landing pages very often crashes and dissipates leaving just a trickle of those who has taken the desired type of action.
There are not really many truly successful landing pages, where the results beat all expectations. Unless, the website is a leader of some niche market, or offer a product that everybody wants, one needs to do a lot of song and dance to persuade website visitors act the way you want on your landing pages.
There are several approaches to conversion optimization and various schools of thought that preach that certain steps need to be taken before even the construction of a landing page. In this short entry I am not going to go deep into analysis of each CRO strategy. After all, a pile of books has been created on this subject. I just want to add after all that’s said and done, the best CRO experts are also guided by their gut feelings. One can conduct the best keyword research, make landing pages look as credible as they can be, write a brilliant copy, waste a lot of money on pay per click campaigns and the like, and still get pretty pathetic conversion results.
CRO experts don’t stop with all these, they “read” the visitors, understand their behavioral tendencies and psychological motivational factors. They are like Internet psychics, in the good meaning of this expression. I observed the results when CRO guys would achieve multiple goals at once. They would raise the conversion optimization to unbelievable heights while at the same time tremendously lowering down costs of the bids and getting magnificent points in Google Quality Scores as well.
I believe that conversion analytics companies are gonna, eventually, gain more significant role in the Internet growth. Sooner or later CRO experts are destined to achieve some kind of celebrity status and will be hunted by paparazzi the same way as Hollywood or baseball stars. Right now, they keep pretty quiet and operate mostly behind the curtains.