Category: CRO

Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of increasing the share of website visitors who become enquiries, without buying more traffic. For UK businesses in 2026 it works as a five-stage cycle: measure what is happening, diagnose where visitors leave, prioritise by effort against impact, test the change, and bank the result.

Why the Same Traffic Is Producing Fewer Leads

Your sessions are holding up and your enquiries are not. That gap is the most common thing UK marketing teams bring us at the moment, and it is genuinely disorienting because none of the usual dashboards explain it. Traffic has become more expensive at the same time as it has become less committed. Paid clicks cost more than they did two years ago, organic clicks are being absorbed by answers that appear above the results, and a growing share of arrivals have already had their question answered somewhere else before they land. Conversion rate optimisation is the response to that, because the cheapest lead available to most businesses is the one already on the site. This guide sets out the framework we run for UK clients: how to measure conversion honestly, how to find where visitors actually leave, how to test when your traffic is too small for a classic split test, and how to tell whether you have improved lead volume or simply lowered the bar.

What Conversion Rate Optimisation Means When Clicks Cost More

CRO gets described as button colours and headline tests, which is why it sits so low on most roadmaps. The description is wrong and the roadmap position follows from it. A conversion rate is a ratio, and a ratio has two sides. Most teams work exclusively on the numerator by chasing more conversions, and ignore the denominator entirely, which is why a traffic push often makes the rate look worse while the business does better. Working the ratio properly means understanding who is arriving, what they came for, and what stops them acting. The commercial case is arithmetic. A site taking 8,000 sessions a month at a 1.4% enquiry rate produces 112 enquiries. Lifting that to 2.1% produces 168, which is 56 more enquiries a month with no extra media spend and no extra content. Buying those 56 through paid search at a realistic UK B2B cost per lead would run into thousands every month, permanently.

The Three Things CRO Is Not

Clearing these up early saves a lot of wasted effort. It is not a redesign. Redesigns change everything at once, which means you learn nothing about which change did the work, and they frequently lose conversions that the old site was quietly earning. It is not a testing tool. Tools measure tests, they do not tell you what to test, and a team with a tool and no diagnosis will burn six months on ideas nobody had a reason to believe in. It is not a one-off project. The site changes, the market changes, and the traffic mix changes, so the rate drifts. A programme that runs quarterly holds gains that a project loses within a year.

The Conversion Rate Optimisation Framework, in One Page

Everything below fits into five stages, run as a loop rather than a line.

The order matters more than the labels. Teams who skip Measure test against numbers they cannot trust. Teams who skip Diagnose test their opinions. Teams who skip Bank make the same discovery three times because nobody wrote down the first one. GLO’s CRO work runs this loop on a quarterly cadence, and the first pass on a site that has never had one typically finds more in Diagnose than in every test that follows.

UK Conversion Benchmarks, and How Much to Trust Them

Benchmarks are the most requested and least reliable part of conversion rate optimisation, so here is the honest position before any numbers. Almost every UK conversion benchmark in circulation traces back to a vendor’s own customer base rather than to an independent study. Those samples are self-selected, the conversion definitions differ between them, and the sector labels are broad enough to hide order-of-magnitude differences. Two sources quoting “4.2% for professional services” are frequently quoting each other. Use benchmarks to notice that you are wildly out of range, never to set a target. A target should come from your own trend and your own economics.

Ranges Worth Knowing, with the Caveat Attached

With that caveat firmly attached, these are the ranges we see across UK accounts we run, which is a small and non-random sample and should be read as orientation rather than evidence.

• B2B services websites: 1% to 3% of sessions producing an enquiry, with the spread driven mostly by form design and offer clarity
• Ecommerce: 1% to 2.5% of sessions producing a purchase, heavily seasonal
• Local services with phone as the main action: often above 4%, though phone tracking gaps make this the least reliable figure of the three
• Paid search landing pages: usually 2 to 3 times the site average, because intent is higher and the page has one job

The variation within any of those bands is larger than the variation between them. A B2B site at 0.8% and a B2B site at 3% are usually separated by whether the form asks for four fields or eleven, not by sector.

Setting a Target That Means Something

Take your own last twelve months, find the best month, and ask what was different about it. That is a more useful target than any published figure, because it is demonstrably achievable on your traffic with your offer. Set the improvement in absolute percentage points rather than as a percentage uplift, since “a 40% improvement” sounds enormous and can mean moving from 1.0% to 1.4%. Then convert it to enquiries and to revenue before you commit to it. A target nobody has translated into money is a target nobody will defend when the roadmap gets crowded.

Defining a Conversion Worth Optimising

A surprising number of CRO programmes fail at this step, because the thing being counted was never worth counting. Newsletter signups, PDF downloads and video plays are all measurable and most of them correlate with nothing. If you improve a metric that does not lead to revenue, you have made the reporting look better and the business no worse, which is an expensive way to spend a quarter.

Primary, Secondary and Diagnostic

Split your events into three groups and treat them differently. Primary conversions are the actions that produce a sales conversation: a form submission, a booked meeting, a phone call over 30 seconds, a quote request. There should be one, or at most two, and everything is judged against them. Secondary conversions are meaningful steps that do not yet produce a conversation, such as a pricing page visit followed by a return visit. Track them, use them to diagnose, and never report them as the headline. Diagnostic events are scroll depth, form field focus, error messages and outbound clicks. They exist to tell you why, not how well, and they belong in explorations rather than in dashboards.

Getting This Right in GA4

GA4 handles this through key events, and the setup decides whether the rest of the programme is possible. Mark only your primary conversions as key events, because marking everything as a key event makes the conversion rate meaningless and makes the Google Ads bidding built on top of it worse. Keep the other events collected but unmarked. Name events consistently from the start. A property with form_submit, formSubmit, contact_form and lead_form all firing on the same three forms cannot be reported on without a rebuild, and the rebuild loses your history.

Measure Before You Touch Anything

Two weeks of establishing what is true saves a quarter of arguing about it. This stage is unglamorous and it is where most of the value hides.

Checking Whether the Data Is Trustworthy

Start by proving your tracking works rather than assuming it. Submit a test enquiry through every form on the site, from a phone and from a desktop, and confirm each one appears in analytics, in the CRM and in the inbox. In roughly a third of the audits we run, at least one form is broken or untracked, and on more than one occasion the entire CRO problem turned out to be a contact form that had been silently failing for months. Check for duplicate tag firing, which inflates conversions and quietly ruins every comparison you are about to make. Check that thank-you pages are excluded from bounce calculations. Check whether your own team’s traffic is filtered.

Establishing the Base

Once the data is trustworthy, take twelve months of it and break the conversion rate down four ways.

• By channel, because organic, paid and direct behave differently enough that a blended figure hides everything
• By device, because mobile and desktop rates frequently differ by a factor of two
• By landing page, because one page is usually responsible for a disproportionate share of the loss
• By month, so you can separate a real decline from ordinary seasonality

Write the numbers down somewhere permanent before you change anything. A programme that cannot show its starting point cannot prove its gains, and six months later nobody will remember what the rate was in March.

The One Report Worth Building First

Build a single view showing sessions, primary conversions and conversion rate, split by channel and device, month by month, for the last twelve months. That report will answer most of your first-round questions on its own. It usually reveals that the site-wide rate is a blend of one channel performing acceptably and one performing terribly, and that the terrible one has been dragging the average for longer than anyone realised.

Finding the Leak: Conversion Rate Optimisation Without a Testing Tool

This is the stage where conversion rate optimisation stops being opinion and starts being evidence, and none of it requires a paid platform on the first pass. The goal is to find the largest single point of loss, expressed in enquiries per month rather than in percentages, because that framing is what gets development time allocated.

The Four Places Visitors Leave

Almost every loss falls into one of four buckets, and each has a different fix. Wrong arrival. The visitor landed on a page that does not match what they searched for. The fix is upstream, in the ad copy, the meta description or the page’s topic, and no on-page change will rescue it. No reason to act. The page is relevant but does not make the case, or the offer is too large a commitment for where the visitor is. The fix is the offer and the copy. Cannot act easily. The form is long, broken on mobile, or asks for something the visitor does not have to hand. The fix is mechanical and usually the fastest win available. Chose not to trust. Nothing on the page reassures a cautious UK buyer that this is a real company that will not waste their time. The fix is proof.

The Sequence to Run

Work through these in order, and stop when you find something large.

1. Compare conversion rate by landing page against sessions by landing page, and find the pages with high traffic and low rate. Rank them by enquiries lost per month, not by rate.
2. Compare mobile against desktop on those pages. A gap wider than roughly 40% points at a mechanical problem rather than a persuasion one.
3. Check the form completion path: how many people start the form against how many finish it. This is the single most revealing number in most audits.
4. Look at the arrival queries for those pages in Search Console, and ask whether the page answers them.
5. Load each page on a real phone on a mobile connection and try to convert, as a stranger would.

That last step is not a formality. Doing it yourself, properly, on a poor connection, finds problems that no report surfaces, and it takes twenty minutes.

Turning Findings into a Loss Estimate

Convert each finding into a number before you prioritise. If a page takes 900 sessions a month and converts at 0.6% while comparable pages convert at 2.1%, the gap is 13 enquiries a month. That is the figure to carry forward, because it is comparable across findings and it survives contact with a finance conversation. Do this for every finding, then sort. The list will usually be shorter and more lopsided than expected, with one or two items accounting for most of the available gain.

Qualitative Evidence, and Where It Beats the Numbers

Analytics tells you where people leave. It never tells you why, and guessing at why is how teams end up testing headlines for a year.

Session Recordings, Used Properly

Recordings are the fastest route to understanding a drop-off, and the most commonly misused tool in the category. Watch recordings filtered to the specific behaviour you are investigating, not at random. Twenty recordings of sessions that reached the form and abandoned it will teach you more than 200 general sessions. Look for hesitation, repeated scrolling back to something, rage clicks on things that are not links, and the field where people stop. Stop at the point of diminishing returns, which arrives sooner than people expect. If four consecutive recordings show the same thing, you have your answer and further watching is procrastination.

On-Page Surveys

One question, at the right moment, answered by a few hundred people, is worth more than a lot of analysis. The two that consistently earn their place are “What almost stopped you getting in touch today?” on the thank-you page, and “Is there anything you were looking for and could not find?” on exit from a key page. Both are open-text, both take a second, and both produce language you can put straight into the copy. Avoid multiple choice for these. The value is in the phrasing people use, and a list of options replaces their words with yours.

The Evidence Nobody Uses

Your sales team already has the answer to most conversion questions and has never been asked. Sit with whoever takes the enquiries and ask what people say in the first two minutes of a call. The questions that come up every time are the questions your page failed to answer. The objections raised before anyone talks about price are the reassurance your page did not give. Transcripts from recorded calls are even better if you have them, because you can count how often something comes up rather than relying on recollection. The phrase a customer uses to describe their own problem is almost always better copy than the phrase you use to describe your solution.

The Form, Which Is Usually the Biggest Single Lever

If one change is going to move your rate materially, it is most often the form. It is also the change most likely to be resisted, because every field on it was added by somebody for a reason.

The Field Count Trade-Off, Stated Honestly

Fewer fields produce more submissions. That is consistent and it is not the whole story. Fewer fields also produce less qualified submissions, more time wasted by sales, and a slower first response because the person calling knows nothing about the enquiry. A form cut from eleven fields to three will lift your conversion rate and may not lift your revenue at all. The useful question is not how few fields you can get away with, but which fields earn their place. A field earns its place if the answer changes what happens next: who the enquiry is routed to, how quickly it is called, or what is said on that call. A field that is merely nice to know does not earn its place and belongs in the conversation instead.

The Audit Worth Running on Your Own Form

Go through every field and put it in one of three groups.

• Essential: without this, you cannot respond at all. Usually name, and one contact method.
• Routing: this changes who handles it or how urgently. Often service type, location or company size.
• Curiosity: everything else, including budget, timescale, how they heard about you, and job title.

Delete the third group. Ask those questions on the call, where a person can explain why they are asking and the answer is more honest anyway. Two exceptions are worth naming. Budget fields genuinely reduce time-wasting for businesses with a high floor price, so if you cannot work with anyone under £10,000, ask. Company size matters if your product genuinely does not fit below a threshold.

Field-Level Problems That Cost More than Field Count

The fields you keep also need to work, and several common patterns quietly break submissions. Phone number fields that reject spaces, brackets or the leading zero fail constantly, and UK users type all three. Postcode validation that rejects valid formats is common enough to be worth checking specifically. Error messages that appear only at the top of the page, after submission, on mobile, mean the user cannot see what went wrong. Check the tab order works, check the mobile keyboard changes to numeric for phone fields, and check that an autofilled form actually submits. These are twenty-minute fixes that recover real enquiries.

Multi-Step Forms, and When They Help

Splitting a long form across steps often lifts completion, and it does not always help. It helps when the first step is genuinely easy and relevant, because starting creates commitment. It helps when the form is long for a good reason and you can show progress. It hurts when it adds clicks to a form that was short enough already, and it hurts badly if any step reloads slowly. If you try it, keep the total number of fields the same rather than adding fields because you now have room. The gain comes from the perceived effort, and it disappears the moment the real effort rises.

Page Speed as a Conversion Problem

Speed is usually filed under SEO, which is why it rarely gets fixed for the reason that matters most. Slow pages lose enquiries directly, and the loss is largest on mobile where the traffic is. The Core Web Vitals thresholds are the practical standard: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less, all measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads and split by device.

Which Metric to Chase First

They do not contribute equally to lost conversions. LCP is the one visitors experience as “slow”, and it is where most sites have the largest gap. INP matters most on interactive pages, which for a lead generation site means the form itself, and a form that lags on every keystroke is abandoned quietly. CLS is the one that causes misclicks, and on mobile a shifting layout that moves a button under a thumb is a genuine conversion killer. Fix in that order unless your own data says otherwise. Field data from real users should always beat a lab score, because a lab score from a fast connection tells you nothing about a visitor on a train.

The Fixes That Usually Do the Work

Most sites get most of their gain from a short list.

• Compress and correctly size images, and serve modern formats. This is still the largest single cause of poor LCP on UK small business sites
• Reserve space for anything that loads late, including ads, embeds and cookie banners, which fixes CLS
• Remove or defer third-party scripts. Most sites carry tags for tools nobody has used in two years
• Set the hero image or heading as the priority load rather than letting the browser guess

The cookie banner is worth singling out. It is often the slowest thing on the page, it frequently causes the layout shift, and it sits between every visitor and the content. Getting it lighter and faster helps every page at once. Speed work sits naturally alongside SEO web design because the same build decisions govern both, and doing them together costs less than doing them twice.

Mobile, Where Most of the Loss Lives

Mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop on almost every UK B2B site, and a portion of that is real buyer behaviour rather than a fault. People research on a phone and enquire from a laptop. That is genuine and you cannot design it away entirely. The part you can fix is the share of the gap caused by the page being harder to use, and on most sites that share is larger than the natural difference.

Testing It Properly

Open the site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and complete an enquiry. Note every point where you had to zoom, where a tap missed, where something moved, where you lost your place, and where you had to switch apps to find information. Each of those is a real cost paid by every mobile visitor. Then do it again in bright light outdoors, because low-contrast text that looks elegant on a monitor becomes unreadable, and a meaningful share of mobile sessions happen away from a desk.

The Mobile-Specific Fixes

A handful of changes account for most mobile recovery. Make tap targets at least 44 pixels and keep them away from screen edges. Put the primary action where a thumb reaches without stretching. Make the phone number a tap-to-call link, which is missed on a startling number of sites. Keep the form above the point where a visitor gives up scrolling, or add a persistent button that jumps to it. Check what the sticky header, the chat widget and the cookie banner do together on a small screen. Individually they are fine, and stacked they can occupy half the viewport.

Trust, Proof and Risk Reversal for UK Buyers

British B2B buyers are cautious, and the caution shows up as silence rather than as objections. Someone who does not believe you simply leaves, and nothing in your analytics tells you that is what happened. Trust signals are not decoration. On a page selling a considered purchase, they frequently outperform every copy change you could make.

What Actually Reassures

Specificity is the whole mechanism. Vague reassurance reassures nobody. A named client with a real outcome beats an unattributed quote. A photograph of the actual team beats a stock image, even if the actual team photograph is less polished. A UK address and a landline number, visible without hunting, does more for a domestic B2B buyer than any badge. Accreditations matter where they are meaningful in your sector and are ignored where they are not. Case studies do the heaviest lifting when they are close to the reader’s situation. One case study from a company of the same size in the same sector is worth ten from elsewhere, which is an argument for more case studies rather than better ones.

Risk Reversal That Costs You Nothing

Most hesitation is about the next step, not the purchase. Someone hovering over a contact form is not deciding whether to buy. They are deciding whether they are about to be pursued by a salesperson for six weeks. Telling them exactly what happens next removes the actual fear. “We’ll reply within one working day with a straight answer about whether we can help. No sales sequence, and we won’t add you to anything.” That sentence next to a form has lifted submission rates on client sites more than most redesigns, and it costs nothing beyond having to honour it. Name the response time, name who will contact them, and name what will not happen. All three are specific, all three are checkable, and all three are usually true already.

Where Trust Signals Go Wrong

Some common patterns actively reduce trust. Review counts with no reviews behind them, badges that link nowhere, and testimonials from initials rather than names all read as fabricated. A carousel of eleven client logos including three that ended two years ago is a liability if a prospect checks. Live chat that turns out to be a bot pretending not to be is worse than no chat. The test is whether a sceptical buyer could verify the claim in thirty seconds. If not, it is decoration.

Pricing, and the Cost of Hiding the Number

Refusing to publish any pricing is the single most common conversion problem on UK B2B service sites, and it is almost always defended with the same three arguments. Every project is different, competitors will see it, and we want the conversation first. All three are understandable. None of them survive the observation that the buyer will find a number somewhere, and if it is not on your site it will be on somebody else’s.

What Publishing Actually Does

It filters, which is the point. Buyers below your floor price leave without occupying a call, which is a gain rather than a loss. Buyers above it arrive already comfortable, and the conversation starts at scope rather than at sticker shock. Your enquiry count may fall and your qualified enquiry count usually rises. If a full price list is genuinely impossible, publish a floor. “Projects typically start at £8,000” answers the only question most visitors have at that moment. A range with the variables named does the same job: say what moves the number, and let the reader place themselves.

Designing the Pricing Page

Assume the visitor has already decided you are plausible and is checking whether you are affordable. Put the number near the top. Explain what changes it in plain terms rather than in a matrix. Include one worked example with a real scope and a real total, because an example does more than any table. Then give them the next step from that page directly. A pricing page without a clear action is the most common dead end on a B2B site, and it is receiving your most qualified traffic.

The Offer, Which Is the Lever Nobody Pulls

Teams will test six headline variants before they will question what they are asking the visitor to do. The ask is usually the largest available gain. “Book a consultation” and “Request a quote” both demand a meeting from someone who arrived four minutes ago. For a portion of visitors that is fine. For the majority who are researching, it is far too much, and they leave with no way for you to reach them.

Building a Ladder Rather than a Door

Give people more than one way in, matched to how ready they are. A high-commitment action for ready buyers, such as booking a call or requesting a quote. A medium-commitment action for the researching majority, such as a costed proposal outline, an audit, or a specific answer to a specific question. A low-commitment action that still gives you contact details, such as something genuinely useful to download. The medium rung is the one most sites are missing entirely, and it is where the largest untapped group sits.

What Makes an Offer Work

Specific beats generous. A big vague offer converts worse than a small precise one. “Free consultation” is vague and sounds like a sales call because it usually is. “A 20-minute call where we’ll tell you what your three biggest conversion losses are, with the numbers” is specific, time-bounded and clearly valuable. The second converts several times better on the same traffic. Say what happens, how long it takes, and what they leave with. Those three details turn an offer from a request into an exchange.

Copy, Clarity and the Five-Second Test

Most conversion copy problems are clarity problems wearing persuasion clothes. The visitor did not disagree with you, they did not work out what you do.

The Test

Show your homepage to someone outside your industry for five seconds, then hide it and ask three questions. What does this company do, who is it for, and what do they want me to do next. If any answer is wrong or missing, that is your first fix, and it will outperform anything further down the page. Do this with three or four people rather than one. The pattern in what they miss is the finding, not any individual answer.

The Habits That Cost Conversions

A handful of writing habits show up on nearly every underperforming page. Leading with your company rather than the reader’s problem. Sector jargon that your buyers do not actually use, which is different from jargon they do. Abstract benefit language where a concrete outcome would land better. Long paragraphs that nobody reads on a phone. Cut the first sentence of every section as an experiment. It is usually a run-up, and the second sentence is usually the real opening.

Writing for Scanners

Nobody reads a service page. They scan it, and the scan decides whether any reading happens. Write headings that carry meaning on their own, so someone reading only the headings gets the argument. Front-load every paragraph with its point. Bold the single most important phrase in a section rather than three phrases, because three bolded phrases bold nothing. GLO’s SEO copywriting principles apply directly here, since a page that is easy to scan is also a page a search engine can condense accurately.

The Journey Between Pages, Where the Loss Hides

Most conversion analysis looks at pages one at a time, and a large share of the loss happens between them. A visitor lands on a blog post, decides you might be worth considering, and then cannot find the route from that post to the service that would help them. Nothing on either page is broken. The path between them was never built.

Finding the Orphaned Pages

Two reports together show this clearly. Take your highest-traffic pages by sessions and look at their onward click-through: what proportion of visitors go anywhere else on the site, and where. Pages with high traffic and low onward movement are collecting attention and dropping it. Then check the reverse. For each of your money pages, look at which internal pages actually send traffic to it. On most sites the answer is the main navigation and almost nothing else, which means every piece of content ever written is contributing nothing to the pages that convert.

Building the Routes

The fix is unglamorous and it compounds. Every informational page should offer one clear, contextually relevant next step towards a service page. Not a sidebar of related posts, which nobody clicks, but a sentence in the body that names the specific thing a reader at that point would want next. Put the link where the reader’s interest peaks, which is usually just after the section that answers their main question rather than at the end. A single well-placed in-body link outperforms an entire related-posts module, and the difference is not close.

The Homepage Question

Homepages get a disproportionate share of attention in redesigns and a small share of the conversion journey. For most UK B2B sites, the homepage is a routing page rather than a selling page. Its job is to tell a visitor which of your services matches their problem and send them there in one click. Judged that way, the metric that matters is how many visitors reach a relevant service page, not how many convert on the homepage itself. Optimising a homepage for direct conversions usually means cluttering the routing job for a small number of extra form fills, which is a poor trade on most sites.

The Thank-You Page, the Most Wasted Asset on the Site

The page shown after a form submission is seen by every single person who converts, which makes it the highest-intent audience you will ever have. On most sites it says “Thanks, we’ll be in touch” and nothing else.

What It Should Be Doing

Four jobs, and it can do all of them without feeling pushy. Set the expectation precisely: who is contacting them, by when, and what they will be asked. This reduces the anxiety that causes people to enquire elsewhere in the meantime. Give them something to read that moves them forward, ideally the case study closest to their situation. Someone who has just enquired is the most willing reader you have. Ask the one question you left off the form. Now that they have converted, a single optional question costs you nothing and often gets answered honestly. Offer the faster route for the impatient minority. A direct phone number or a booking link converts a share of enquiries into same-day conversations.

The Measurement It Enables

The thank-you page is also where your tracking should confirm the conversion, and it is where the exit survey earns most. “What almost stopped you getting in touch today?” asked here, of people who did get in touch, surfaces the objections that stopped everyone who did not. It is the closest thing available to interviewing the visitors you lost. Read those responses monthly and put the recurring phrases straight into the page copy. The answers to that one question have driven more of our clients’ conversion gains than any testing tool.

Live Chat, and Whether It Earns Its Place

Chat is added to most B2B sites at some point, usually without anyone deciding what it is for, and it either produces a meaningful share of enquiries or quietly costs conversions.

When It Works

Chat earns its place under specific conditions. It works when a real person answers within a minute or two during working hours. It works when the questions people ask are quick to answer and are genuinely blocking the enquiry, such as coverage area, lead time or rough price. It works on pages where the visitor is close to deciding, particularly pricing and service pages. Where it works, it captures people who would never fill in a form, which is a genuinely different audience rather than the same one arriving differently.

When It Costs You

The failure modes are common enough to check for. A bot presenting itself as a person annoys people and the discovery colours everything else on the page. A widget that opens automatically and covers the content on mobile blocks the conversion path it was meant to support. Unanswered chats outside working hours are worse than no chat, because someone tried and got nothing. The widget is also frequently among the heaviest third-party scripts on the page, so it can be costing conversions through speed before anyone types anything.

How to Decide

Measure it rather than debating it. Count chats started, chats answered within two minutes, and chats that became a qualified enquiry. Compare that last number against the enquiries the widget plausibly cost through page weight and mobile obstruction. If it produces fewer than a handful of qualified enquiries a month, remove it and put the effort into the form. Turning it off is also, conveniently, one of the easiest speed improvements available.

Landing Pages for Paid Traffic Follow Different Rules

Paid landing pages behave differently enough from site pages that applying the same rules to both costs money on the paid side. Someone arriving from an advert clicked a specific promise thirty seconds ago. They have no relationship with the brand, no patience for exploration, and a very clear expectation formed by the ad copy.

Message Match, Which Does Most of the Work

The largest single factor in paid conversion is whether the page continues the sentence the advert started. If the ad says “Industrial door repairs across Suffolk, same-day callout”, the page headline should say close to that. Sending that click to a generic homepage, or to a services page listing eleven things, breaks the promise and the visitor leaves within seconds. This is why a paid campaign with poor conversion is often an alignment problem rather than a page quality problem. Check the ad-to-page match before rewriting anything.

One Page, One Job

Site pages support exploration. Paid landing pages should not. Remove the main navigation, or reduce it to a logo. Have one action, repeated, rather than three competing ones. Answer the specific question the advert raised and leave the broader story for the site. Keep the form visible without scrolling on mobile, or put a persistent button that jumps to it. Paid visitors rarely scroll twice.

Measuring Them Separately

Never let paid landing page performance blend into your site average. The rates are different by design, usually two to three times higher, and blending them makes both numbers useless. Report paid pages against paid pages and site pages against site pages, and set separate targets for each. The same discipline applies to the CRM. Tag the conversion with the campaign so cost per qualified enquiry, rather than cost per click, becomes the number the media decisions are made on.

Prioritising Your Conversion Rate Optimisation Work

By this point you will have a list longer than your capacity. Prioritising badly is how CRO programmes lose their budget in month four.

A Scoring Model That Works

Score each item out of ten on three things, then multiply.

• Impact: the estimated enquiries per month recovered, scaled to ten
• Confidence: how sure you are, based on the strength of the evidence behind it
• Ease: the inverse of effort, where a copy change is a nine and a rebuild is a two

Multiply the three and sort descending. The model is crude on purpose, because the value is in forcing the confidence conversation rather than in the arithmetic.

A Worked Prioritisation

Four findings from a real audit, scored.

The form wins, and it is not close. It also happens to be the cheapest of the four, which is the usual pattern on a first pass: the biggest win is often mechanical rather than strategic. The headline change comes second on score despite a lower impact estimate, because it is quick and the evidence is decent. Doing both in the same fortnight is realistic, which is what makes the model useful rather than academic.

The Trap in the Scoring

Confidence is the score people inflate, and it is the one that matters. A nine on confidence means you have direct evidence: a measured drop-off, a pattern in recordings, or the same thing said by four customers. A guess dressed as a hypothesis is a four however strongly it is held, and scoring it honestly is what stops the roadmap filling up with opinions.

Testing When You Do Not Have the Traffic

Classic A/B testing needs more traffic than most UK B2B sites have, and pretending otherwise produces confident conclusions from noise.

The Arithmetic That Decides Your Method

Work out roughly what you can detect before you plan any test. A site with 4,000 monthly sessions on the tested page and a 2% conversion rate produces about 80 conversions a month. Split across two variants, that is 40 each. Detecting anything smaller than a large relative change on those numbers takes many months, by which time the season has changed and the result means nothing. If your page produces fewer than about 200 conversions a month, classic split testing is the wrong tool. That is most UK B2B sites, and it is not a failing.

Sequential Testing, and What It Can Prove

Running version A for a period, then version B, gets you usable answers at low volume. The method: hold everything else constant, run each version for a matched period of at least four weeks, and compare like with like. Account for seasonality by comparing against the same period last year if you can, or by running a third period back on version A to check the effect persists. It cannot prove small differences and does not pretend to. What it can prove is that a change of ten percentage points or more is real, and at this scale those are the only changes worth your time anyway.

The Honest Limits

Say what the method cannot do rather than overclaiming. Sequential testing confounds the change with anything else that happened in that period, including your own marketing, a competitor’s, and the weather. A run-back period reduces that risk without removing it. The mitigation is to only test changes large enough that a modest confound cannot explain the whole result, and to write down what else changed during the test so you can judge it honestly afterwards.

When to Just Make the Change

Some fixes do not need a test at all. A broken form, a phone number that is not tap-to-call, a validation rule rejecting valid postcodes, an error message nobody can see. These are defects. Testing whether a working form beats a broken one wastes a month you could have spent collecting the enquiries. Test changes of judgement, fix things that are simply wrong. Confusing the two is the most common way small teams waste their testing capacity.

Behavioural Science, Applied Honestly

The behavioural literature has real things to offer conversion work, and it has been oversold to the point where practitioners are rightly sceptical.

What Holds Up

A few effects are robust enough to design around. Reducing effort increases action, reliably and across every context anyone has tested. Specificity increases credibility, so a precise number outperforms a round one. Defaults matter enormously, so whatever is pre-selected will be chosen by most people. Loss framing tends to outperform gain framing for decisions people are already worried about, though the size of the effect varies. GLO’s earlier work on behavioural science in marketing covers the underlying mechanisms, and the practical point for CRO is that the reliable effects are mostly about effort and clarity rather than about persuasion tricks.

What Does Not

Several widely-cited techniques have not replicated well, or work only in narrow conditions. Artificial scarcity on a B2B service site is transparent and damages trust, which costs more than the urgency gains. Countdown timers that reset on refresh are noticed. Anchoring works in some contexts and not others, and the versions taught in marketing courses are usually a simplification of a more conditional finding. The test we apply: if the technique depends on the visitor not noticing it, it will eventually be noticed, and the cost when it is exceeds the gain while it works.

The Ethical Line, and Why It Is Also Commercial

Manipulative patterns convert in the short term and produce worse customers. A lead generated by a misleading offer arrives with the wrong expectation, wastes a sales conversation, and either does not buy or buys and complains. Optimising for enquiry volume with dark patterns is how a team hits its target and misses its number. Design for the buyer who reads carefully. They are the one worth having.

Lead Quality Against Lead Volume

Every conversion improvement can be achieved by lowering the bar, and a programme that is not watching for that will eventually do it by accident.

Spotting It

The signs are visible in the sales data rather than in the marketing data. Enquiry volume up while meetings booked stays flat. Meetings up while proposals stay flat. Sales spending longer disqualifying than talking. All three mean the extra volume is arriving from people who were never going to buy. This is why the loop has to close into the CRM. Website analytics will report a triumph in exactly the scenario where the business got worse.

The Metric That Keeps You Honest

Track qualified enquiries rather than enquiries, and set your target against that. A qualified enquiry is one that meets your basic criteria and reaches a real conversation. Defining it takes an afternoon with the sales team and it changes what the whole programme optimises for. A 20% lift in enquiries with a 20% fall in qualification rate is a lot of work for nothing, and it happens more often than anyone reports.

When Lowering the Bar Is Correct

Sometimes it genuinely is the right call, and it should be a decision rather than an accident. If your sales team has spare capacity, more marginal enquiries are worth having. If your close rate is high and your cost of a wasted conversation is low, volume wins. If you are entering a new market and need to learn who responds, take everything. Say which of those you are doing, and set the measurement accordingly.

Speed to Lead: The Conversion Step After the Form

The conversion does not finish when the form submits. It finishes when someone has a conversation, and a large share of enquiries die in the gap between the two. This step sits outside most CRO programmes because it belongs to sales rather than marketing, which is precisely why it is so often the cheapest available gain.

The Arithmetic of the First Hour

A prospect who has just filled in your form is at their maximum interest, and it decays fast. They have almost certainly enquired with two or three of your competitors in the same session, because that is what people do. The first company to have a real conversation is the one that frames the comparison, and the fourth to call is competing against a decision that has already half formed. Measure your own time from submission to first genuine contact attempt, not to the automated acknowledgement. On most UK B2B accounts we look at, the honest figure is several hours and often the next working day.

Fixing It Without Hiring Anyone

A few changes move this without adding headcount.

• Route enquiries to a named person rather than a shared inbox, because shared inboxes are owned by nobody
• Set an internal response standard, in hours, and report against it weekly
• Send the notification to a phone as well as an inbox
• Give whoever calls a two-line brief from the form so they are not starting cold
• Use the routing fields you kept on the form to send it to the right person first time

The Autoresponder Is Doing More than You Think

The automatic acknowledgement is the only thing standing between submission and the call, and on most sites it is doing nothing useful. Use it to set expectations precisely: who will be in touch, by when, and what they will ask. Include something useful to read in the meantime, ideally the case study closest to their situation. Make it come from a person with a name rather than from “the team”. That message holds attention through the gap, and it costs one afternoon to write properly.

Closing the Loop into HubSpot

A conversion rate measured on the website tells you about form fills. A conversion rate measured through the CRM tells you about revenue, and only one of those survives a board meeting.

The Stages to Wire Up

Map the website action onto the CRM so the whole path is visible in one place. HubSpot’s lifecycle stages do this natively, and GLO’s standard setup runs Suspect, Prospect, Sales-Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Considering Quote and Client. The website conversion creates a contact at Prospect, and everything after that is sales activity. Keep lead status separate from lifecycle stage. Lead status moves back and forth as a conversation develops. Lifecycle stage only moves forward, which is what makes it usable for reporting.

The Properties That Make CRO Measurable

Set these at the point of conversion, automatically, and never rely on anyone filling them in later.

• Landing page, meaning the page they arrived on, not the page they converted on
• Conversion page, which is often different and is what your tests are changing
• Form variant, if you are running a sequential test
• Original source and campaign, carried through properly rather than overwritten
• Device, because your mobile fixes need to be provable

With those five, you can answer the only question that matters: did the change to that page produce more revenue, or just more records.

Reading the Result

Give it a full sales cycle before judging, and say so in advance so nobody expects an answer in three weeks. The measure is qualified enquiries per thousand sessions, and then closed revenue per thousand sessions once enough deals have run through. Both are comparable across periods and across channels in a way that a raw conversion rate is not. The mechanics of connecting spend, conversions and revenue are covered in more detail in our guide to measuring ad ROI with HubSpot, and the same wiring serves both purposes.

Where AI Assistant Traffic Changes the Picture

A newer complication is worth naming, because it distorts the numbers people are trying to read. A growing share of visitors now arrive having already had their question answered by an AI assistant. They are further through their decision, they read less of the page, and they behave differently enough to move a site’s blended conversion rate without anything on the site having changed.

What It Does to Your Reporting

The effect on the numbers is usually the opposite of what people expect. Sessions from that traffic tend to be fewer and better qualified, so the conversion rate on those sessions can be higher than average while total conversions fall, because the informational visits that used to arrive and never convert are no longer arriving. A falling session count with a rising conversion rate is a pattern worth checking for before you celebrate or panic. A portion of this traffic also lands in Direct rather than in any identifiable channel, which makes it harder to isolate. Segment by landing page and behaviour rather than trusting the channel grouping alone.

What It Means for the Page

Pages now have to serve two audiences with different needs. A visitor who has read a summary elsewhere wants confirmation and specifics: prices, proof, process, and a way to act. A visitor arriving cold still needs the explanation. Front-load the specifics and keep the explanation available below, rather than making the informed visitor scroll through material they already have. This is one of the few areas where the correct answer is genuinely still moving, so treat any confident advice on it, including this, as provisional.

A Worked Example: Three Months on a UK B2B Site

Numbers make the framework concrete. This is a composite of the pattern we see, with the arithmetic shown. A professional services firm, 6,200 sessions a month, converting at 1.3%, producing about 81 enquiries of which roughly 30 were qualified.

Weeks One and Two: Measure

Two problems surfaced before any change was made. The quote request form on the highest-traffic service page had been failing on iOS Safari for an unknown period, silently. Roughly 40% of that page’s traffic was mobile, and a proportion of it had been submitting into nothing. Second, three separate events were marked as key events in GA4, including a newsletter signup, so the reported conversion rate was a blend of things that did not mean the same thing. The real enquiry rate was 1.0%, not 1.3%.

Weeks Three to Five: Diagnose

The findings, converted into monthly enquiries lost.

• Broken iOS form: an estimated 9 enquiries a month
• Main contact form, 12 fields, 71% start-to-finish drop: an estimated 14 a month
• No pricing information anywhere: unquantifiable, but named by 6 of 11 exit survey responses
• Service page LCP of 5.1 seconds on mobile: an estimated 5 a month

The exit survey took an afternoon to install and produced the most useful single finding, which is common.

Weeks Six to Eight: Fix and Test

The form fix went in without a test, because a broken form is a defect. The field reduction from 12 to 5 ran as a sequential test, four weeks on the new version against the previous four weeks. Submissions rose 46%, and qualified enquiries rose 31%, so some quality was given up and the trade was clearly worth it. A pricing section was added to two service pages with a floor price and a worked example. Enquiry volume from those pages fell 8% and qualified enquiries from them rose 22%.

Weeks Nine to Twelve: The Result

The base against the end of the quarter, on comparable traffic.

The largest single contributor was the broken form nobody knew about. The second was field reduction. Neither required a designer, a testing platform or a redesign, and the whole quarter’s work sat inside about twelve days of effort spread across three months.

Tip: Notice that the qualified figure rose slightly faster than the raw figure, which is the pattern you want. If the raw number had risen 55% and the qualified number 10%, the pricing change would have been the wrong call.

Reading a Sudden Conversion Drop

At some point the rate falls sharply in a single week and somebody asks what happened. Working through the possibilities in order stops a lot of wasted panic.

Rule out the Measurement First

More sudden drops turn out to be tracking failures than real declines, so start there. Check whether the tag still fires by submitting a test enquiry. Check whether anything was deployed to the site in the relevant window, including plugin updates and consent banner changes, both of which routinely break event tracking without anyone noticing. Check whether a form or a thank-you page URL changed. Then check the inbox and the CRM. If enquiries are still arriving at the normal rate and analytics disagrees, the business is fine and the reporting is broken.

Then Check the Traffic Mix

A conversion rate can fall without any visitor behaving differently, simply because the mix of visitors changed. A new campaign bringing in high-volume, low-intent traffic will lower the blended rate while adding conversions. A brand campaign, a piece of coverage, or a post that performed unusually well all do the same thing. Segment by channel and check whether the rate fell within each channel or only in the blend. If every channel held and only the total fell, you have a mix change rather than a problem, and the correct response is to report by channel from now on.

Then Check Seasonality Against the Right Comparison

Compare against the same period last year rather than against last month. UK B2B enquiry volumes have predictable troughs: August, the fortnight around Christmas, and the days either side of bank holidays. A drop that matches last year’s shape is weather rather than illness. Use at least two years of history where you have it, because a single prior year can itself have been unusual.

Only Then Look for a Real Cause

Once measurement, mix and season are ruled out, the remaining explanations are short. Something on the site changed, so review the deployment history properly. Something upstream changed, such as ad copy, targeting or a landing page URL. A competitor changed something visible. Or a technical issue is affecting a subset of visitors, which shows up as a drop concentrated in one device or browser rather than spread evenly. A drop concentrated in one device or browser is almost always a defect, and a drop spread evenly across all of them is almost always upstream. That single distinction narrows the search faster than anything else.

Writing It Down

Whatever the cause, record it with the date. Six months later somebody will notice the same shape in the chart and ask the same question, and a one-line note saying what happened in September saves the whole investigation being repeated. Programmes that keep this log get faster at diagnosis every year, and it costs a sentence each time.

Troubleshooting: When the Numbers Do Not Move

Conversion rate optimisation programmes stall in recognisable ways, and each has a different cause.

The Rate Is Flat After Three Changes

Check whether the changes were on pages that matter. It is easy to spend a quarter improving pages that receive 3% of the traffic, because they are the easy ones to change. Rank your work by sessions affected before you conclude the method is not working. The second possibility is that your problem is upstream. If the traffic arriving is wrong for the offer, no on-page change will fix it, and the answer is in targeting rather than in the page.

The Rate Improved and Revenue Did Not

You have lowered the bar. Compare your qualification rate before and after, and if it fell by more than the volume rose, reverse the change or add the qualifying field back. This is why the qualified metric has to be tracked from the start. Discovering it three months later means you cannot tell which change did it.

Every Test Comes Back Inconclusive

Your changes are too small for your traffic. Make bigger changes. Testing a headline variant on a page with 300 sessions a month will always come back inconclusive, and running it for longer does not help as much as people hope. Test the offer, the form or the page structure instead, and accept that you are looking for large effects only.

The Programme Has Lost Its Budget

This is usually a reporting failure rather than a results failure. If your reporting shows conversion rate percentages, nobody outside marketing can judge whether that was worth the money. Report enquiries gained per month and the media spend those enquiries would have cost, and the conversation changes entirely. Bank every result in writing, including the ones that failed, because a documented failure is what stops someone re-proposing it next year.

Getting the Changes Actually Shipped

A conversion rate optimisation programme fails more often on delivery than on analysis. The findings are correct, the priorities are sensible, and nothing changes for four months.

Why It Stalls

Three causes account for most of it. The change needs developer time that belongs to another team with its own roadmap. The change touches something a senior person has an opinion about. Or the change was described as a suggestion rather than as a specification, so it sat in a backlog waiting for someone to work out what was actually being asked for. None of these are solved by better analysis, which is why teams who respond to a stalled programme by producing more evidence usually stay stalled.

Making a Change Easy to Say Yes To

Specify it fully before you ask for it. Say exactly what changes, on which page or template, with the new copy written out and the fields named. Say what you expect it to produce, in enquiries a month, and how you will know. Say what happens if it does not work, which for most conversion changes is that you put it back. That last point removes most of the resistance. A change described as reversible within an hour is a much smaller decision than a change described as a new direction.

Handling the Opinion

Someone senior will disagree with something, and it is usually the pricing or the homepage. Argue with evidence rather than with principle, and be specific about the evidence’s strength. “Six of eleven exit survey responses said they could not find pricing” is a conversation. “Best practice says publish pricing” is an invitation to a different opinion. When the evidence is genuinely thin, say so and propose the change as a test with a defined reversal point. Most objections are about permanence rather than about the change itself.

Building Capacity That Lasts

The programmes that survive are the ones that need less from other teams over time. Push changes into templates rather than pages, so one build serves every future page. Get a small set of components you can edit without a developer: headings, body copy, trust blocks, form fields, calls to action. Agree a standing allocation of developer time, however small, rather than negotiating each request. A team that can ship a copy change the same day will run a better programme than a team with more traffic and a two-month queue.

A 90-Day Conversion Rate Optimisation Programme, Week by Week

This is the shape we run for clients, sized for a team with a few hours a week rather than a dedicated function.

Weeks 1 to 2: Measure

Test every form on every device. Audit the GA4 key event setup and fix the naming. Pull twelve months of conversion data split by channel, device, landing page and month. Write down the base. Install an exit survey on your two highest-traffic service pages and leave it running for the whole quarter.

Weeks 3 to 5: Diagnose

Run the diagnostic sequence. Watch twenty filtered session recordings, not two hundred random ones. Sit with whoever answers the enquiries for an hour. Complete an enquiry yourself on a phone, outdoors, on mobile data. Convert every finding into enquiries lost per month. Score and sort them.

Weeks 6 to 8: Fix the Defects

Anything broken gets fixed without a test. Anything mechanical and obviously right gets fixed without a test. Start the first sequential test at the beginning of week six so it has four clear weeks. Change nothing else on that page while it runs.

Weeks 9 to 11: Test and Measure

Read the first test, bank it or reverse it, and start the second. Begin reporting qualified enquiries alongside raw enquiries, and make that the headline number from this point forward.

Week 12: Bank and Plan

Write up what changed, what it produced, and what you now believe that you did not believe twelve weeks ago. That last part is the one people skip and it is the one that makes the next quarter faster. A CRO programme’s real asset is the accumulated understanding of its own visitors, and it only accumulates if somebody writes it down.

When Conversion Rate Optimisation Is the Wrong Priority

Honest advice includes saying when conversion rate optimisation should wait. If you are taking fewer than about 1,000 sessions a month, you do not have a conversion problem you can measure. Improving a 1.5% rate on 600 sessions means going from 9 enquiries to 12, and you will not be able to prove it happened. Spend the effort on traffic first. If your close rate on qualified enquiries is under 10%, the leak is after the website and fixing the site sends more people into the same gap. Work on the sales process first. If your offer is not competitive, conversion work papers over it briefly. A page can only make a case that is available to be made, and no amount of form design fixes a price nobody will pay or a service nobody wants. If your tracking is broken and cannot be fixed in the near term, do not run a programme you will be unable to read. Fix the measurement, then start.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Good Conversion Rate for a UK B2B Website?

Most UK B2B service websites convert between 1% and 3% of sessions into an enquiry, and the spread within that band is driven far more by form design and offer clarity than by sector. Treat any published benchmark carefully. Almost all of them come from a vendor’s own customer base rather than an independent study, the conversion definitions differ, and two sources quoting the same figure are often quoting each other. The more useful target is your own best month from the last twelve, since that is demonstrably achievable on your traffic with your offer. Convert it into enquiries and revenue before you commit to it, because a target expressed only as a percentage is one nobody will defend when priorities compete.

How Long Does Conversion Rate Optimisation Take to Show Results?

Defects fixed in the first fortnight can show up immediately, and a broken form repaired in week two produces enquiries in week three. Changes of judgement take longer. A sequential test needs at least four weeks per version to be readable, so a single conclusion is a two-month exercise on most UK site traffic volumes. The full picture takes a quarter, and the revenue picture takes a full sales cycle beyond that. Set that expectation before starting, because a programme judged at six weeks will usually be judged on the defect fixes alone and either flattered or dismissed unfairly.

Do I Need a Testing Tool to Do CRO?

Not for the first pass, and often not for the second. A first audit needs analytics you trust, Search Console, a session recording tool and an exit survey, and the last two are inexpensive. Testing platforms become worthwhile when you have enough traffic for classic split testing, which for most sites means several hundred conversions a month on the page being tested. Below that threshold, a tool measures noise very precisely. Sequential testing gets you usable answers at low volume without one, provided you hold everything else constant and only test changes large enough to be visible.

Is CRO Better Value than Spending More on Ads?

They answer different problems and the arithmetic usually favours doing the conversion work first. A conversion improvement applies to all your traffic, paid and organic, and it does not stop when the budget does. A media increase buys more of what you already have, at a cost that recurs every month and typically rises. The exception is volume. If you need to triple enquiries and your site converts reasonably already, no realistic conversion gain gets you there and you need more traffic. The common case is a site converting at 1% while spending heavily on ads, where the conversion work makes every future pound of media spend go further.

What Is the Difference Between CRO and SEO?

SEO increases the number of people arriving from search. Conversion rate optimisation increases the share of arrivals who act. One works on the denominator and one on the numerator of the same ratio. They overlap more than they used to. Page speed, mobile usability and clear structure serve both, and the content that ranks is increasingly the content that answers a question well enough to earn trust. Running them together works better than running them in sequence, because SEO gains arriving at a page that converts poorly produce traffic reports rather than revenue.

Where to Start

Conversion rate optimisation rewards patience with the diagnosis and speed with the defects, and most of the available gain on a UK B2B site is sitting in things nobody has looked at.

• Test every form on every device this week, because a meaningful share of sites have one that is broken
• Fix your GA4 key events so the rate you are reading means one thing
• Audit your form and delete every field that does not change what happens next
• Put a floor price or a range on the site, and watch qualified enquiries rather than raw ones
• Ask one question on the thank-you page and read the answers monthly
• Measure time from submission to first real contact, and halve it

If you would rather have the audit, the diagnosis and the testing programme run for you, book a Growth Strategy session and we will start with what your own data already shows.

CRO is an acronym used by marketers referring to conversion rate optimisation – the process of increasing the number of conversions a website receives. There are several types of conversions a business could be aiming to increase; transactional sales, form completions, email signups or the number of visitors creating an account. These are all dependent on the business’s goals.

In order to optimise your website’s conversion rate, you need to understand what your customers’ needs and wants are when visiting your website. Simply asking your customers through surveys doesn’t guarantee any quality feedback that you could rely on. Instead, taking the data-driven approach using analytical tools, such as Google Analytics and Hotjar, enables you to physically see what is and isn’t working, ultimately preventing your conversion rate from increasing.

What Is A/B Testing?

CRO and A/B testing typically go hand in hand, as optimising a website’s conversion rate requires various testing to be carried out. A/B testing is simply the act of testing two or more variations of pages, content or elements, to help pinpoint what contributes to customers successfully being pushed down the marketing funnel and converting. There’s no correct “one size fits all” way for your website to appear and function to be successful; what works for one company’s website may not work for another. The specific data collected from your visitors is key to understanding where any metaphorical “roadblocks” are along the customer’s journey, enabling you to eliminate them through the process of A/B testing.

But What Data Should I Be Tracking?

Within Google Analytics, the ‘pages per session’ and ‘average session duration’ metrics are good to be aware of but need to be approached with discernment. Having a high average session duration could suggest customers are having to spend more time trying to find what they want which leads to frustration and abandoning the site. To ensure this isn’t the case, view and examine your analytics – when visitors are viewing lots of pages, are they resulting in conversions? If not, it might be an indication that there are too many roadblocks on their way to converting.

The two metrics which are essential to track are Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. If there is a high Bounce Rate on a certain page, you can take that as a good indicator of where to start A/B testing. Once you identify the problem and fix it, your Bounce Rate on this specific page is likely to decrease, resulting in a spike in conversions. After all, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) leads to more completed purchases or sign-ups, depending on the goal, rather than just increasing the traffic that comes into the site.

How Does A/B Testing Work?

Once decided on an A/B testing tool, some of the best being Optimizley, VWO, Omniconvert and Google Optimise, a code needs to be placed into the website in order to gain full control of the site and users’ experience. Now, using any of the website analytical tools previously mentioned, analyse where your visitors appear to be dropping off within your website. Identifying that helps narrow down what pages need reviewing and testing, allowing you to start building the new variations to test against within the A/B testing tool. Having conducted your research prior and identified where your visitors are dropping off, you can build the variations within the A/B testing tool, creating as little as one to as many variations desired.

Tip:

If conducting multiple A/B tests simultaneously, ensure none of them conflicts with one and other. Avoid testing anything which can be viewed at the same time, as although some testing tools do limit each visitor to only see one campaign at a time, others however don’t. Consequently resulting in both test results being contaminated by one and other. So in general it’s good practice to keep the tests separate and prioritise one over the other initially.

The A/B testing tool allows you to decide what percentage of your site traffic are recipients of the test. For example, 100% traffic would equal 50% of visitors seeing the original site, also referred to as ‘the control’, the other half seeing the variant. The delivery is completely random, ensuring there are no biased results depending on external factors.

Before launching the test, there will be an option of setting goals for your tests. This is dependent on what you are trying to achieve. Either increasing conversion rate or something more specific like multiplying click-throughs of a button or being directed to the next stage of the funnel.

Browser cookies track and save whichever variation visitors land on. Though, if a visitor were to delete the cookies’ data before returning to the website or open it on another device, they could potentially view the control or another variation.

Each test should last for a minimum of 1 to 2 weeks, to ensure enough data has been collected and the results have normalised, clearly stating a ‘winner’. Keep in mind that the duration of your test will vary depending on your site’s average number of visitors, especially if you have multiple variations. Low traffic means the test needs to run longer to collect enough data and vice versa. The successful variation needs to be implemented for 100% of traffic until it’s been permanently built into the website.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

When it comes to testing, you’re able to change basically anything that already exists on site which your customers can see. There are some limits though, you’re unable to add net-new pages without adding them to the original website. For instance, if the homepage needed to be completely redesigned, you couldn’t test this without adding the new page variation to the original website. However, using your A/B testing tool, you could redirect a proportion of your visitors to the new page and the others to the original. The other limitation to testing includes the site functions which don’t already exist in the original code. For example, if you wanted to test an ‘Add to wishlist’ function, it would need to be written into the code first, but then be suppressed for a percentage of traffic.

You could test:

• Images or Videos
• Copy
• Call to actions
• Buttons
• Pop-ups
• Navigation
• Forms

If you are just starting out with A/B testing then begin with features that everyone can see! Landing pages typically receive the most traffic, so are a great place to start pushing those new visitors down the funnel and further into your site.

Further A/B Testing Ideas

If your website data isn’t showing you the results you were hoping for in terms of conversions but are unsure of where the issue lies, here are some testing suggestions:

• Perfect your checkout – Your visitors are on the home stretch, ready to make a purchase. The checkout should have as few distractions as possible, to ensure your customers make that transaction. Test removing irrelevant content which could persuade the customer to go backwards in the funnel. Display shipping costs upfront as this can be a surprise expense which sometimes discourages the user from continuing. Simplify navigation, so there’s no confusion. Remember to continue showing any price discounts, original price and the new price. This will remind the customer how much they are saving which will motivate conversions.
• Experiment with major elements – Large blocks of content can be overwhelming so try hiding parts or breaking them up into smaller pieces. Show/hide banners or images which are pushing important content further down the page. Cyber security logos may be off-putting for customers, so test which works for you.
• Auto sort by popularity – Try sorting your product categories by popularity. This may improve the chances of new visitors finding what they are looking for quicker.
• Create clarity – Test any call to actions (CTA’s) that have a lot of text vs a short snappy one. Chances are the short one will generate more leads. Any ad copy, headlines or CTAs should be clear and simple to drive a response.

A/B Testing for CRO Results: How to Identify the Winner?

As mentioned earlier, each test should last at least 2 weeks. Your A/B testing tool will have a reports page that provides key information which contributes to deciding when the test should end and what variation won. There will be a metric called ‘confidence rate’ or ‘chance to beat control’, providing a percentage to each variation whether it’s predicted to be more successful than the original ‘Control’. The percentage has to be above 50%, otherwise, it’s a clear indication it has lost. To consider using any of the variations, they need to be at least 90%. Meaning there is little risk of the variation becoming a failure.

Next, a graph will present all the results. Ignoring the first few days, each line should have flatlined and stayed like that for 10 days or so to be able to stop the test.

Combining each of those points plus a sufficient amount of traffic will indicate a ‘winner’ of the test. If the confidence percentage is good but does not receive enough traffic, then let the test run longer, in order to obtain a fair result.

No Clear A/B Test Winners?

Some tests may be trial and error, not all will result in the variant being crowned the ‘winner’ but that doesn’t mean the test was unsuccessful. You have gained more information about your visitors’ browsing habits, which will help guide future tests. But how can you utilise this information to your benefit now? The best way is to analyse the data and create user personas to paint a clear picture of your target audience, which can not only guide your further CRO efforts but also inform your social media posts or email marketing campaigns.

Building A User Persona

Forming one primary persona and perhaps a couple of secondaries from analysing previous reports enables you to build specific segments within your analytical tracking tool to identify what website elements the target audience is using and where A/B testing for CRO should be implemented. To give an example, using demographics within your analytical tool, enables you to identify both the age and gender of your key persona. At this point, start to build a new segment within the tool including that information. Take a look at your customer interests and narrow down what your primary persona interests are, then add those to the segment too. Also, key information to incorporate is ‘Geo’. Your key persona’s language and geographic location are valuable in order to target specific regions for future campaigns. You can make the persona segment as specific or vague as desired, depending on your website traffic volume or business goals. Now having built the segment, you’re able to see the pages and elements which are the driving factors of your key persona making a conversion. However, more importantly, you’re able to recognise where they are dropping off within your site which pinpoints exactly what to A/B test to optimise your website for your key persona.

How Many A/B Tests Do I Need to Run To See an Increase in Conversions?

The first test won’t magically increase your conversion rate overnight. A/B testing for CRO is an iterative process of removing both big and small issues throughout your conversion funnel, creating a seamless experience for customers. Removing a stumbling block in the middle of the funnel won’t automatically make the entire journey clear too. It will take several improvements throughout the funnel until you start seeing your conversion rate increase.

It’s vital to regularly track your website’s data through analytical tools, in order to identify more testing opportunities. Through constant tracking, you will begin to spot behavioural patterns within your data. Completing one test and observing the subsequent data could potentially reveal another page which is now in need of testing. That new issue that arose as a result of a recent improvement proves how necessary observing your website’s data is at every step of the testing process. For example, improving an element on one page and successfully increasing the click-through rate will inevitably lead to more traffic being directed through to the next page. Consequently, the following page to which you have successfully boosted traffic levels, may not have previously received sufficient data to identify any testing opportunities. However, as a result, you may now be experiencing a high drop off rate, clearly showing the need for this case to be tested and optimised to increase conversions.

Here at GLO we continually analyse the data we are tracking to spot patterns and testing opportunities, which in turn help us to optimise our website and offer a seamless experience for our visitors.

Common CRO Mistakes to Avoid

Now, if you are sitting there feeling slightly overwhelmed or confused after reading the entirety of that information, let’s take a step back and recap. Conversion Rate Optimisation is an ongoing process that involves tweaking elements of your website in order to improve user’s experience and as a result generate more conversions, whether those are sales, form submissions or email newsletter subscriptions. By working on your CRO you can generate more leads via your website as your visitors will come across fewer roadblocks.

One of the best ways to improve your CRO is through A/B testing – the process of testing new variations of pages or elements on a website against the original. To decide what to test, use a website analytical tool to figure out where most of your current traffic is dropping off or start with landing pages that typically receive the most traffic. Some of the metrics that may indicate areas or pages worth testing include the Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. Run your tests for a minimum duration of one to two weeks and allow the results to normalise – you know which version is your winner when you see one with at least a 90% success rate.

And finally, don’t forget that not all A/B tests you do will have the goal of increasing your conversion rate, especially in the beginning. You could set the goal to measure the number of times a specific element that’s being tested is clicked and therefore pushing those users closer to making a conversion. Furthermore, not all tests will have a clear winner but the data you collect can still be utilised to build a primary persona. This data can help you to understand who your key customer is and constantly ensure any A/B tests are increasing the conversion rate within that segment.

Conclusion

Just like with any optimisation efforts, it is important to strike a good balance between not responding to the data and doing too much to try and fix the issues. Every visitor wants a simple and easy browsing experience. So when it comes to optimising or redesigning your website and completing A/B testing for CRO, here are some mistakes you should try to avoid:

• Over personalisation – Personalised shopping experiences may be the latest trend but that doesn’t mean a customer’s experience should be 100% personalised. It can be off-putting sometimes for a customer to see actually how much information you know about them, resulting in potential losses. Test what performs best, do visitors want to see suggested items based on what they’ve already viewed or view new products that they may not have considered before?
• Having multiple navigation methods – You want to ensure a streamlined experience. If adding new navigational methods, ensure it is easy for a customer to use or give hints on how to use new features.
• Obsessing over colour – Of course, some colours are more eye-catching than others but overall it’s not an element to spend too much time worrying about it. Fix substantial problems before testing little details.
• Carousels vs Static Images – Carousels that are especially featured on landing pages can bring the site to life and make it instantly more engaging, however, users typically click on the first slide, therefore missing the rest of the information. A/B testing will determine which works best for your users.
• Don’t test without any data to back up your decision – This is a waste of time. Randomly testing elements to see if they work better is very time-consuming too. Figure out what content needs to be tested using your site’s data. You should A/B test new content before adding it to the original site in case it damages your conversion rate.
• Focusing too much on the landing page – Yes, the landing page is very important! But if you know there are bigger issues further down the funnel, test and fix those first before driving more customers into the funnel.

Request a Callback

Are you already applying any of our A/B testing for CRO ideas on your website? Request a callback to get free advice about how you can improve your conversion rate.

In this Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide, we are going to drill into Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and provide you with our top 10 CRO tips that can help improve your conversion rate on your website, meaning you will generate more leads and subsequently, more revenue for your business.

The first thing you hear when you start a business is that you need a website. But what is the point in having a website? One thing that is pretty consistent with businesses, whether you are selling something on your website or simply have it up there for informative purposes, is that you want it to be able to help you convert potential customers to paying customers.

At GLO, we understand that in order to generate leads online, you need a website that converts web traffic into customers. Understanding the importance of CRO is the first step in the process. After all, the higher the number of ‘converters’ in relation to web visitors, the higher your conversion rate is. You may have thought to yourself in the past:

“I get a lot of visitors to my website but I haven’t got any enquiries from them.”
“My website is just my online business card.”
“I get all my business from referrals, I don’t need a website.”

This reminds of a saying from Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right”. I mention this because all the people who believe their website is not there to generate their business more leads are probably right! And the reason for this is most likely that they are unaware of their conversion rate and the ways to optimise it. If the website wasn’t designed with the purpose of convincing people to convert then it’s not likely that potential customers will convert, or even having anyways their customers can ‘convert’ in the first place.

Firstly you’ve got to start asking yourself, what do I want my website to do for me? You may want to sell more of your products, increase subscriptions to your mailing list or get people to enquire about your services. What is the point in having a website if it’s not working to achieve the goals you’ve set for it?

What Is a Conversion?

A conversion is a point at which a visitor on your website completes a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out an enquiry form or subscribing to your email newsletter. The conversion rate of your website is, therefore, the percentage of web visitors that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.

Micro Conversions vs Marco Conversions

Macro Conversions

Your ‘Macro Conversion’ is the end goal that you are looking to achieve after your website visitor goes through the different levels of your marketing funnel.

It is important to note that this ultimate goal looks different for every business. An e-commerce website will be looking to get a purchase from its visitors. However, a service provider may wish to focus their efforts on getting visitors to request a quote for one of their services.

Micro Conversions

To get to a ‘Macro Conversion’, the visitor may take a series of smaller steps which can be defined as Micro Conversions. These can then be further split into categories, known as Process Milestone and Secondary Action.

Process Milestone

As the name suggests, a process milestone is a significant step on your potential customer’s journey where they take an action that brings them closer to a macro conversion, i.e. your ultimate goal. Some examples of process milestones include a visitor inquiring further about your products and services via live chat or adding products to their wish list.

Secondary Action

Secondary actions are still desired actions taken by the user but are seen as more distant from reaching a macro conversion. An example of a secondary action is a user coming to your website and downloading any free resources you are offering by entering their email address, commenting on your blog posts or signing up to your newsletter. Your website managed to get their attention and create some interest, but it may require a bit more nurturing to bring this particular user to a macro conversion.

What Does Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Mean?

CRO is an umbrella term used for all of the tools and methodologies digital marketers use to optimize their sites and campaigns. In this article, we’re talking specifically about website CRO and things you can do on your website to improve your conversion rate.

Traffic may be coming your way via an effective SEO, paid search, social or content strategy, which is great! Unfortunately, the people visiting your site aren’t achieving the goal you actually intended them to achieve in the first place. They’re not converting. It’s time to think about conversion rate optimisation.

Digital marketers track the percentage of web visitors that are converting (conversion rate) in order to assess how well your website is getting web visitors to perform your goals (completing a conversion). Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your site to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete that specific action.

This continuous process of tracking the user browsing behaviour and adjusting the website elements accordingly, to get an increased percentage of users to perform your desired actions is known as Conversion Rate Optimisation.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

Every business has a marketing funnel in place. This is essentially your customer’s journey with you, and it usually includes the following steps: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

Converting a lead will mean something different at every stage of the marketing funnel and so each stage may need a different CRO strategy.

Furthermore, CRO strategies vary from business to business but there are some best practices we can offer you today that can help optimise the conversion rate of your website.

As a business, you are out there to make a profit. Spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a website that isn’t converting is not going to help you achieve that goal. Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process that will transform your website into a lead generating tool, helping you earn more revenue.

10 Website CRO Tips – Our Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide

Understanding Your Customer & Adding Value

Develop and express empathy for your target audience. Walk a mile in their shoes during every interaction and step, but go further. What brought the potential customer to this specific page? For the visitor to convert you need to show them you fully understand them. You, as the business owner, most likely do. But your website, as an extension of the business, needs to translate that understanding.

It is a good idea to go back to your buyer personas and make sure you understand who your ideal customers are, what their pain points are and how your product or service solves that issue. This reminds me of when I used to work in telesales (please don’t judge me). Every prospect I spoke to had sales objections, or reasons they’re hesitant to buy the product. If the buyer didn’t have reservations about the price, value, competitors, product fit, relevance to their situation, or their purchasing ability, they would have already bought it. To be successful in sales, reps must learn how to both discover and resolve these objections. This is exactly what you have to do to optimise the conversion rate on your website! These objections could be organised easily in a FAQs section, where you list common objections in a question format and responding in a way that changes their mind or alleviates their concerns.

Once you refresh your understanding of your customers, visit your website as a potential client with a specific problem in mind and observe how easy it is for you to find what you need, and how convincing and encouraging is the value proposition on your website.

Note the places within your marketing funnel where perhaps you could add more value. Would your potential customer appreciate a free downloadable PDF with your ‘Top 10 Tips on how to…[input your expertise]’? Or perhaps showcasing some case studies of how your product or service helped someone else could help you win their trust?

Harness Web Analytics & Behavioural Analysis Tools

To fine-tune these strategies you need real data. You may have a good understanding of how your customers browse your website but gathering data with the use of tools such as Google Analytics will give your CRO efforts more precision. From this information, you can begin to learn about the target audience segments that convert the most. This information helps us to modify the content and user experience to improve the conversion rate for the buyer personas you attract.

You can analyse user behaviour with snapshots, heatmaps and recordings with platforms such as Hotjar or CrazyEgg. This helps you to understand at which point a specific type of customer drops out and can even show you how customers interact with your website. This information will help you rethink your content, web design and how you add value.

Copywriting

Before you even think about changing the design of your website to optimise the conversion rate, you need to focus on your copy. It will be your words that will evoke the emotions needed for the lead to convert. Therefore, catchy headlines are vital to capture their attention fast. You can use a headline analyser to see how those headlines will appear to visitors – many people only read the beginning and end of a headline!

Remember to always start your SEO copywriting with the end goal in mind. What is it that you want the user to do on this particular page? This will make your content more structured and will reveal where you should be putting your ‘Call to Action’ buttons.

You should also always lead with the benefit in mind. How is your product or service helping them to solve a problem? How is it addressing their pain point? If you are still unsure what those pain points are, you should go back to Tip #1.

Optimise for Mobile & Page Load Speed

Each year the number of people visiting websites from their phones vs desktop raises. The percentage went up from 16.2% to 53.3% between 2013 and 2019 and is predicted to keep increasing. What this means is that your website needs to be mobile optimised. You need to make sure the user experience on mobile is just as effective as it is on the desktop.

What’s more, pages on your website need to load fast on mobile and desktop. Slow websites frustrate visitors and negatively impact your conversion rate. A study by Soasta showed a decrease of 20.5% in conversion rate on mobile pages that had 1 second slower experience. That one second could be very costly when is comes to your conversion rate.

Pop-Ups

In the digital marketing world, pop-ups are overlays that appear on your screen and draw your attention to something different than you have been looking at on the website. For example, they are often used to get the visitor to sign up to an email list.

Many people find pop-ups annoying but there are many different pop-up types. Some appear the moment you open the site, others after a few seconds and then there are exit pop-ups that would only appear when you’re about to leave the website.

This latter type is considered as one of the most effective ways to keep your visitor happy whilst they’re browsing the website, yet capture them and make a micro-conversion when they’re about to leave.

When considering adding a pop-up to your site, make sure you:

• Make it relevant to the page on which it pops-up
• Make it easy for the visitor to close the pop-up
• Make the design consistent with your branding
• Use a compelling CTA
• Use cookies. This way you’re not showing the pop-up to those who already signed up or to those who always close the pop-up without reading it.

Strategic CTA’S

Congrats! You’ve attracted a visitor to your website – we could say this was one of your micro conversions, as if you have a Facebook Pixel, you can use remarketing to show them relevant ads to get them back to your website and to convert in the future.

So they’ve landed on your website, now what? What are you trying to capture next? Perhaps it’s their email address. How and where on the page will you entice them to do that? To lead them through a series of micro-conversions towards a macro conversion you will need to use visible, clear and effective ‘Call To Action’ buttons (CTAs).

This is why the strategic placement of your CTAs is so important. Think about your micro and macro conversions and the behaviour patterns of the visitors in the different stages of your marketing funnel. If they’re not yet at the stage of requesting a quote from you, what else can you do to stay connected with them?

Consider using the language of the prospect and including multiple CTA’s to speak to different audiences at different points in the funnel. Make the CTA buttons stand out by playing with their design, as well as the copy. Benefit-oriented copy, such as ‘Get my free eBook’, ‘Request call-back’ or ‘Stay connected’ perform better than a button that simply says ‘Click here’. And remember to split test your CTAs. Monitor what placement, design and copy work the best and adjust over time.

SEO Your Inner Service Pages

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps people find your products and services online from search. However, time and time again I see businesses ‘SEOing’ their homepage for their services and giving very little effort put towards their inner services pages. A customer is a lot more likely to convert if they are displayed the service information they’re actually searching for. Here’s an example:

The customer searches “web design Ipswich” into Google and they click the first link. The website displays the homepage of the digital marketing agencies website which shows all of their digital marketing services, including; SEO, Google Ads Management, Social Media Marketing and then finally has a link to their web design services. In finding this link to the information your potential client was initially searching for, half the amount of searchers may have given up and chosen one of your competitors.

This is why it is important to pay just as much attention to your inner product/service pages as your homepage when it comes to web design and SEO. We pay close attention to getting service pages to rank higher than the homepage for service related searches, to improve the conversion rate. Someone searching for ‘web design’ may have different pain points as someone searching for a ‘digital marketing agency’, so your inner service pages need to reflect this.

Build Authority & Credibility

One way to increase the conversion rate is to build trust with your potential customers. In order to do this, you can add qualifications or trust stamps your business has, such as a high number of good reviews. This helps to build authority and makes you stand out against your competitors.

People trust other customers who took the time to review your products or services. Showcasing testimonials that relate to a particular service or product when the lead is in the ‘Consideration’ stage of the marketing funnel could convince them to move towards conversion. As with almost everything on this list, you can split test the effectiveness of your trust stamps, qualifications and testimonials to optimise your conversion rate.

Live Chatbot

One of the things that can kill your conversion rate is visitors not being able to get the information they came to find. If they become frustrated they will simply leave your website. To keep them from doing this, you could provide extra support with a Live Chatbot plugin.

Adding a live chatbot to your website makes your website visitors trust you and give them an impression that there are real people behind the chatbot 24/7, ready to support them with their queries. It is a cost-effective way of improving customer service.

Providing that extra reassurance is not only convenient for your website visitors when requiring extra information, but could also help them make a decision on whether they’d like to try your product or services. Live Chats are the most popular way for customers to request support. We recommended LiveChat or ChatBot, depending on your need for automation.

A/B Testing

Now let’s not get CRO and A/B Testing mixed up. CRO is about using tools and methods to optimise the number of conversions from your website. Testing is about verifying these tools and methods.

A/B testing is used throughout digital marketing. The glory of digital marketing, after all, is data. It is especially used effectively in paid media campaigns, by showing different variations of an advert to determine which gets the best click-through rate.

For website CRO, A/B testing is a popular method of comparing the effectiveness of two different versions of the same website, by showing different content or designs to visitors and analysing the data in order to find out the version that brings the most qualified leads. It helps you identify what works and what doesn’t.

We have ended our ‘10 Website CRO Tips’ on A/B Testing to show you that with testing, conversion rate optimisation is never-ending and you can constantly test different variations of every one of our CRO tips to get the best results from your website.