Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Quick Start Complete Guide 2025

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — for example, adding items to a basket, completing a form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter.

How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate

Let’s say you run an ecommerce store and your current stats are as follows.

• Monthly visitors: 100,000
• Current conversion rate: 2%
• Average order value (AOV): $50

Based on these numbers, your current monthly revenue would be: 100,000 x 0.02 x 50 = $100,000

Let's now imagine that you increase your conversion rate from 2% to 2.5% by implementing some CRO techniques.

Your new monthly revenue becomes: 100,000 x 0.025 x 50 = $125,000

That’s a 25% increase in revenue — an additional $25,000 per month — achieved without spending extra money on traffic acquisition.

5 Steps to Improve Your Conversion Rate.

Define Your Goals

CRO is critical for every business, and defining your CRO goals is as critical as it sets the direction for all relevant efforts. A well-defined CRO goal should be clear and focused. You can use SMART methodology to make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and time-bound. For example, when you are unclear on your goal and want to increase conversions, a SMART goal would be “Increase add-to-basket rates by 25% within the next 60 days”. CRO goals vary depending on the business model. E-commerce sites may focus on increasing purchases or reducing cart abandonment for SaaS platforms, but conversion may be different.

Every objective you set has to be accompanied with key performance indicators (KPI) that can be anything like the conversion rate, percentage of adding to basket, the number of people leaving before the purchase is completed, bounce rate, or average duration of a session on the website, etc. Also, it is a good to put your goals and rankings into groups. For instance, you may set up primary objectives such as increase in sales, secondary objectives such as getting the customers to add items to their basket, and minor victories such as clicks on buttons, and so on. Thus, it is possible to see how customers progress through the different stages of the buying process every time. 

There are many tools you can use to assist and monitor your goals. At RVS Media, we use Google Analytics and CRM platforms to track our CRO and user intent, which Ultimately align with our customer business objectives to ensures that optimisation efforts are both strategic and impactful. 

Start by identifying what a conversion means for your business: 

• Completing a Purchase
• Lead form submission
• Email signup
• App download 

Analyse User Behaviour

Everything we do and build on our website is for users, and if we don’t have a user behaviour analysis in place, everything we do is pointless. In our opinion, this is a critical step in CRO. It will help you uncover user interaction metrics with your website, and this data can open a whole new door to optimise your website with the intent to create a more optimised, convertible flow. We use Google Analytics to track key metrics such as bounce rate, exit rate, session duration, conversion funnels, add to basket, and so on, which reveal where users drop off.   
There are also free and paid tools to track user behaviour through their journey. We use Microsoft Clarity, but there are also some paid tools, which are also great, such as Heatmap and session recording tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg provide visual insights into user engagement, showing where users click, scroll, or hesitate. Additionally, you can collect data through customer feedback forms and some brands also run survey and polls in exchange for winning a gift, these insights will give you more detail about their pain points so you can set a clear road map to resolve them make sure then By combining quantitative and qualitative data, you can identify patterns, segment users based on their behaviour and prioritise areas for optimisation.   

For example, suppose analytics indicate a significant drop on the checkout page, and session recordings point out that users are having trouble with the form fields, you can hypothesize that making the form easier to fill out could lead to a rise in conversions. Thus, the behaviour analysis not only facilitates the making of data-driven decisions but also verifies that the resources spent on CRO are directed towards the users' actual needs and issues. 

Key Metrics to Watch: 

• Bounce rate is very important in terms of finding a pain point.
• Exit rate can help you find issues.
• Average session duration
• Funnel conversion rates
• Add to Basket rate 

Identify Bottlenecks

It is also important to identify bottlenecks in Conversion Rate Optimisation, as it helps pinpoint where users are dropping off or encountering issues in their journey. It can occur at any stage of the conversion funnel, such as landing pages with high bounce rates, forms with low completion rates, product pages or checkout pages with high abandonment. To find these problems, look at funnel data in tools such as Google Analytics. Use it to see at what point the people leave your site the most. Add in things from heatmaps, session recordings, or what the users say, to see why these people go away. Many times, this happens because the page takes a long time to load. We have written a detailed article on the slow page load time and how to improve it. Other reasons include confusing navigation, lack of trust signals, or overly complex forms. Once identified, these areas become prime candidates for optimisation experiments.   

Case study:  

The conversion rate optimization (CRO) on the Owen Brothers Catering website increased by 12% due to the addition of a Call Us button in the header, which also helped to eliminate bottlenecks. It made the user experience better. It also helped people to take the steps they wanted. This change, as I said before, made a good difference in how many people acted on the site.   

Here are some of the bottlenecks you should be looking for: 

• Pages with high traffic but low conversion
• Forms with high abandonment
• Confusing navigation or CTAs 

Example: If users drop off on the checkout page, investigate form length, trust signals, and payment options. 

Hypothesise Improvements

Once you've identified bottlenecks and gathered behavioural insights, if you need further learning on how to calculate the key metrics, you can read our article on Key Metrics and solutions. The next step is to form hypotheses for optimisation, educated guesses about what changes could improve conversion rates.  

A strong hypothesis is based on data and user behaviour, not assumptions. For example, if users frequently abandon a basket, a hypothesis might be: “Reducing the number of required fields will increase form completion rates.” To prioritise which hypotheses to test first, many CRO experts use frameworks like ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) it is used in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and product management to prioritise ideas and experiments based on three key criteria, which helps evaluate the potential effectiveness and feasibility of each idea. The objective is to create a short and precise statement. This statement will direct your A/B testing or multivariate tests. Each suggestion should indicate the modification you are making and the outcome you desire. It must also indicate the metric you will use to assess the success of the intervention. This testing method keeps everything simple and allows for easy monitoring. Each trial design will be properly organized and will meet the needs of both users and businesses. 

Use the ICE Framework to prioritise: 

• Impact: How much positive effect the idea is expected to have on the goal (e.g, conversion rate, revenue).
• Confidence: How confident you are that the idea will work, based on data, experience, or user feedback.
• Ease: How easy it is to implement the idea in terms of time, resources, and complexity. 

5. Run A/B Tests 

It is a good practice when you believe one version is other than the second, run an A/B test to test your idea It is generally a good technique in Conversion Rate Optimisation, it allows you to compare two or more versions of a webpage or element to determine which performs better. If you are new to this, basically in an A/B test, you split your audience randomly so that one group sees the original version (control) and another sees a modified version. This could involve changes to headlines, introducing USP’s, improving call to action buttons, clear and clean page layouts, high resolution images, or even pricing structures.

The goal is to finalise a single variable and measure its impact on a specific conversion metric, such as click through rate or form submissions. This is to ensure reliable results; however, tests should be run long enough to reach a reliable statistical significance and account for traffic variability. We use tools like Optimizely, VWO, and Adobe Target to help manage and analyse these experiments.   

It is also important to break up results by traffic source and user type. This lets you find more details about your users. The process of comparing A/B tests does not replace the interpretation of the data test analysis report and the latest information in the form in which we keep testing. You can make changes that are shown to help user experience and increase conversions. 

Best Practices: 

• Test one variable at a time (headline, CTA, layout)
• Ensure Reliable statistics
• Run tests long enough to account for traffic variability. 

Implement & Iterate 

You have now got a winning variation through A/B testing. The next step is to implement the change and continue refining. It involves rolling out the successful variant to all users and ensuring it’s fully integrated into your site. Remember, your CRO doesn’t stop here; it’s an ongoing process of making further improvements. Monitor the KPI’s of the implemented change over time, this is important as it could be temporary due to seasonality or spikes in traffic; you must track the stats long enough to ensure that the uplift is permanent.   

Keep data always as your first priority so that you can consult it often and reveal new insights that will give rise to new theories. Keep working to make your data better. Small steps can add up to big wins as time goes on. 

I would advise building a culture of experimentation that drives long-term growth and better user experiences.  

Be curious and continue on this CRO journey.