{"id":81351,"date":"2017-03-01T15:36:44","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T23:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thegood.com\/?page_id=81351"},"modified":"2026-04-23T09:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T16:34:11","slug":"whatiscro","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/thegood.com\/whatiscro\/","title":{"rendered":"What is CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is CRO? Conversion Rate Optimization Explained<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

You’re probably already spending money to drive traffic to your website. Paid ads. SEO. Social. Email. The question isn’t whether people are showing up, it’s whether they’re doing anything when they get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your website or app. That action could be making a purchase, starting a free trial, signing up for a demo, or completing a registration form. Rather than spending more to acquire new visitors, CRO gets more value out of the traffic you already have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The math is straightforward. If your site converts 2% of 10,000 monthly visitors, you get 200 customers. Improve that rate to 4% with the same traffic and same ad spend, you’ve doubled revenue without spending another dollar on acquisition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But CRO isn’t just button colors and headline tests. Done well, it’s a research-backed discipline that uncovers why<\/em> people aren’t converting and fixes the root cause, not just the symptom. And when it’s done really well, it evolves into something bigger. More on that below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRO by the numbers: What the benchmarks tell you<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Before you optimize, you need to know what you’re optimizing against. Here are five benchmarks worth knowing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The average ecommerce conversion rate sits around 1.8\u20132%.<\/strong>
<\/strong>According to IRP Commerce data<\/a>, the average ecommerce conversion rate in 2025 is approximately 1.8%. Shopify<\/a> puts a similar figure at 2.5\u20133% for stores on their platform, with the top 20% converting above 3.2%<\/a>. If you’re below 2%, you almost certainly have fixable problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. B2B SaaS conversion rates are even lower, around 1.1\u20131.2%.<\/strong>
<\/strong>Software and B2B companies consistently land at the bottom of industry benchmarks (Firstpagesage, 2025<\/a>). Longer decision cycles and complex buying committees drive this down. Every friction point in your funnel costs you more than it would for a $30 consumer product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Seven out of every ten online shoppers abandon their cart.<\/strong>
<\/strong>Baymard Institute’s<\/a> aggregate of 50 cart abandonment studies puts the global average at 70.22%. The leading causes: unexpected costs at checkout (48%), mandatory account creation (26%), and overly complicated checkout flows (18%). Baymard also estimates that better checkout design alone could recover $260 billion in lost orders annually in the US and EU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Companies that invest in CRO see an average ROI of <\/strong>223%<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong>
<\/strong>Despite this return, research shows companies spend only $1 on conversion optimization for every $92 they spend acquiring new visitors (Econsultancy, via DemandSage<\/a>). The asymmetry is remarkable. Fewer than 40% of businesses have a formally documented CRO strategy \u2014 which means there’s significant competitive advantage available to those who do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Top-performing landing pages convert at 5\u201312% or higher.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry average for landing page conversion sits around 2.35%, but the top 25% of websites convert at 5.31% or more, and the top 10% exceed 11%, according to DemandSage’s CRO statistics<\/a>. There’s a wide gap between average and excellent, and that gap is almost always a CRO problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How CRO works: A 7-step process<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

CRO is a process, not a one-time project. Here’s how it works when it’s done right:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 1: Define your goals and conversion events<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

You can’t optimize what you haven’t defined. Before anything else, identify which actions matter most: purchases, sign-ups, demo requests, free trial activations, and set up tracking to measure them accurately. Fuzzy goals produce fuzzy results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 2: Audit your baseline data<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Pull your current conversion rates, bounce rates, exit pages, and funnel drop-off points. This gives you a map of where people are falling out before taking action. Google Analytics, heatmapping tools, and session recordings all serve a role here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 3: Conduct user research<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is the step most CRO programs skip, and it’s usually the most important. Analytics tells you where<\/em> people drop off. Research tells you why<\/em>. Qualitative methods like user testing, surveys, and interviews surface friction points, confusion, and unmet needs that no dashboard will ever show you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 4: Form hypotheses<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Based on what your research uncovers, write specific, testable hypotheses. Not “let’s change the headline” but “changing the headline to focus on the outcome rather than the feature will increase click-through because users currently don’t understand what they’re getting.” The more specific the hypothesis, the more useful the result, win or lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 5: Design and prioritize experiments<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Not all tests are worth running. Prioritize based on potential impact, confidence in your hypothesis, and ease of implementation. This is where structured prioritization frameworks help teams decide where to spend their testing bandwidth instead of chasing whoever made the loudest request in the last meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 6: Run A\/B tests (and other experiments)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

With your hypotheses and designs in hand, launch your experiments. Give them enough time and traffic to reach statistical significance. Ending tests early because the results look promising is one of the most common mistakes in CRO. Patience and rigor protect the quality of your decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step 7: Analyze, implement, and iterate<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A winning test is only valuable if you act on it and learn from it. Document what worked, what didn’t, and why. Roll out winners. Use losing tests as research inputs for the next round. The best CRO programs are continuous. Every test makes the next one better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What CRO is not<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

CRO has accumulated a lot of mythology. A few things worth clearing up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRO is not just <\/strong>A\/B testing<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong> In practice, many teams use “CRO program” and “testing program” interchangeably. That’s the problem. Testing is one tool in the toolkit. A CRO program without research is just guessing with a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRO is not tricks.<\/strong> Dark patterns and manipulative tactics can technically lift conversion rates short term. They also destroy trust and increase churn. Sustainable CRO removes friction and builds confidence; it doesn’t manufacture false urgency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRO is not a one-time engagement.<\/strong> Running a few tests and calling it done is a project. Real CRO is a continuous capability that compounds over time. Each experiment builds institutional knowledge that makes future optimization faster and more effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRO is not a silver bullet for broken acquisition.<\/strong> If the wrong people are arriving at your site, optimizing the experience will only do so much. CRO works best when you have defined audiences, solid traffic, and a product people actually want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRO vs. Digital Experience Optimization (DXO): What’s the difference?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Conversion rate is a useful metric. It’s also a product of hundreds of factors, many of which are outside your direct control, like market conditions, competition, seasonality, and traffic quality. Treating conversion rate as the single north star can lead teams to optimize for the number rather than the experience generating it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jon MacDonald<\/a>, founder of The Good, put it plainly: “Websites and apps won’t reach their full potential under the current industry expectations and implementations of conversion rate optimization.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issue isn’t that conversion rates don’t matter. It’s that how you improve them can’t be reduced to one research method or one metric. One number can’t signal the health of your entire digital product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital Experience Optimization (DXO)<\/a> is the evolved approach. Where CRO focuses on increasing a specific conversion event, DXO looks at the entire digital journey, from the moment a user enters your site or app through post-conversion, to find and fix what’s actually preventing growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DXO practitioners are excellent at A\/B testing, but they also:<\/p>\n\n\n\n