How to Perform a CRO Audit: Complete CRO Audit Checklist

Are you experiencing a shallow conversion rate despite thousands of monthly website visitors?

Something must be off about the website, which is turning down the conversion. The best way to identify the real cause is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) audit. Performing a CRO audit will help you get insights into the complete customer experience and help boost conversion rate.

While heat mat testing may highlight some issues, a CRO audit identifies every aspect of your website’s performance through a comprehensive audit. For instance, it can help determine the problems your visitors face on your site and the pages/actions that work best for conversion.

In this CRO audit blog, we have explained a detailed 12-step process to run a CRO audit.

12-Steps to Perform a CRO Audit

1.     Define Your Goals and Targets

Firstly, define the goals and objectives you seek through this CRO audit. Aiming your target is essential even before you begin with the CRO dashboard audit because it will give you a clear path to follow.

Deciding the goal will also allow you to calculate the metrics of success in that particular area. Suppose you want to improve the pricing page conversion rate or website usability. Both of these goals have different KPIs (key performance indicators) and require different strategies.

So, you must focus on completing a goal and perfecting its flaws. For example, you have to work on task completion rate, error rate, and usability score to improve your site’s usability.

In contrast, pricing page conversion requires filling in the pricing page shortcomings (like lowering the price or offering discounts) so your customers don’t leave the page before buying your product or services.

2.     Identify Your Ideal Customers

If the conversion rate of your site is relatively low, then you may have to redefine your target audience and ideal customer profile. If you don’t know your target customers, creating a website for your e-commerce business that attracts them is nearly impossible. Identifying your ideal customers will help you find the right strategies to target them and attract them to your business.

Make an ideal customer profile, which must include their age, gender, language, interests, nature, and more. Other than these demographics, notice their online presence, website behaviors, and buying preferences and habits. All these details will help you create a website that attracts and compels them to become paid customers.

3.     Identify Key/Priority Conversion Actions

Defining the critical conversion pages/actions for your site is an important step on the CRO checklist. In an e-commerce or SaaS business, there are several conversion actions.

For instance, free trials, landing pages, conversion-focused blogs, pricing pages, and in-app conversions might propel your sales. Focus on the pages that have more potential to convert leads into loyal and paid customers.

You can start by prioritizing to fill the shortcomings of the pages that get the most attention yet fail to increase conversions. Focusing on improving customer priority pages has more chances of increasing the conversion rate.

4.     Analyze Sales Funnel

Analyzing conversion or sales funnel will help you get insights into the user experience on your website or app. Find out the pages that get the most traffic and focus on how you can improve the performance of those pages to optimize the website for more conversions. Still, you may not get the desired results if you focus only on top-of-the-funnel content/pages like brand awareness blogs.

In order to increase the conversion rate, your focal point should be the bottom of the sales funnel. For example, if the customers are coming to the pricing page or adding your products to the cart, it shows that they are interested in buying. However, something is stopping them from converting and making a purchase.

Whether it is the product’s high price or the limited-time free trial of your services, detect the hindrances your customers are facing and solve them ASAP.

5.     Read User Behavior on Your Site

Use different analyses like heat maps, user behavior analytics, and feature tags for conversion goals. These analyses will help you get insights into when/how your customers are signing up on your website, subscribing to emails and newsletters, and converting into paid customers. Moreover, you will find call-to-action (CTA) buttons that get more clicks and others that customers keep neglecting. Make sure every CTA counts and see how you can get more clicks from new and existing customers.

Also, notice if the click-through rates and click-to-open rates of your emails are low. If yes, then working on the quality of the email titles and entire newsletters is yet another task to improve the conversion rate.

6.     Review your Content and Design

The next point in our CRO audit blog is reviewing the content you post on your website or send in emails. Identify the type of content that gets the most attention and, consequently, has the potential for more conversions. Focus on such content and further improve the quality of your blogs and newsletter.

Make sure the content is optimized and conversion-focused while providing relevant information and solving your target audience’s issues. Use appropriate keywords and images, catchy headlines, and mention your customer’s pain points to get hold of the right audience.

Moreover, the design of your site holds great value as it can make or break your customers. Design your site’s interface using colors and layouts that are more likely to pull your target audience. Also, use a consistent design for your website to build a sense of trust for your customers in your business.

7.     Complete Technical Analysis

Reviewing every aspect of your site is a vital part of the CRO audit checklist. You must analyze everything from your website’s usability and credibility to its landing page and mobile friendliness. Optimize your website to make it as user-friendly as possible. Ensure that locating your site on the SERPs is easy and has minimal loading time.

If your site takes quite a few minutes to load, it is improbable that the customers will wait and not turn to other websites for their queries. And we can’t let that happen, so decreasing the loading time is the only way to prevent the customers from going anywhere else. Plus, ensure the website interface is mobile-friendly and doesn’t appear cluttered or compressed on a phone screen. The best SEO tools can help you analyze and fix these off-page and technical SEO issues.

Other than that, focus on the performance of the landing page and how customers are staying or moving further from there. If the customers are u-turning from the landing page, then you must address the issue immediately.

8. Run Surveys for Customer Insights

Using tools like Google Analytics and heat maps to get user insights is pretty helpful, but nothing confirms that it is all you need. Why not try getting the first-hand voice of customers through feedback and suggestion surveys?

Send some online feedback forms and suggestions surveys to your subscribers or warm leads. You can also find leads through AI. When the customers fill out and submit these surveys, it will help you connect the dots, and then you can simply fill the gaps.

You may ask for their reviews about your website usability, what’s stopping them from converting, or any improvement suggestions they would like you to implement. This will help you make changes to your website based on your customer’s preferences. It will eventually improve user experience, increasing the chances of conversions and better sales.

8.     Detect Simple Changes

With your CRO audit checklist insights, identify quick fixes that will significantly impact the conversion rate. For instance, if the website design needs some fixes in the layout or colors, do it right away, as it will take a little time.

In another case, if your emails or blogs are not attracting the targeted numbers, you can upgrade the titles of your blogs and emails using some catchy headlines to get clicks and draw more customers.

Plus, using relevant, optimized images can improve the quality of your website content and increase the loading speed simultaneously. Last but not least, clear and prominent call-to-action buttons and email sign-up boxes can really change the game for you. Such easy and quick wins can show unimaginable results for your CRO audit goals.

9.     A/B Testing

As you move forward with the CRO audit dashboard, you start understanding your conversion goals, your audience, and their needs.

When you have read customer behavior on your site and have gotten their feedback and suggestions for improvement, you can see a path to work on. Make a hypothesis for changes that are likely to move the conversion rate scale upwards.

For instance, one customer tells you the delivery time is a lot, while the other says the delivery time is okay, but the delivery charges are a concern. Maybe a faster delivery option or cutting down the delivery charges to half for limited days could bring more conversions.

To experiment with your hypothesis and identify which one is showing the desired results, run A/B tests. A/B testing will help you compare the performance of two similar yet different experiments on your site or app. You can keep one change for a few weeks and observe its results first, then update to another change for the next few (same number of) weeks and see which one worked better for your goals.

11. Apply all the Strategies

After running surveys and A/B tests and identifying priority pages and key conversion points, you know the strategies and actions you must take. Apply all the techniques into practice to revamp your website and upgrade its content. Ensure to use the hypothesis that proved right as a result of A/B testing on your website.

Applying all these changes at once is pretty far-fetched, so focusing on one at a time is more manageable and fruitful. However, you can create a team to work on the changes and brief them about your desired goals with the expected results.

12. Schedule Regular CRO Audits

Performing a CRO audit only once is insufficient for your e-commerce or SaaS business. The business market trends, product requirements, and customer nature keep changing with time. So, you need to repeat the same process to perform a CRO audit twice (every six months) a year. Regular audits will help you keep up and evolve side by side with the market trends.

CRO Audit Checklist

Here’s a quick overview of the CRO audit checklist for a thorough audit of your website concerning conversion rate issues:

  • Define your goals and targets
  • Identify your ideal customers
  • Identify key/priority conversion actions
  • Analyze sales funnel
  • Read user behavior on your site
  • Review your content and design
  • Complete technical analysis
  • Run surveys for customer insights
  • A/B testing
  • Detect simple changes
  • Apply all the strategies
  • Schedule regular CRO audits

Conclusion

Whether your website is bringing the desired conversion results or not, you will always find areas with potential for improvement. Besides heat map testing and SMART analysis, performing a regular and timely CRO audit will do precisely that and help you identify where you need to put your efforts. Follow the 12-step process to perform a hassle-free CRO audit and improve your user experience, as it directly influences the conversion of more leads into loyal customers.

If you’re unsure about conducting a CRO audit, get in touch with our experts at Kubico for discussion.

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