Which KPIs are essential for best-in-class CRO?
Every business faces the same challenges - capturing customers’ attention and then translating this interest into a conversion. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategies can be the key differentiator for a business, enabling you to deliver a consistent premium customer experience (CX).
But how to fine tune your CX? Adopting a holistic approach and collecting data from all available touchpoints is key to gain the big picture. Localising your efforts to one part of your website means you don’t have the wide perspective and your innovations risk failing at the first hurdle - or worse, improving certain aspects of the website elements but compromising others, causing a frustrating, disjointed user experience that you will find hard to untangle.
Anchoring your CRO programme in clearly-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) can ensure you are optimising the right elements. We have identified four KPIs that are essential for keeping any CRO strategy on course for success:
- Customer engagement
- Conversion rate or value
- Cost optimisation
- Lifetime value
Customer engagement
Understanding how customers interact with your website is the first step to refining your digital experience - and this starts with analysing user behaviours. Within customer engagement, traffic is the most fundamental metric. Tracking the number of unique visitors your site achieves within a predetermined time frame can shed light on your marketing campaign effectiveness and the strength of your brand awareness. Similarly, delving into your website’s monthly active users (MAU) provides a more granular view of your website’s current retention capabilities.
Driving traffic to your website is all well-and-good but will count for nothing if visitors leave immediately. Monitoring users’ page depth - the number of pages they visit before leaving your site - paints a picture as to whether they’re exploring beyond your landing page and if the content is relevant to incoming visitors. Tracking the dwell time spent on site is also important; the longer the visitor time spent on your website, the more likely it is that your content is resonating and your UX design is first-class.
Gauging customer satisfaction and loyalty doesn’t have to be confined solely to computer-calculated percentages. You can also adopt a more human approach by integrating a net promoter score (NPS) survey to ascertain in an organic way whether your products, services and overall website experience are fit for purpose and aligned with customer expectations. And this has a palpable financial impact. Improving your NPS score by tenfold can help improve upsell revenue by 3.2%.
You can also monitor your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score to determine the customer’s mood after they’ve completed a specific interaction, such as completing a purchase or filling out a contact form. In both instances, addressing the pain points you find will improve customer retention and generate future recommendations. Even a slight change in retention can pave the way for significant financial gains - with a 5% improvement facilitating a profit increase between 25% to 95%.
Conversion rate or value
Tracking conversions is the fundamental metric for successful CRO programmes. Whether it’s macro conversions such as buying a product or micro conversions like signing-up to your newsletter the conversion rate (CVR), meaning the percentage of visitors that complete this action out of your website’s total visitors, these metrics provide concrete proof of your website’s effectiveness. This approach enables you to identify conversion bottlenecks and make necessary changes across the funnel.
For ecommerce businesses, there’s only one metric that really matters - order numbers. The higher your average order value (AOV), the better your revenue and profitability. Free shipping and product bundling are two effective drivers to make premium, expensive products more accessible.
Contextual targeting is also a powerful tool for moving the needle in this department. Relevance is everything to modern consumers; 81% of customers favour businesses that consistently deliver personalised experiences. Personalised product recommendations, either pre-or-post purchase, enables you to maximise the value of each transaction.
Cost optimisation
Digital ads, whether they’re paid or display, are often the first port of call for any business trying to bolster the level of traffic flowing to its website. However, this shouldn’t become an exercise in throwing money down a well. Monitoring your traffic acquisition costs, such as cost-per-click (CPC), provides tangible data about how efficient your paid advertising campaigns are. For context, the average CPC for a Google search ad in the UK was 97p in May 2023; if your rate is routinely higher, this should incentivise you to change tack. Another similar metric in this department is your customer acquisition cost (CAC), which provides a wider view of the spend required to acquire new customers - these range from general marketing expenses to sales commissions.
Ecommerce businesses need a firm grasp on product and supply chain costs. This involves monitoring all expenses associated with sourcing, manufacturing and distributing your goods. From an optimisation standpoint, keeping your inventory overheads to a minimum and streamlining the logistics can ensure that customer satisfaction and product quality remains premium, whilst costs fall.
Lifetime value
Your CRO journey doesn’t end when a customer completes their first purchase. In an era where maximising incremental gains is paramount, the onus is on businesses to nurture every customer relationship for as long as possible and unlock their full revenue potential. The most basic metric to monitor is the retention rate; if this is high, you don’t have to allocate so much budget towards your acquisition efforts. Providing personalised comms as well as loyalty bonuses (such as discounts) can be key drivers for improving retention rates.
What’s more, keeping an eye on purchases per user or purchases per year gives a keen insight into each consumers’ unique buying behaviours. Analysing which products they’re most attracted to can open the door to cross-selling complementary products, as well as upselling higher-value offerings, so enhancing overall profitability.
Putting KPIs into practice
Getting to grips with these KPIs enables your in-house CRO teams to accurately measure the metrics that matter. Alternatively, partnering with a specialist CRO agency such as Eclipse ensures that you’re not just setting actionable goals but also implementing the necessary improvements.
We previously worked with the Post Office to improve its website’s ecommerce capabilities. Whilst the brand has honed its high-street operations for more than three centuries, its digital functionality still left a lot to be desired.
Our analysis revealed that although the homepage’s landing page was receiving significant traffic, 30% of visitors were unable to find the desired call-to-action (CTA) button. Implementing an always-visible sticky button facilitated seamless navigation irrespective of the users’ actions. What’s more, developing this feature on mobile prior to rolling it out across all devices meant there were no UX discrepancies.
P&O Cruises is one of the country’s most established travel brands - but sales success can always be enhanced. Our audit found that the website’s ‘deals’ segment was severely underperforming, part of which was down to poor visibility. Reconfiguring the tab’s design helped it become front-of-mind for visitors, which subsequently drove a 78% increase in Bookings after viewing the deals page and a 51% uplift in the number of ‘deals’ orders.
Want to find out more about the KPIs that are crucial for CRO success? Get in touch with us to speak to our team about implementing a CRO strategy for your business.
