SIDRA

Welcome back to Marketing Bites – a collection of short, easy-to-consume blog posts about all things marketing. Today we are diving into CRO and A/B testing.

CRO stands for conversion rate optimization. In my opinion, Hubspot defines it best:

“CRO is the process of increasing the percentage of users or website visitors who complete a specific action to increase the number of leads you generate.”

There are a couple different ways to calculate CRO, depending on what kind of action you want users to take. If you sell products on your website and want to determine the CRO for purchases, you take the number of transactions (conversions) and divide that by the total number of visits to your site (sessions). If your goal is to increase subscribers for your newsletter or blog, CRO would be the number of subscriptions divided by the number of unique visitors to your site. Using the number of unique visitors is key in this scenario because each person can only complete your goal action once, whereas if you are selling products on your site that are re-purchasable, you must divide by total visitors to your site.

A/B testing is a tool that can be used to increase CRO. While it sounds like a fancy name, A/B testing is well-named. To run an A/B test, you send out two slightly different versions of whatever it is you are testing to two groups (a control group, A, and a variation group, B) that are part of your target market and monitor how each group responds. Does your new version result in a higher amount of subscriptions or sales, or did your original version do better? Lift occurs when a variable performs better than the original. The data from these tests can provide you with insight on what the best ways are to serve your target market and can help you increase your CRO.

An example of A/B testing occurring in the “real world” comes from Hubspot. They tested three versions of their homepage with the goal of increasing monthly sign-ups for their courses. Through this testing, they determined one of their variable versions would increase monthly sign-ups by almost 400. They also found that their other variation version performed worse than their original version (meaning less people signed up for Hubspot courses when presented with this variation than people who were presented with Hubspot’s original version).

A/B testing and CRO are important for marketers to understand and be able to use, and I hope this blog helps you better-understand the what, how, and whys of these tools.