No matter what your content marketing goals are at the moment, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a method for improving success rates.
For established brands, conversion can mean product purchases or demo requests. Newer brands might simply be trying to convert search traffic into website traffic, or site visitors into newsletter subscribers.
Why we created this template
We created this template to identify CRO opportunities and suggest tactical changes.
CRO can focus on any number of elements in your content – visual design, copy edits, page load speed, keyword optimization, social proof – depending on your goals.
To find the best path forward, you need to first assess the page, how it’s performing, and what might improve.
What you need to get started
To fill out our template, you will essentially need data from two sources:
- Google Analytics
- Your marketing automation platform (we use Hubspot)
Step-by-step: using the template
Review the Google Analytics Data tab.
This info is derived directly from a custom report in Google Analytics.
What we are looking for here is how many entrances each page has gotten. To break this down further, how many times was each page the first page a person clicked on in a session.
You can also use page views as well. You can also dig deeper by restricting certain traffic types, and allowing others to show in your data. (All traffic vs organic traffic is an example here.)
Review the Hubspot Data tab.
The data is derived from your marketing automation platform. (This can be from the last year, or quarter or month.)
What we’re looking at here is all the leads in your database and their sources. In other words: people’s email addresses and the first page on your site that those people saw.
This info is copied and pasted into Columns D and E.
Column A is formulated to shorten First Page Seen (column E), and column B is formulated to pull information from Entrances info from Google Analytics tab. (Need to drag formula to bottom of rows to apply data for columns B and on.)
Review the Priorities tab.
This is where all of the info is combined and creates more helpful data.
The info from GA automatically populates into column A (pages) and column C (entrances).
The info from Hubspot automatically populates into column B (first page seen).
Column D has a formula to create the conversion rate. This conversion rate helps to understand which pages are successful at turning those seeing a page for the first time into subscribers, paying customers, etc. The higher the conversion percentage, the more successful that page is. Adversely, the lower the percentage, the less effective that page is. These less effective pages then become opportunities to strengthen you site!
Columns F-H will populate once you apply the formula to all 3 columns. These columns help us even further to decide which pages to focus on improving. There may be a lot of lower percentages in column D, so column F organizes the list to tell you which would be the most beneficial to focus on.
