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The ultimate guide to CRO ideation (Part 0: Why?)


February 2020

How do you generate ideas for experiments, campaigns, or improvements to your website?

How do you decide which ones are worth the effort?

One way is to run hundreds of experiments across dozens of websites over the course of several years, while spending your free time hanging out with Conversion Rate Optimization nerds 🤓.

If that’s not an option for you, though, you need a detailed, step-by-step guide. That’s what this is.

Before you start: Why bother?

We’re going to step through a rigorous process for generating test ideas, uncovering opportunities to reduce friction, and “just fix stuff” that’s impeding conversions on your site.

It’s going to take time, though. And making the changes, or running the experiments, is going to cost money. Why go to all the trouble?

Challenge yourself to go deeper than “We want more conversions.” You can probably get more conversions by buying more traffic.

Don’t settle for “Our conversion rate could be higher.”

How much higher? What would that mean for your business?

How many additional conversions would this target conversion rate yield? Are you equipped to handle that kind of volume? How much additional revenue do you expect them to bring?

We’ll be extremely methodical, but your own subjective judgement is still a huge factor in the decisions you’re about to make. So, be clear on where you’re starting from, and where you’re trying to get.

To prepare, be sure you’ve documented the following:

When you’re done, you should be able to fill in the blanks:

We get about ____ conversions per month. Most come from _______ - our conversion rate for that channel is ___%. We’d like to raise it to ___%, and if we could, it would mean an additional $_____ per month in revenue. (Of course, the conversion rate varies week-to-week, from as low as ___% to as high as ___% … we’ll know when we’ve succeeded when we hit our target for __ months in a row.)

We’ve also got conversions coming in from _______, with a conversion rate of ___%. Raising that to our target of ___% would mean an extra $_____ per month.

Congrats! You’re done with Step 0, and you’re ready to begin.

    © 2024 Brian David Hall