Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategy: How to Turn More Visitors Into Customers
Getting more traffic is often the first response when a website isn’t generating enough leads or sales. Increase the ad budget, publish more content, or find another acquisition channel.
But more traffic doesn’t automatically mean better results.
If people are already reaching your website but dropping off before taking action, the bigger opportunity may be improving what happens after they arrive. That’s where a conversion rate optimisation strategy comes in.
What Is a Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategy?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of improving a website or landing page so that more visitors complete a desired action. That action could be making a purchase, submitting a form, booking a call, starting a trial, or requesting a quote.
A CRO strategy gives that process structure. Instead of making website changes based on assumptions, you use customer behaviour, analytics, research, and testing to understand where people are getting stuck and what could improve the experience. (For a step-by-step version of this framework, see how to build a CRO strategy that actually increases conversions.)
In simple terms:
Research → Find Friction → Prioritise → Improve → Test → Learn
CRO isn’t about persuading every visitor to convert. It’s about making it easier for the right visitor to understand the offer and take the next step.
Why CRO Matters More Than Simply Getting More Traffic
Acquiring website traffic is getting more expensive, which makes the experience after the click increasingly important.
Contentsquare’s 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks analysed billions of sessions across 6,000 websites and nine industries. It found that digital ad spend increased 13.2%, while conversions declined 6.1% in the data it analysed.
Paid channels also accounted for 39% of digital traffic, up from 37% the previous year.
The takeaway isn’t that paid advertising doesn’t work. It’s that buying more traffic and improving the experience receiving that traffic need to work together.
If an ad generates the right click but the landing page has unclear messaging, a complicated form, poor mobile UX, or a weak next step, part of that acquisition opportunity can be lost. Our landing page checklist covers what to check before you spend.
How to Build a CRO Strategy
Effective CRO starts with understanding the problem before designing the solution.
Here are the main steps.
1. Define What a Conversion Means
Before trying to increase conversions, decide what actually counts as one.
The primary conversion depends on the type of website.
For example:
- Ecommerce: Completed purchase
- Service business: Qualified enquiry
- SaaS: Trial or demo signup
- Consulting: Discovery call booking
- Landing page: Form submission
- Membership business: New subscription
You can also track smaller actions that happen before the primary conversion. These are often called micro conversions.
They might include clicking a CTA, watching a product video, starting a form, adding an item to a cart, or reaching the pricing page.
These actions can help reveal where visitors are moving forward and where they stop.
2. Understand What Visitors Are Actually Doing
One of the biggest CRO mistakes is starting with a solution.
“We need a new headline.”
“Move the form higher.”
“Make the CTA bigger.”
“Redesign the landing page.”
Any of those changes might help, but first you need evidence that there’s a problem they could solve.
A useful CRO research stack can include:
Analytics
Analytics helps answer what is happening.
Look at important pages, traffic sources, devices, conversion paths, form completion, and funnel drop-offs.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps can reveal which parts of a page receive attention and which elements visitors interact with.
Session Recordings
Recordings help you observe real browsing behaviour. Repeated hesitation, dead clicks, rapid backtracking, or difficulty using an interface can reveal issues that aren’t obvious from a conversion-rate report.
Customer Feedback
Surveys, reviews, support tickets, sales calls, and customer interviews can help explain why something is happening.
Analytics might tell you that visitors leave a pricing page. Customer feedback might reveal that they don’t understand what’s included.
Combining quantitative and qualitative information gives you a much stronger starting point than either alone.
3. Find Where the Journey Is Breaking Down
Once you’ve gathered enough information, look for patterns.
Imagine a financial services company running paid search campaigns.
The ads generate qualified traffic and visitors are reaching the landing page. Many start the application form, but relatively few complete it.
The initial assumption might be that the company needs a better CTA.
Research reveals something different.
The form asks for too much information before explaining what happens next. On mobile, it feels particularly long, and users can’t tell how much time completing it will take.
That’s a more useful CRO insight.
Instead of redesigning the entire website, the business now has a specific problem to investigate:
How can we make the qualification process feel clearer and easier to complete without reducing lead quality?
That’s the difference between CRO and random website changes.
4. Prioritise the Biggest Opportunities
Research will usually uncover more potential improvements than you can implement at once.
Don’t treat every issue equally.
Prioritise opportunities based on:
- Impact: Could fixing this meaningfully affect conversions?
- Evidence: How strongly does the research support the problem?
- Reach: How many visitors experience it?
- Effort: How difficult is the change to implement?
- Business value: How close is the issue to an important conversion?
A small improvement on a high-traffic landing page may be more valuable than a complete redesign of a page almost nobody visits.
Unbounce makes a similar point in its CRO guidance: high-traffic pages can often produce useful testing data faster than low-traffic pages.
5. Turn Insights Into a CRO Hypothesis
Once you’ve identified a problem, create a clear hypothesis before changing the page.
A useful structure is:
Observation → Problem → Change → Expected Result
For example:
Observation: A large percentage of mobile users begin the enquiry form but don’t complete it.
Problem: The form asks for 12 pieces of information on one screen and gives no indication of how long the process will take.
Change: Break the form into three short steps, show progress, and remove fields that aren’t needed before qualification.
Expected result: More qualified visitors will complete the enquiry process.
The important part is that the change comes from an observed problem rather than personal preference.
6. Test Meaningful Changes
A/B testing allows you to compare an existing experience with a changed version.
For example:
Version A: Current landing page
Version B: Landing page with a simplified form
Traffic is divided between the versions, and you measure whether the change produces a meaningful difference in the target conversion.
You can test areas such as:
- Headlines and value propositions
- Landing-page layouts
- Calls to action
- Form length
- Social proof
- Pricing presentation
- Product information
- Navigation
- Checkout steps
- Mobile layouts
Avoid changing five major things and then trying to work out which one affected performance.
And don’t stop a test simply because one variation looks better after a few days. Unbounce recommends running experiments until there is enough data to reach appropriate statistical significance and documenting unsuccessful tests too, because they still provide useful information.
What Should You Optimise First?
There isn’t a universal CRO checklist that tells every website where to start.
Your data should guide the decision.
However, these areas are often worth investigating:
Value Proposition
Can someone quickly understand what you offer and why it matters?
Headlines and Messaging
Does the copy match what visitors expected before reaching the page?
Calls to Action
Is the next step clear, relevant, and easy to find?
Landing Pages
Does each page match the audience, campaign, search intent, or offer that brought visitors there?
Forms
Are you asking only for information that’s necessary at that stage?
Social Proof
Are reviews, testimonials, case studies, credentials, or other relevant trust signals available when visitors need reassurance?
Mobile Experience
Can visitors comfortably understand the page, complete forms, and take action from a smaller screen?
Page Performance
Does the experience remain fast and stable enough for visitors to use comfortably?
Checkout or Conversion Flow
Are there unnecessary steps between intent and completion?
The right question isn’t “What CRO tactic should we try?”
It’s “Where is the evidence showing friction?”
CRO in Numbers
Research gives some useful context for why removing friction matters.
+13.2%
Increase in digital ad spend found in Contentsquare’s analysis of 2024 digital experience data.
-6.1%
Change in conversions across the same benchmark.
39%
Share of analysed digital traffic coming from paid channels, up from 37% the previous year.
Source: Contentsquare 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks, based on billions of sessions across 6,000 websites and nine industries.
For ecommerce specifically, checkout research provides an even clearer example of conversion friction.
Baymard Institute currently calculates the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, based on 50 studies.
Some abandonment is unavoidable. Baymard found that 42% of US shoppers surveyed who had abandoned a cart said they were simply browsing or weren’t ready to buy.
But there are also addressable problems. Among Baymard’s reported reasons for abandonment, 17% cited a checkout process that was too long or complicated, while other reasons included unexpected costs, trust concerns, forced account creation, website errors, and insufficient payment options.
That’s an important distinction for CRO.
The goal isn’t to eliminate every drop-off. It’s to identify the drop-offs you can realistically influence.
A Practical CRO Example
Imagine a coaching business running Google and Meta campaigns to a landing page.
The page gets traffic and people click Book a Strategy Call, but the booking completion rate is lower than expected.
Analytics show a large drop between the landing page and booking form. Session recordings reveal that visitors repeatedly move between the pricing section, testimonials, and CTA before leaving.
Customer conversations uncover another clue: prospects aren’t sure what happens during the call or whether it’s appropriate for businesses at their stage.
Instead of immediately changing the button colour or rebuilding the page, the business could test:
- Clearer explanation of who the call is for
- What visitors will discuss during the session
- Relevant client outcomes close to the CTA
- A shorter qualification form
- Clear expectations about what happens after booking
Now every change addresses an identified uncertainty.
That’s a CRO strategy.
How Do You Calculate Conversion Rate?
The basic formula is:
Conversion Rate = (Conversions ÷ Visitors) × 100
For example, if a landing page receives 5,000 visitors and generates 200 qualified enquiries:
200 ÷ 5,000 × 100 = 4% conversion rate
But conversion rate shouldn’t be the only metric you monitor.
Depending on the business, useful CRO metrics can include:
- Qualified leads
- Revenue per visitor
- Cost per acquisition
- Form completion rate
- Add-to-cart rate
- Checkout completion rate
- Average order value
- Trial-to-paid conversion
- Booking completion
- Customer lifetime value
A higher conversion rate isn’t particularly useful if lead quality falls or profitability gets worse.
Is There a Good Conversion Rate?
There is no single conversion rate that every website should target.
Conversion rates vary according to industry, traffic source, audience intent, product price, device, offer, geography, and what you’re counting as a conversion.
A visitor searching for emergency plumbing services behaves very differently from someone researching enterprise software that requires a six-month buying process.
Instead of obsessing over a generic benchmark, start with your own baseline.
Compare:
- Mobile vs. desktop
- Paid vs. organic traffic
- New vs. returning visitors
- Campaign A vs. campaign B
- Landing page vs. landing page
- Current vs. previous performance
Those comparisons often tell you more about where your opportunities are.
CRO Is a Process, Not a One-Time Redesign
Conversion optimisation doesn’t end when a new landing page launches.
Traffic sources change. Customer expectations change. Competitors change their offers. New campaigns bring different audiences, and something that performed well six months ago may not perform the same way today.
A mature CRO process keeps repeating the cycle:
Research → Prioritise → Hypothesise → Test → Learn → Improve
Some tests will produce clear improvements.
Some won’t.
And some will reveal something completely different about your customers.
That’s the point.
CRO replaces assumptions with a process for learning what actually helps people move forward.
Conversion Rate Optimisation FAQs
What is a CRO strategy?
A CRO strategy is a structured approach to improving website conversions using customer research, behavioural data, prioritisation, experimentation, and ongoing measurement.
Is CRO the same as A/B testing?
No. A/B testing is one CRO method. CRO also includes analytics, customer research, heatmaps, session recordings, UX analysis, messaging research, and other techniques used to identify and understand conversion problems.
What should I optimise first?
Start with areas where the data shows meaningful friction, particularly high-traffic pages or important steps close to your primary conversion.
How long should an A/B test run?
There isn’t a universal number of days. The required duration depends on traffic, baseline conversion rate, expected effect size, and the level of statistical confidence you’re targeting. Avoid ending a test simply because one version temporarily moves ahead.
Does CRO only apply to ecommerce?
No. CRO can be used across ecommerce stores, SaaS websites, lead-generation pages, service businesses, booking funnels, subscription platforms, and other digital experiences where visitors are expected to take action.
Can CRO increase conversions without increasing traffic?
Yes. That’s one of its main purposes. CRO focuses on improving how effectively existing visitors move toward valuable actions rather than relying entirely on additional traffic.
Turn More of Your Existing Traffic Into Results
More traffic can create more opportunities, but it won’t automatically fix a weak customer journey.
If visitors don’t understand the offer, can’t find the information they need, struggle with a form, or lose confidence before taking action, increasing acquisition can simply send more people into the same friction.
A better CRO strategy starts by understanding what users actually do, identifying where they struggle, prioritising the biggest opportunities, and testing meaningful improvements.
At BrandUs, we combine conversion rate optimisation, landing page design, website UX, analytics, testing, and performance-focused creative to improve the journey from first click to conversion.
Because CRO isn’t about making your website look different.
It’s about understanding what stops people from taking action and building a better path forward.