Business life and marketing seem to be all about the content production these days. That has never my favorite to be honest. Especially considering social media, having to focus on LinkedIn all the time strongly conflicts with my personal feelings about it. It’s a struggle, I’m not going to lie.
Also, contrary to many, I’m personally not AI’s number one fan. I will never copy and paste content from an AI prompt just to ramp up my content production.
With all of that said, ideation is often a struggle for me for those reasons in addition to the fact that content production seems so saturated these days.
So, one idea I had recently to spark inspiration was to look at the questions that auto-populate on Google relative to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Supposedly real people are searching these. I’m not sure I fully believe that but whatever. Many of them are solid questions.
I’m setting out to provide answers to them in a series I’m calling “CRO Qs from the Goog.” This is a starting point, so we’ll see how it evolves.
Perhaps you’ve Googled one of these at some point. Hopefully you find something helpful for yourself or a teammate.
I answer the following in this post:
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
What is CRO and SEO? (I throw PPC in there, too.)
Is conversion rate optimization a good career?
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
It is the “optimization of conversion rates,” of course; however, that doesn’t tell anyone much. Even if you know about conversion rates, the conversion rate of what thing? Transactions? Clicks? Views? There are so many options. Perhaps one could infer from the word “optimization” that you’re trying to improve – thereby increase – conversion rates. 🤷♀️
Taking it back to square one…
A conversion is simply one completion of an action you want someone to take. Optimization in my words here is just maximizing how many action completions you get. Now relate that to digital experiences (which is what we’re focused on in this industry), and you’re trying to get the most action completions possible on a given experience. That action could be any number of things. To me though, this is still an overcomplicated blob of jargony nothing.
Here are some of my favorite alternative ways to break it down and think about it.
A business’ digital experiences – like an app or website – exist to ultimately make them more money. It’s not just for fun. Knowing that, it’d make sense that they’d want to make the most from each one, right? CRO helps them do that.
Same concept as 1 now relate it to what I call “money faucets.” Each digital experience is its own money faucet. Every related decision somehow impacts them. You never want to shut off or impede the flow of those faucets, right? You want to mitigate the risk of the decisions you make AND make sure the ones you execute are indeed the right choices so that you either keep the flow steady or increase it.
Businesses make tons of decisions daily. Different businesses have different ways they make those decisions, usually influenced by their culture, systems, and processes in place. CRO is a way to go about decision-making – think back to 2. It doesn’t just impact one person or one team. Ideally it should affect an entire company. It should be a driver of culture.
Now you might think this all sounds great but ask, “how is it done?” Jargony answer: user research and experimentation (AKA testing). Again, bleh. This sounds too fancy and doesn’t tell anyone much. I’ll break it down in a way that resonates more with me.
User research: It’s talking to your customers and learning from them to make more informed decisions. It’s gathering and analyzing data to understand the reality of what’s going on with something. You’d be surprised how many companies don’t do this at all, they don’t prioritize it, or they totally stink at it. Alternatives that are very common in decision-making are guessing, ego battles, and opinions. All not great I say.
Experimentation: Once you make a decision, it’s seeing how it performs first to confirm whether it is the right one. If it is, you’ll learn that. If it’s not, you’ll learn that. Again, you’d be surprised at how many companies just fling sh*t into the ether and hope it does well…or they confidently state that it’s the right choice but don’t really have any clue. All not great again I say.
It’s really a simple cycle that continues forever as a business practice. It’s like people talk about going on a new “diet” but that it should really be a “lifestyle.” Temporary vs. permanent. CRO should be a ‘lifestyle” that’s permanent within a company.
If you look at the most successful companies, specifically ones with crazy fast growth, CRO (even if it’s not called that in the writeups) is almost always part of it.
What is CRO and SEO?
I described CRO in the previous question. Check out that explanation relative to what’s here.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It’s related but totally different at a high level.
I’ll back it up even further to help describe the differences.
Everyone knows there’s Marketing, but there are actually several umbrellas under it. I’ll delineate them here (listing just the ones relevant to this explanation):
Marketing
⬇️
Digital Marketing
⬇️
SEO - PPC - CRO
SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) bring traffic to an experience – again, an app or website, for example. CRO does not bring traffic. It better converts the traffic you do have. Is there some overlap and are all of these efforts related? Absolutely. But talking at a high level, don’t worry about those nuances.
Whatever traffic you do have, you lead them somewhere. It’s not just for fun though. If that traffic isn’t making you any money, then there’s no point. CRO helps you make money – and more of it.
SEO is organic traffic, meaning it’s not paid for. It’s gained through strategic execution alone.
PPC is paid traffic (hence the name). It’s ads you see on Google and Instagram, for example. Any paid ad digitally is PPC. There are tons of options under the PPC umbrella out there.
Disclaimer, I’m not an SEO or PPC expert. Those never interested me as much to double-down on them. I’m a true CRO nerd at heart.
Is conversion rate optimization a good career?
Absolutely. I’d argue it’s one of the coolest. I landed in it entirely by accident. I went to college and was wandering around like a lost puppy when it was close to the time for me to get a job. I got lucky and landed a gig as an Exec. Admin. Assistant at a PPC agency in town around that time. I didn’t even know what PPC meant. I Googled a ton of stuff before my interview and somehow got the job. Ultimately, I learned about CRO and was like, “that’s it.” I haven’t left the industry since.
A few rapid fire points about why I think it’s so awesome:
It’s full of AMAZING people.
It’s something every business needs – small, big, or otherwise.
Everyone all over the world needs it, so the industry is global.
With that said, it’s an extremely small global community of us CRO nerds. I love that. I know people everywhere. I’ve worked with people everywhere.
It’s flexible. Work from home. Work from an office. Work in the mountains. Work any hours. Wear whatever you want. It’s quite casual.
There is a ton of opportunity as far as where you’d like to work and who you’d like to work with. It’s super niche, so jobs can be hard to find; however, it’s worth the wait if you don’t get one immediately.
It’s analytical and creative work. I live on both sides of that spectrum so the mix is perfect for me.
It requires constant learning and is extremely multidisciplinary. It’s never boring.
A few considerations that might not be for everyone:
It’s almost always learned by on-the-job training. It’s not something you really get a degree for formally. It’s not like doctors and lawyers, for example. That means the bar to entry is quite low, so honestly, there are a lot of people out there who have no idea what they’re doing. It’s something that frequently has to be combated in a variety of ways.
It’s not a hard science. There’s a lot of gray area. It’s not for everyone.
It’s multidisciplinary. It can be hard sometimes. To be a killer at it, it’s not a job where you can show up, twiddle your thumbs, and get paid for not doing much.
Experience really does matter. I used to fight this hard in the beginning. Now I know I was wrong. There’s no quick way to the top. Learning from books is different from learning from experience. This isn’t a shocker to anyone. Rather, understanding for some people just comes from getting older I suppose.
To the ladies out there, it’s still a very male-dominated industry in my opinion. This has slowly changed over the years, and I believe that will continue. However, it certainly adds a different layer to consider. Don’t be scared by it though. It’s more just something to be aware of.
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