CRO tools and tips to make UX better and boost sales

A 1% conversion rate improvement would bring in 33% more paying clients per month if your website has 10,000 monthly users and converts 3%. Increasing conversion rate increases revenue per user, lowers customer acquisition expenses, and improves product affinity.

But where to begin? A CRO audit will help you fix bottlenecks, meet user needs, and boost conversions.

This tutorial walks you through a successful customer-centric CRO audit.

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A CRO audit preparation guide
A conversion rate optimisation audit is a 360-degree user experience (UX) study that evaluates your homepage, detects problems that may be lowering conversion rates, and helps you prioritise improvements.

A full-scale CRO audit should be done after launch, once you’ve optimised your marketing efforts and understood your client journey.

Set internal milestones for CRO audits, such as a particular number of purchases (for ecommerce stores) or paying customers (for agency or SaaS owners).

Build explicit parameters into your launch strategy. As an example:

CRO audit after 250 direct-site purchases

Post-50 client signup CRO audit

CRO audit following $5,000 ad spend

After launch, large companies benefit from CRO audits using several benchmarks, such as 10,000 monthly users or every three or six months.

“We like to go by the average of 2.63–4.31% as the conversion rate for a well-converting website,” says Tomedia director Tomas Heligr-Pyke. You must also decide whether to do an audit and which product pages to target.

“This depends on demographics, customers, region, products/services, etc. Holding steady at 3% helps us assess website performance. Above 3%, you should focus on anything else. CRO may be appropriate if you’re below 3%.”

9 steps to a successful CRO audit
How do you identify product improvements and user paint points that lower conversion rates? Instead of discovering superficial improvements that enhance conversions but don’t improve UX, the greatest CRO audits focus on understanding your users and meeting their demands.

Run a thorough, customer-focused audit to guide your CRO program using this step-by-step process:

First, identify conversion actions
Before beginning your CRO audit, determine which conversions your firm needs to track for customers and the company, and define conversion goals.

User conversions move them closer to buying. Conversion rate for an ecommerce store is the percentage of users who check out and buy a product, whereas for a SaaS business it is trial signups or other goal completion metrics like lead magnet signups or webinar registrations.

Discuss conversions with various stakeholders to understand their impact on your company. Choose whatever micro conversions—such adding a product to their wishlist or cart or watching a demo video—you want to track across the customer journey, along with macro conversions like purchases, subscriptions, and signups.

For a thorough CRO audit, examine your entire funnel, from visitor to buy funnel to completed transaction. Find drop-offs and optimise gaps at each level. Starting there is preferable than focussing on funnel traffic.

Laura Wong
Associate Growth Product Manager, Hotjar
Step 2: prioritise pages
Follow CRO best practices by auditing pages with the biggest conversion potential. Determine your priority pages based on traffic and user journey placement.

Audit conversion-focused pages with high traffic to see results faster and assess if your optimisation efforts are on track. Don’t make top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content your main audit focus because it gets a lot of traffic but doesn’t convert because it’s at the start of the customer journey.

A blog post seeking to rank for an informational keyword may have tens of thousands of hits but minimal sales. BUT blog articles that link to conversion-focused product pages let you execute an effective CRO audit and make results-driven modifications.

Prioritise pages that convert customers, such as landing pages or pages where they sign up for demos or download whitepapers or ebooks.

3. Understand user behaviour
   By now, you should know which conversion actions and pages to assess and optimise.

Next, analyse real user behaviour to see how people are using your site and why they’re converting. Use Google Analytics target conversions and event tracking to track user conversions like purchases, newsletter signups, and webinar registrations.

Use Hotjar’s Observe capabilities to become more granular: Heatmaps show where people click, move, and scroll on your site to help you identify which conversion elements—like CTAs—are seen and ignored.

Watch people scrolling, moving, u-turning, and rage clicking on your site during their customer journey. This reveals where they’re losing interest, getting frustrated, and not converting.

Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings provide an end-to-end perspective of user behaviour, revealing which web pages and site aspects drive or obstruct conversions.

Hotjar Heatmap illustrating website users’ most active locations

A Hotjar heatmap indicating website users’ most active locations
Step 4: obtain VoC insights
Your CRO audit should go beyond quantitative user data to discover what people want and need in their own words. Customer interviews and research can reveal your users’ conversion incentives and barriers.

Hotjar’s Ask tools provide qualitative user insights to improve CRO audits. Feedback tools and surveys can reveal what consumers think about your site and customers.

Do you notice that customers add items to their cart but abandon them at checkout? Ask why users are leaving—maybe your navigation design and search filters aren’t working. If shipping costs or delivery periods are excessively exorbitant or protracted, offering expedited shipment may increase conversions.

Surveys can determine:

Determine if your product meets market needs.

Discover why users are leaving and how you can help.

Review price plans to ensure users receive all the necessary information.

Exit surveys from Hotjar provide user-driven user experience feedback.
User feedback from Hotjar’s exit surveys provides user experience insights.
Step 5: find simple fixes
Use qualitative and quantitative data to follow user behaviour and collect VoC insights to understand user happiness, goals, and concerns and identify conversion barriers.

Based on your CRO audit findings, find ‘quick wins’ or simple page adjustments to reduce friction.

How many form fields do consumers need to fill out to download an ebook if you’re directing paid traffic to it? User feedback and recordings may demonstrate they’re annoyed by needing to enter their name, email address, and other personal information before downloading the ebook. Eliminating extraneous fields and simplifying the procedure would win here.

If you own an ecommerce store, search for issues, roadblocks, and ways to improve checkout. To achieve this, compare recordings of people who drop off before checkout with those who complete a transaction, then run through the checkout process yourself to identify frustration areas.

This checklist can help you uncover more CRO audit fast wins. Check your primary product and service pages for these missing elements:

A catchy headline

Clear value proposition

Quality photos

Liberal white space

User-generated content, case studies, and testimonials provide social evidence.

Appealing offers include free trials or money-back guarantees

Easy methods to contact you: live chat or contact form

Clearly stated CTAs

See our landing page optimisation guide for more quick wins.

6. Create a conversion hypothesis
   Create a hypothesis to test for larger product modifications to determine which enhancements will boost conversions the most.

Use user and product research to identify pages and site features you can optimise to suit user needs and increase conversions.

To understand why a critical landing page has low time-on-page and high bounce rates, obtain more user information. Your audience may not be responding to your message. Your hypothesis is that including use cases more relevant to our target audience will increase this landing page’s conversion rate by 2%.

Perhaps your ‘book a demo’ page is underperforming and users aren’t signing up since they’re unsure of the demo call’s timing and logistics. Your hypothesis may be that twice as many users will book if we provide clear details above the fold on the demo’s duration and appearance.

Next, your A/B tests will be based on these hypotheses.

Step 7: A/B test
After identifying hypotheses, execute A/B tests to evaluate their success and make data-driven CRO decisions.

To evaluate your testing, specify explicit goals and outcomes. Use Google Optimise, Optimizely, VWO, or Omniconvert to create up effective tests. After creating a test and control page, split traffic between them and let the experiment run until you have enough data to select the winner.

Then, utilise Hotjar (integrated with Optimizely, Google Optimise, and Omniconvert) to analyse your A/B test results, discover why customers prefer alternative page versions, and see the user journey across a full site session.

Here’s how different teams could create hypotheses and execute A/B tests:

The first scenario
Overpriced shipping causes customers to abandon checkout.

We think a free delivery tier above a particular order size will boost checkout rates.

Proposed action: add a clear notification above the average fold (the section of your webpage users can see without scrolling down) indicating customers get free delivery on orders above $75.

Conversion rate should reach 5%.

The team conducts an A/B experiment with a control checkout page and one with the free shipping notice above the fold. Then they measure the new page’s conversion boost.

Second scenario
Problem: despite sales page traffic, consumers aren’t signing up for sample calls.

Hypothesis: testimonies will increase demo signups.

Proposed action: request quotations from existing customers across customer groups and include two case studies related to our ideal client profile.

Goal: increase demo calls from 10 to 15 per week without increasing ad budget.

The team will conduct an A/B experiment to determine if adding client quotations and case studies to their demo call page will increase bookings.

Step 8: Apply your knowledge
The next phase is to apply A/B testing, key page audits, and PX research findings.

If your experiment meets your conversion goals, your hypothesis was correct, and you can implement the adjustments.

If your optimisation approach fails, acquire more user data and create a fresh hypothesis.

Share your CRO audit findings with your team and stakeholders to align your optimisation efforts.

Pro tip: Use Hotjar’s Highlights tool to swiftly publish significant user and product insights throughout your organisation to acquire buy-in for CRO strategies and ensure team alignment.

Hotjar Highlights centralises your meaningful observations.
Hotjar Highlights lets you centralise and distribute key information with your team and stakeholders.

9. Schedule your next CRO audit.
   A CRO audit is ongoing.

You may face new competition with fresh items and offerings in six months. Adding pages and features, expanding into new market groups, or industry verticals may have changed your product or market.

The top companies and websites adapt to new user and market issues.

Make sure your site reflects internal and external changes with regular CRO audits. Frequent CRO audits assist you understand your customers and find ways to improve their user experience and convert them.

Audit CRO checklist

A CRO audit involves these steps:

Define key conversion actions

Prioritise pages

Understand user behaviour

Get customer feedback.

Find quick wins

Create a conversion hypothesis

Do A/B testing

Apply your knowledge

Order your next CRO audit.

Customer-centric CRO audits boost conversions.
86% of customers would pay more for good service. If your website doesn’t deliver a fantastic product experience, you’re missing out on a major potential to boost conversions.

Run a customer-centric CRO audit to understand your users’ needs, identify conversion-boosting site features, and test modifications. An effective CRO audit is the first step to fixing customer issues and achieving organisational goals.