7 Critical Requirements for Choosing the Right CRO Agency

The decision to start an optimization program as part of your project leads to high expectations. One of the most crucial parts of kicking off this process is choosing what agency is worthy of your investment from the start. Where do you start? I’m going to walk through the key points you should consider when choosing your CRO agency. 

What is a CRO agency?

CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. It’s a group of techniques used to improve conversions, and as a result, a website or app’s profitability. A CRO agency has a team of qualified professionals that are experts in analyzing your website/app, detecting areas to improve, and implementing the ideal improvements to achieve the desired results. 

What should you take into account when choosing your CRO agency partner? 

7 non-negotiable requirements for your CRO agency 

1. Strategic Profile

When you’re thinking about choosing a CRO agency, you’ll wonder if they’ll understand your goals and be able to meet your expectations. Plus, if you share your CRO strategy, the agency should be able to understand it and detect the problems it could have as well as propose areas for improvement to solve them. 

The agency strategy should follow your KPIs and constantly iterate itself to gain results. A/B and Multivariate testing should be mandatory parts of the process to quickly find out what conversion strategy best adapts to your market. 

2. Testing tools (A/B and multivariate)

You should automatically discard an agency that doesn’t use tools to optimize the conversion rate. You cannot make decisions on intuition alone: the users that use your product should tell you what’s the best strategy. The best way to measure the User Experience is by using testing tools like Optimizely, VWO, or Google Optimize.

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A/B tests represent a traditional pathway for optimizing your website by showing two or more versions of a section block to find out what works better and get rid of the other options. 

In turn, multivariate tests do not show different versions of a section block, but instead, show a full section. It’s handy when creating landing pages and determining what structures bring us more conversions and benefits. 

It seems straightforward to do at first glance, but a reputable CRO agency also comprehends the source of the traffic that converts the most, the bounce rate, the session length, and other critical components. We gather all this with a robust analytic basis that we’ll look at next. 

3. Web Analytics Tools 

A reputable CRO agency should know the source of converting traffic. If your agency says that “your landing page has a 2% conversion rate, a 70% bounce rate, and a 1:30 minute session length,” you should be careful: this is the data, and what you need is information. 

It’s crucial to find out where the converting traffic comes from, what time it does it, and how it acts inside your landing page. They should also guide you to follow a strategy that converts, optimizes, or discards the actions that don’t help you achieve your objectives. This information will lead to benefits and not small pieces of data. 

Analytics also serves as a way to determine what devices convert better or worse for the same website. The conversion rate may be high on desktop but be worse on mobile. These insights let us focus on where we need to focus our efforts on optimizing resources and boosting performance. 

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Mixpanel are ideal for carrying out these actions and should be part of your CRO strategy.  

4. Landing Page Optimization 

Optimizing your landing pages is a critical action for your project. The CRO agency you hire should know how to do it perfectly while following everything we’ve previously mentioned. It’s fundamental to know if the visual elements, CTAs, and structure continue to capture the users’ attention and change their behavior to lead them towards conversion. 

The first impression a user has of your landing page is vital, leading us to a necessary point: the user experience.  

5. User Experience (UX)

Your future CRO agency should give you not only quantitative data (the number of visits, conversion percentage, bounce rate) and information but also qualitative data.  

Heatmaps play a vital role, given that they show the areas where users click the most. That’s how we can pinpoint possible user experience issues and move forward with optimization. 

Hotjar is one of the most popular tools for creating heatmaps, but there are others such as Crazy Egg and Lucky Orange.

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6. User Interface (UI)

Information architecture, interaction design, the visual component, etc. come together to create the user interface, or what the user sees when they get to a page. This component is also highly crucial when it comes to landing conversions, so that’s why having highly specialized professionals in this area will work to your advantage. 

7. Copywriting

Another critical component is the content on your page. How do we know if our texts are helping us achieve the desired effect? A/B testing on the one hand and having a team that specializes in creating website content on the other will help you ensure you’re doing just that. This approach helps us choose the right words, convey the correct message, and make a connection with the consumer to guide them towards the action we desire. 

At We Are Marketing, we strive to ensure your visits turn into clients to boost your website’s performance. We’re a 360° Marketing consulting firm, and this approach means we look at every project from every angle to achieve the best results. Are you ready to optimize your website and make your business take off?