Are you frustrated with visitors leaving your website without completing a purchase or taking the desired action, such as booking an appointment or signing up to your newsletter? This is where Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) comes in.
Put simply, CRO is the practice of boosting the percentage of users who took the desired action on your website. This could be making a purchase, filling out a form or clicking on a link.
It’s also important to note that CRO is more than just increasing conversions. It’s also about understanding user behaviour on your site. By learning what drives, attracts and persuades your users, you can give them the best user experience possible, in turn leading to better conversion rates and improved website performance.
CRO, however, is ineffective at best without access to good data. Data is the key to making the right decisions when it comes to optimising your website for conversion.
For instance, if your data shows that a high percentage of visitors are abandoning their carts during the checkout process, this would suggest that there is a problem with the process itself. So, let’s dive in and find out how to use data analysis to make the most of your small business digital marketing.
RELATED: Mastering small business analytics: Strategies for growth.
What is the role of data analysis in CRO?
In short, CRO data analysis is about identifying weaknesses and opportunities when it comes to users on your website. With the help of tools like Google Analytics you can track necessary metrics and get valuable insights into user behaviour that help you establish goals and concentrate your efforts in the right places.
RELATED: Setup Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager.
Data types to collect and analyse.
While there are many types of data analysis that can help improve your website, the following three tend to provide the most actionable insights when it comes to CRO:
Quantitative data analysis.
- Purpose: Quantitative analysis involves the use of numerical data and statistics to identify patterns and trends related to user behaviour and conversion rates
- Data sources: This analysis relies heavily on data from tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, A/B testing platforms and other web analytics tools
- Methods: Statistical analysis, conversion rate calculations, segmentation, funnel analysis, and data visualisation
- Use cases: Quantitative analysis helps identify areas of your website or app that need improvement by highlighting where users drop off or where conversion rates are low. It also provides insights into which A/B test variations perform better.
Qualitative data analysis.
- Purpose: Qualitative analysis involves the examination of non-numerical data, such as user feedback, comments, surveys and usability testing results, to understand user perceptions and motivations
- Data sources: User surveys, customer interviews, user testing sessions, on-page surveys and social media sentiment analysis
- Methods: Content analysis, sentiment analysis, thematic coding, and usability testing.
- Use cases: Qualitative analysis helps you uncover the ‘why’ behind user behaviour. It provides insights into user pain points, preferences and perceptions, which can inform design and content improvements.
User Experience (UX) Analysis.
- Purpose: UX analysis focuses on evaluating the overall user experience of your website or app, looking at design, navigation, usability and accessibility
- Data sources: Usability testing, user feedback, heatmaps, session recordings and user journey mapping
- Methods: Usability testing, user surveys, and accessibility audits
- Use cases: UX analysis helps identify user experience issues that may be hindering conversions. It ensures that your site is user-friendly, easy to navigate and optimised for various devices and accessibility needs.
Going deeper: micro-conversions, segmentation and a real-world fix.
When it comes to improving your website’s performance, focusing only on the final conversion (like a purchase or booking) doesn’t give you the full picture. Users go through many small steps before converting, and understanding these micro-conversions is just as important.
What are micro-conversions?
Micro-conversions are small, trackable actions that users take on their journey to the end goal. These might include:
- Clicking on a product or CTA
- Watching a video
- Adding items to cart
- Starting (but not finishing) a form
- Scrolling to the bottom of a page
- Visiting multiple product pages in one session.
Each of these gives clues about where users are dropping off, what’s holding them back, and what’s working.
For example, if thousands of users add items to cart but very few complete the checkout, your final conversion rate might look poor — but micro-conversion data shows that the problem is isolated to the checkout stage, not the product pages or CTA buttons.
Example: Fixing a broken checkout.
Let’s say you run an online gift store. You’ve got decent traffic, people are clicking on products and lots of users are adding items to their cart. But sales? Barely trickling through.
You dive into Google Analytics and notice something odd in your funnel report: a huge drop-off right after users click ‘Proceed to Checkout.’ Around 70% of users who hit that button never make it to the payment step.
Curious, you segment the data further and see:
- Mobile users have a significantly lower conversion rate than desktop users
- Most exits happen on the checkout shipping page.
Now you know where to look.
After reviewing the page, the issue becomes obvious: the shipping options are buried beneath a wall of mandatory form fields, and there’s no progress indicator to show how many steps are left. On mobile, it’s even worse — the page loads slowly and the form is hard to navigate.
Here’s what you change:
- Streamline the form so only essential info is collected upfront
- Add a progress bar so users know what to expect
- Move the shipping options to the top, with clearer delivery time-frames
- Optimise the mobile layout for faster load and easier tapping.
The outcome?
- Cart abandonment drops by 30%
- Mobile conversion rate increases by 45%
- Overall revenue lifts without increasing your traffic or ad budget.
By using analytics to spot the leak and applying simple UX fixes, the store turns passive browsers into confident buyers, proving that small changes, when informed by data, can deliver big wins.
Why segmentation and targeting matter.
A mistake many small businesses make is treating all users the same. In reality, not all visitors behave alike.
Segmentation allows you to break down your audience by:
- Traffic source (e.g. social, organic search, referral)
- Device (mobile, desktop, tablet)
- Location or time of day
- User type (new vs returning customers)
- Behaviour (engaged vs bounce).
This kind of segmentation can uncover insights like:
- Mobile users bounce because your layout is clunky
- First-time visitors don’t trust your brand yet, while repeat visitors are ready to buy
- Users from social media expect faster loading times and don’t stick around if the site lags.
By combining segmentation with data analysis, you can tailor your fixes to the users that matter most, instead of wasting effort on assumptions.
Final thoughts.
CRO is a powerful method for increasing the number of desired outcomes from your website traffic. Its success, however, relies heavily on collecting data and using those insights to make the right decisions.
By using data analysis to continuously enhance website performance, businesses can increase their conversion rates, resulting in the achievement of their online goals and a better return on investment (ROI).
