Most marketers try to grow by buying more traffic. The cheaper path is usually converting more of the traffic you already have. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the discipline of finding where people drop out of your funnel and fixing it — with evidence, not opinions.
Step 1: map the funnel and find the leak
List each step from ad to sale: ad click → page view → form start → form submit → contact → qualified → sale. Measure the drop at each step. The biggest drop is your first priority. A page with a 70% bounce rate needs a different fix from a form that people start but abandon.
Step 2: watch real behaviour
- Session recordings and heatmaps show where people click, how far they scroll and where they hesitate.
- Form analytics show which field causes abandonment.
- Call recordings reveal what callers expected and what confused them.
- Five-second tests with real users: can they tell what the page offers?
High-impact fixes that usually work
- Message match — the page headline repeats the promise of the ad.
- One goal per page — remove navigation, extra offers and distractions.
- Fewer form fields — ask only what the buyer needs now; collect the rest later. Multi-step forms often outperform one long form.
- Speed — every second of load time costs conversions, especially on mobile.
- Trust — real reviews, recognisable credentials, clear company details and privacy information.
- Clear next step — say exactly what happens after the click or call.
Step 3: test one change at a time
Run A/B tests where half the traffic sees the original and half the new version. Rules for valid tests:
- Decide the success metric before you start — ideally qualified leads or sales, not just submissions.
- Run until you have enough conversions for a reliable result (often a few hundred per variant), and for at least one full week to cover day-of-week patterns.
- Do not stop a test early because one version is "winning" after a day.
Measure quality, not just volume
A change that increases leads by 30% but halves the share that qualify is a loss. Connect your test results to downstream outcomes: contact rate, billable rate, appointments, sales. In lead generation, the buyer's acceptance rate is the truth.
Build a testing rhythm
Keep a simple log: hypothesis, change, dates, result, decision. One well-run test per page per month compounds into large gains over a year.
BFOUNT buyers share acceptance and billable data with publishers so you can optimise for quality. Join the network.