Khalid Saleh, Author at Invesp

Ecommerce Category Page Design: Best Practices, Examples, and Tests That Work in 2026

Khalid Saleh — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:35:26 +0000

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Let’s put this all together with the best practices in creating your category pages:

1. Define the purpose of your category page

Before you change layouts, add buttons, or run tests, you need to answer one basic question:

What should this category page help the visitor do right now?

Most brands create ecommerce category pages to serve one of three roles: helping visitors browse, decide, or buy. Each role demands a different design approach.

Browsing-focused category pages

On browsing-focused category pages, visitors are still answering: “What options exist here, and where should I look next?”

When you introduce conversion actions (like “Add to Cart”) at this stage, you’re asking them to answer a different question: “Am I ready to buy this specific thing?”

That creates decision conflict.

Instead of moving forward, the visitor now has to:

Pause scanning
Evaluate something they weren’t prepared to evaluate
Either reject the action or back out to regain orientation

That interruption is what causes friction, not the button itself.

When an interface demands a higher-commitment decision than the user is ready to make, users slow down, backtrack, or abandon rather than comply.

On browsing-focused category pages, the page should instead prioritize:

Clear subcategories that reduce mental load
Strong visual hierarchy to support scanning
Filters that help narrow options without overwhelming

2. What actions do visitors want to take on a category page?

It is not enough to think about what actions you want your visitors to take, you have to consider what actions a visitor expects to find on a category page. For example, I do not buy a product from the category page. I must click on the actual product, and visit its own page to read more details about it before I add it to my shopping cart. Other visitors might already know what they are looking for and having an “add to cart button” on the category page will simplify their order process. The intersection of items between actions you want the visitors to take and actions they themselves want to take provides a list of features and possible actions you should have on a category page.

3. Evaluate your category pages analytics data

Once you’ve determined the purpose of your page, one of the first things you should do when considering category pages is examining your analytics data to understand how well you current design is working for you. We usually expect category pages to have an exit rate similar or close to the site average. If you notice that your category pages are suffering from high exit rates this is an indication that visitors are exiting your website as opposed to continuing to navigate to product pages. Something in the design is not working all too well.

4. The minimum in creating category pages

Grouping your products into top level categories should be straight forward. On most websites, you should to take down that grouping at least one level further. A category such as Electronics is too large and should be broken down further into subcategories. The question is how much further you need to break down these subcategories. In general, we do not recommend having more than 3 levels of sub-categories under each of the top level categories. As the visitor is navigating through any of the categories, you should highlight some of the items listed in its “child” categories.

5. Determine the main features people ask for when shopping for your products

Consumers sometimes look for specific features when shopping for some products. For examples, if you sell TV sets, then the size and resolution of the different sets matters to many consumers. Sometimes the brand name or manufacturer information is important to visitors. When I shop for books, I am always looking for new releases. Each of these features represents additional ways to filter and regroup products within a category.

Circuit city uses a variety of features (category, screen size, resolution, etc) on their category page to allow visitors to further navigate to the section of the site most appropriate for them.

6. List the why visitors buy your products

what are the top needs visitors express when they shop for your products? When I am shopping for books, I need to get audio books so I can download them on my IPod. So, in that case, the type of media book available matters a lot to me.

BestBuy.com’s desktop section allows visitor to identify the needs they have for buying a desktop (Basic, photo & music, entertainment, gaming, etc).

Similar to the features of the products, the reason people buy a product will also provide you with additional ways to break down your category pages further.

7. Help the user select the appropriate subcategory:

If your product is complex, visitors might need some help deciding which product or subcategory is appropriate for them. A category page should provide a way for visitors determine the appropriate decision. You can provide buying guides or wizards that help the visitor determine which subcategory is most appropriate for his or her situation.

8. Let testing tell you what works and what does not

By following each of the steps above, you will be able to provide users with a variety of ways to interact with your category pages. But nothing is set in stone. Let your analytics as well as heat maps tell you which categorization most users are clicking on and which ones they do not use. I remember one client who added a “need base” filtration to the top section of his category pages. The team was very proud of it but visitor were not clicking on it. Two weeks later we removed that filter to use something else!

Any other recommendations or techniques you used on your website?

The post Ecommerce Category Page Design: Best Practices, Examples, and Tests That Work in 2026 appeared first on Invesp.

Creating A Conversion Roadmap: How to Prioritize Conversion Problems on Your Website

Khalid Saleh — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:29:04 +0000

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Most teams waste time testing low-impact ideas. This playbook helps you focus your CRO roadmap on what actually lifts conversions.

The Four Phases of a CRO Program (The SHIP model)

A successful conversion optimization project follows the same rhythm:

Scrutinize stage: You conduct various activities to identify potential testing areas within a platform or campaign.
Hypothesis: Create a hypothesis for each testing idea identified during the “scrutinize” phase.
Implement: Validate your hypothesis through an A/B or usability test.
Propagate: You look for insights, share them within the organization and across marketing channels and verticals.

Think of it as a continuous loop rather than a one-time project. Each phase feeds into the next, creating a compounding effect on your site’s performance and learning.

1. Scrutinize — Gather Data and Identify Issues

Your goal here is to uncover why visitors aren’t getting just where they drop off. Most marketers jump straight to testing without understanding the root cause. The Scrutinize phase fixes that by combining data, observation, and empathy to find what’s holding users back.

Think of your website as a sales conversation. When conversions stall, something in that conversation is breaking down. The Scrutinize phase is where you identify which part.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step:

Step 1. Start with quantitative data (the “what”).

Use our analytics to spot friction points.

In GA4, check where users drop off in your funnel: product pages with high exits, CTAs with low click-throughs, or forms with high abandonment rates.
Use server-side or event-based tracking to fill gaps left by cookie loss — especially for checkout or login flows.
Add scroll-depth and click tracking to see which sections lose attention.

Bugs, usability issues, and conversion blockers

I will take a quick detour to discuss the various items we uncover during a website conversion rate audit.

Website bugs: areas where the website is broken and not functioning as expected. You should classify the bugs you identified by priority (P1: blockers, P4: small items). Bugs are typically put into the “fix it right away” bucket.
Website usability issues: issues where website usability is not ideal. Usability issues are typically classified as either “fix it right away” or “research opportunities” buckets.
Conversion blockers: issues that relate to persuading visitors to convert. Conversion issues are typically classified in the “research opportunities” bucket.

Many conversion consultants focus their effort on identifying bugs and usability issues on a website and rarely pay close attention to conversion issues. Without getting into a philosophical debate, I firmly believe there is a vast difference between creating a user-friendly website and a high-converting site.

Usability issues:

Fixing usability issues on a website makes it user-friendly.
Usability issues focus on making the site easier to use
Usability issues focus on top-of-mind issues for website users

Conversion issues:

Fixing conversion issues on a website creates a user-friendly website (Similar to fixing usability issues)
Conversion issues focus on making the site more persuasive
Conversion issues focus on psychological items that persuade visitors to convert

Every usability issue is a conversion issue, but not the other way around.

Beyond problems – adding new website features

CROs focus heavily on issues that prevent visitors from converting on a website. However, your research during the scrutiny phase should go beyond that to include potential new features you can implement on the platform to enhance conversions further.

Understanding your initial AB test plans: the research opportunities list

It is not enough to identify a list of research opportunities for a website. You will need to go a step further by determining your initial test hypothesis for each item on the list. The initial test hypothesis identifies how we think the particular issue could be tested/fixed.

A hypothesis is a predictive statement about a possible change on the page and its impact on your conversion rate.

Now, notice how I used the term “initial hypothesis.”

An initial hypothesis is the first stab our team takes on how we should address a potential problem on the website/webpage.

Example of an initial hypothesis:

“Adding social proof will enhance visitor trust in the website and increase conversions”

We use the initial hypothesis to assess each line item on our list of research opportunities. When we decide to implement a particular test, we further develop our initial hypothesis into a

“concrete hypothesis.” Let’s look at the initial hypothesis above and see the concrete hypothesis for it:

Based on qualitative data collected through online polling, we observed that website users do not trust the brand and are unaware of how many users use it. Adding social proof on the homepage will increase visitors’ trust and improve conversion rates by 10%.

A concrete hypothesis

states how we identified the issue
indicates the problem identified on the page
states the potential impact of making the fix (we set an actual numerical goal for the test)

Now that you have your research opportunities list and each item has an initial hypothesis attached, we are ready to prioritize the items on the list.

Prioritizing your AB testing ideas (the research opportunities list)

CRO practitioners have used several frameworks to classify testing ideas. I will cover some common frameworks and suggest using a new model.

Karl E. Wiegers explains:

“When setting priorities, you need to balance the business benefit that each function provides against its cost and any implications it has for the product’s architectural foundation future evolution.”

Pie by Widerfunnel

The pie framework evaluates items based on three different factors: potential, importance, and effort.

Potential: Not all of your testing ideas will have the same potential to increase conversion rates. A good example of this is testing different CTA colors on a page (with little to no real impact) compared to changing the page layout to emphasize the value proposition.

While the potential is significant, it is very subjective. What I might think will have a significant impact on the bottom line, someone else might think it will have no effect.

Importance: How important is the page you are optimizing?

The Widerfunnel team defines Importance as follows:

“How valuable is the traffic to the pages? Your most important pages are the ones with the highest volume and the costliest traffic. You may have identified pages that perform terribly, but if they don’t have significant volume of expensive traffic, they aren’t aren’tg priorities.”

According to Chris Goward:

“How do I figure out where to test first?”It’s a smart question to ask. You can’t test all pages at once. With limited time and resources to commit and, most importantly, limited traffic to allocate to each test, test prioritization is an important part of your conversion optimization plan.”

Ease: How easy is it to implement the test? Widerfunnel defines ease as:

There are two elements to consider when it comes to ease:

Technical implementation
Organizational or political barriers

Both of these elements impact how easy it is to implement a testing idea; however, they are somewhat subjective.

Hotwire framework

Pauline Marol, the Lead Product Manager for optimization at Hotwire, introduced this model back in 2015.

Here are the elements in this framework:

Main Metric
Location
Fold
Targeting
New Information
Benchmarking
Conversion Veins
Strategic Topic
Mobile
Opaque

What I like most about this model is the specificity it provides for the potential problem and potential fix. It also brings into focus how strategic a test is to the overall business objective. According to Pauline Marol:

“Prioritization is a critical part when building an efficient, impactful testing program. Creating a framework to make smarter choices and thinking deeply about the key factors will make your program successful in the long term.”

PXL framework from CXL

The PXL framework uses the following criteria to score items on your research opportunities list:

Is the change above the fold? Changes above the fold are noticed by more people, increasing the likelihood that the test will have an impact.
Is the change noticeable in under 5 seconds? How fast does a user notice the change?
Does it add or remove anything? The idea is that “removing distractions” or “adding key information: will have more impact.
Does the test run on high-traffic pages? Changes to “high traffic page(s)” will have a larger impact on the bottom line.
Designed to increase user motivation: does the introduction of your solution increase visitor motivation? Highly motivated visitors are more likely to convert.
How was the problem identified?
- User testing
- Quantitative data
- Qualitative data (polls, surveys, etc.).
- Mouse tracking, heat maps, or eye tracking
Ease of implementation

The PXL framework is a step in the right direction. Peep listed three main advantages to using it:

It makes any “potential” or “impact ” rating more objective
It helps to foster a data-informed culture
It makes the “ease of implementation” rating more objective

The central theme is the effort to establish a more accurate model for scoring different line items on your list.

I believe that there is room for improvement for the following reasons:

All prioritization frameworks use a mix of points to score the identified issue and its potential fix. But a single problem could have multiple possible solutions. And each potential solution should be assessed with a different score.
A potential problem could be identified in various ways, which give it a higher score. But does identifying a problem in 4 ways make that problem a more significant issue compared to a problem identified in 3 different ways? At some point, adding more ways to how a problem is detected should not give the problem more weight.
There is not enough focus on how a potential solution could impact visitors’ view of the website. PXL does an excellent job of motivating, but there are other criteria we should consider when evaluating a possible solution.
The models do not distinguish well enough between the different types of pages (top, middle, and bottom of the funnel).
Finally, the models use “high traffic pages” to score a problem. Since analytics provides a specific metric for identifying a high-traffic page, we should use it.

Invesp Prioritization framework

Let me state this again: a particular problem can have multiple initial hypotheses for how to fix it. Some of our team members like to call these testing ideas. This is important because each problem and each initial hypothesis is listed as a separate line item in our prioritization framework.

You can address a single research opportunity in different ways, each requiring different time to implement and having a different impact on the bottom line.

Next are the criteria we use to evaluate each research opportunity:

What is the potential Impact?
Is the problem above the fold?
Was the problem discovered through expert review?
Was the problem identified through qualitative research?
Was the problem identified through user testing?
Was the problem identified through analytics?
Was the problem identified through heatmaps/Video recording?
Known top competitor feature?
Does the test idea enhance primary conversion goal?
Is implementing the change easy (politically, LOE)?
Adding or removing an element?
Does the test idea increase visitor trust?
Does the test idea reduce FUDs?
Does the test idea incentivize visitors to act right away?
Does the test idea increase engagement?
What type of change?
What type of page?
The percentage of page views

Not all of these items carry the same weight.

Let’s discuss some of these elements:

Potential Impact: We do think that this is a subjective measure. However, we did not delete it. The value of the impact is high (score of 4), mid-impact (score of 2), and low impact (score of 1).
Is the problem above the fold? Where did you uncover the problem? The higher the problem is on a page, the more likely visitors will notice it.
How did you discover the problem? Most CROs will conduct a mix of activities to uncover issues on a site. Each of these activities should be called out. These are
Expert review (some might refer to it as heuristic analysis)
Analytics data
Heatmap/session
Qualitative data
User testing

Most conversion blockers are uncovered through a combination of the above elements. So, we decided to take a weighted average as follows:

If an item is discovered through one method score of 3

If an item is identified through two methods score of 6

If an item is identified through three methods score of 9

If an item is identified through four or five methods score of 12

Known competitive feature: there are instances where you want to test an item because you observed that one of your competitors have implemented. By no means should you understand this as a way to copy your competitors, but you should not ignore them either.
Does the test idea enhance the page’s primary conversion goal? Is your testing idea going to increase that conversion goal?
Is implementing the change easy (politically, LOE)?
Adding or removing an element: Your test can do several things at the same time:

Add or remove an element: scored at 3

Replace an element: scored at 2

Change the location of an element: scored at 1

Emphasize an element: scored at 1

Evaluation of visitor-centric factors that would impact how a visitor perceives a page:

Does the test idea increase visitor trust?
Does the test idea reduce FUDs?
Does the test idea incentivize visitors to act right away?
Does the test idea increase engagement?

Two or more elements give you a score of 6. One gives you a score of 3.

Type of change: This focuses on the testing idea at hand. Are you:

Focused on an element level (changing a single element), scored at 1
Focused on page level (changing layout or several elements on the page), scored at 2
Focused on visitor flow around the website, scored at 3

Type of page: How is the page classified in your funnel?

Top of funnel page scored at 1
Mid-funnel page scored at 2
Bottom of the funnel page scored at 5
Global Change scored at 5

% of page views: By looking at the % of unique page views the page gets compared to the overall website page views, you can select one of the following values:

Is there a perfect prioritization framework?

I do not think there is a perfect framework out there. We continue to tweak this framework as we work on different projects. On a recent project, our team identified close to 200 research opportunities. We ran it through a previous version of the framework and looked at the results. Some of the top items were confusing to us. It did not make sense for us to start with them. We went back and reworked some of the formulas. I am sure that someone can take the same framework and tweak it further. According to Chris Goward:

“There are no standard rules for which pages are best to prioritize. Your website lives in a unique target market, including factors like your competition, seasonality, and internal cultural environment; all of these affects how your site is used and should be optimized. The priority rating you give each of your potential test pages will depend on this unique business environment.

It is a step in the right direction. We built on existing frameworks and added elements that impact prioritization for our different projects.

You can download the Excel file for the prioritization framework from here.

As always, if you have suggestions, please do let us know

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Answer: Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is the practice of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. It involves analyzing user behavior and implementing changes to improve the user experience and boost conversions.

What is a Conversion Funnel?

Answer: A conversion funnel is a series of steps that a website visitor goes through before completing a desired action. It usually starts with attracting visitors to the site and ends with them taking action, such as making a purchase.

What is A/B Testing?

Answer: A/B testing is a method where you compare two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better in terms of conversions.

How Do I Prioritize My A/B Testing Ideas?

Answer: Prioritizing A/B testing ideas involves evaluating the potential impact, ease of implementation, and relevance of each test. Frameworks like PIE (Potential, Importance, Ease) or the Invesp Prioritization Framework can help in this process.

What are FUDs in CRO?

Answer: FUDs stand for Fears, Uncertainties, and Doubts. These are psychological barriers that can prevent a visitor from converting. Identifying and addressing FUDs can significantly improve your conversion rate.

What Does ‘Above the Fold’ Mean

Answer: ‘Above the fold’ refers to the portion of a webpage that is visible without scrolling. Elements placed here are more likely to be seen by visitors and therefore have a higher impact on conversions.

How Long Does It Take to See Results from CRO?

Answer: The time it takes to see results from CRO can vary widely depending on the changes made and the metrics you’re tracking. However, a good rule of thumb is to allow at least a few weeks for meaningful patterns to emerge.

The post Creating A Conversion Roadmap: How to Prioritize Conversion Problems on Your Website appeared first on Invesp.

How Much Does CRO Cost? Complete Agency & Freelancer Pricing Breakdown

Khalid Saleh — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 13:28:44 +0000

Reading Time: 8 minutes

How much does CRO cost? It’s one of the first questions companies ask when they start thinking about improving their website performance, and one I get multiple times every week.

The short answer: in 2025, CRO costs range from $5,000 to $35,000 per month, depending on the agency’s experience, testing velocity, and team size.

Conversion rate optimization can significantly impact your bottom line. Still, it’s also an investment, and understanding how CRO agencies price their work helps you decide what’s realistic for your budget and goals.

In this guide, we’ll break down what you actually get for that price: from staffing and software costs to implementation, testing, and how agency experience shapes ROI.

Quick version: How much does it cost to hire a conversion agency?

Let me give you general numbers, and then I will provide a detailed breakdown of different agency services.

Let me start by mentioning that the numbers below are for dedicated CRO agencies with at least 10+ full-time employees. I will discuss the rates charged by smaller CRO agencies in a separate section of the article.

The top-tier conversion optimization agencies (with a solid track record and at least 7 years of CRO experience) start at $10,000/month. Many of these agencies charge around $16,000 per month, with some charging upwards of $30,000.

Mid-tier CRO agencies (with a good track record but less field experience) will charge between $6,000 and $15,000 per month.

The lowest-tier CRO agencies (starting in CRO with less dedicated staff) will charge anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 per month.

What Drives CRO Pricing?

Before we talk about what different agencies charge, it helps to understand where the money actually goes in a conversion optimization project.

A CRO engagement isn’t just about “running A/B tests.” It’s a structured program that blends strategy, design, development, analytics, and project management. And each comes with its own cost component.

Whether you hire a specialized CRO agency, a digital marketing firm, or an independent consultant, you’ll typically be paying for four main things:

The team working on your project
The software and tools used
The implementation of A/B tests
The final integration of winning variations into your website

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Cost related to the staff who are doing the CRO work

At the heart of every optimization program is a multidisciplinary team.

A typical CRO project includes:

Conversion Strategist: Leads the research and identifies conversion barriers. Creates wireframes or hypotheses for what to test.
UX/UI Designer: Turns those wireframes into test-ready designs.
Front-End Developer: Builds the test variants in your A/B testing tool using JavaScript and CSS.
QA Specialist: Ensures tests work across browsers, devices, and user journeys.
Project Manager: Keeps everything on schedule and ensures learnings are documented.

Some smaller agencies combine these roles, but the difference between a junior generalist and a senior, specialized team is significant not only in cost, but in quality of insight and execution speed.

2. Software and tool costs

Most CRO agencies expect clients to cover the costs of third-party software used during the project. This typically includes:

A/B testing platforms: for example, FigPii, VWO, or emerging tools like Kameleoon or Mutiny
Heatmaps & session replays: e.g., FigPii, Hotjar, FullStory, Microsoft Clarity
User feedback & surveys: e.g., Typeform, Usabilla, Maze
Analytics integrations: e.g., GA4, Amplitude, Mixpanel

Estimated range: $200–$1,500/month, depending on traffic volume and number of tools.

3. A/B test implementation costs

The core of CRO is experimentation, and building tests can be time-intensive.

Factor	Typical Range
Average dev time per A/B test	10–30 hours
Complex test (checkout flow, dynamic elements)	40–80 hours
Number of tests/month	2–12 depending on traffic

Top-tier agencies handle full implementation internally, ensuring test velocity and QA are maintained.
If you rely on internal developers, expect delays. Traditional web development and A/B testing are very different skill sets.

4. Cost of hardcoding AB test winners on the site

You run an AB experiment, and you have a winner that shows an uplift in conversions. Yet, this winner is not the default design on your site. Someone will need to implement the new design on the site so it becomes the default. This cost will only apply when your experimentation program generates an uplift.

Before I discuss the costs of different CRO agencies, I will cover a few options to consider for running a conversion project.

CRO Provider Options: What Each Costs and Includes

Not every business needs the same type of conversion optimization support. Your best option and how much you’ll end up paying depend on your company’s size, internal resources, and growth goals.

Each model comes with its own cost structure, advantages, and trade-offs. Here are all your CRO provider options:

1. Hiring a digital marketing agency

Typical cost: $3,000 – $9,000 per month

This is a new trend that has taken hold over the last 4 to 5 years. Many firms that offer SEO, paid search, or social marketing are expanding and adding conversion marketing to their offer. Your results will depend on the company and the extent to which it invests in conversion optimization.

Pros of hiring a digital marketing firm:

One company is responsible for all aspects of digital marketing.
Full responsibility for the success of the CRO (and online marketing) program.
Lower cost compared to specialized CRO firms.

Cons of hiring a digital marketing firm:

One company is responsible for all aspects of digital marketing. Having multiple teams manage different parts of the online programs provides a level of checks and balances that is necessary for many businesses.
Lack of specialization: Most digital marketing firms have added CRO as an afterthought and have not invested in it.
Little attention to CRO: CRO is bundled with too many other services, and the digital marketing firm pays little attention to it.

2. Hiring a freelancer

There are some excellent CRO consultants available. At the same time, for every great CRO consultant, there are 1,000 who will NOT generate the results you expect.

Some of the best CROs I know prefer not to commit to a firm and enjoy working independently. At the same time, I have encountered some very shady freelancers who lack a clear understanding of CRO. The cost of hiring a freelancer ranges widely.

Cost of hiring a conversion optimization freelancer: Some of the top consultants will charge anywhere between $250 and $300 per hour. I would be wary of hiring a consultant who charges $10 to $40/hour. It does not mean that they are bad; you need to do more due diligence.

Pluses of hiring a CRO freelancer:

No long-term contracts: When it comes to the contract, you hold power. It is rare to get stuck in a long-term contract
You can hire fantastic talent at a reasonable cost.
Individual attention. The contractor is focused on you and will do whatever it takes to ensure the project succeeds.

Cons of hiring a CRO freelancer:

You are hiring an individual – no team behind him supports him to ensure deadlines are met
Overworked freelancers – if you hired freelancers in the past, this should not come as a surprise. The freelancer who commits to too many projects at the same time starts dropping the ball and missing deadlines.

3. Hiring a specialized conversion optimization agency

As CRO became more popular, many agencies specializing in CRO services emerged. These firms will vary based on experience and staffing levels. Choosing the right CRO firm can be a bit tricky. I have written about different questions you should ask a conversion optimization agency before hiring them.

How much do smaller CRO agencies charge?

Some of the best CROs prefer to take on fewer clients. Some like a very specialized service. Our friend, Rishi Rawat, who runs frictionless commerce, specializes in helping Shopify-based companies optimize their product pages. Anil Batra built Optizent, a great agency focused on analytics implementation (Omniture and Google Analytics).

This article is not meant to cover the pros and cons of hiring a smaller or a larger CRO agency. They each have their place.

If you are going with a smaller agency, make sure they specialize in CRO (not hiring a digital agency that does 10 things, with CRO being one of them).

Smaller CRO agencies will charge anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000 per month.

How much do large CRO agencies charge?

These are agencies with at least 10-person staff. Most of them have at least 20 employees.

The top-tier conversion optimization agencies (those with a solid track record, having been doing CRO for at least 10 years) start at $10,000/month with a minimum commitment of 6 months. Most of these agencies charge around $16,000 per month, with some charging upwards of $30,000 per month.

Mid-tier CRO agencies (with a good track record but less field experience) will start charging between $5,000 and $8,000 per month.

The lowest-tier CRO agencies (starting in CRO with less dedicated staff) will begin to charge anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 per month.

Pros of hiring a specialized CRO firm

A highly specialized team that focuses on CRO, depending on experience, this can increase the chances of a successful project
Tested process and methodology.

Cons of hiring a specialized CRO firm

Some CRO teams do not fully understand the impact of their work on other aspects of digital marketing (they do not understand PPC, SEO, or social).
Higher cost for the top firms.

Performance-based conversion optimization agencies

I get asked that question many times. Top-tier agencies do not do pay-per-performance. They have enough work coming their way, and they understand the complexity of identifying the revenue impact of their conversion work.

If you are looking for a pay-per-performance conversion optimization agency, you should expect to hire either a smaller agency or one just starting in CRO.

When we started CRO back in 2006, we experimented with a pay-per-performance model.

We were just getting started and thought this would be a win-win for the client and us. It made perfect sense for the client, as well. He got to reduce his upfront costs.

It was all fine until we ran the 2nd experiment, and got a winner with 35% uplift and 99% confidence. The client was not convinced. We ran the experiment twice more to ensure the results were consistent. They were. The client then asked to run the test using different testing software. We obliged. And again, the experiment showed that we have a clear winner. We were looking at a $45k payment.

The client disappeared for a couple of weeks. I then got a lengthy letter from the CEO trying to debunk AB testing altogether and all statistical analysis. After arguing back and forth, I made two decisions:

We walked away from the contract.
We will never take on a performance-based project again.

The most challenging part of these projects is agreeing on a straightforward methodology to determine the project’s actual revenue impact. Remember that an AB test shows a 15% uplift. It does NOT mean that you will generate a 15% uplift in revenue.

Fundamentally, I believe that a CRO project requires both the conversion firm and the client to invest. You will only succeed if everyone has skin in the game.

Just CRO recommendations – no development included

There are conversion optimization agencies that build a business by providing general conversion recommendations (best practices). They do not help with implementing these recommendations as AB tests on the client site.

You can find agencies that charge anywhere from $500/month to $3,500/month for CRO recommendations without including development work. I have many concerns about this type of work because I have yet to see it work.

Conversion Rate Optimization Services FAQs

1. What does a conversion rate optimization specialist do?

A Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) specialist analyzes website performance, user behavior, and design to identify and implement improvements that increase the percentage of visitors who take desired actions, such as making a purchase or filling out a form, ultimately maximizing the site’s effectiveness and ROI.

2. What services do Conversion Rate Optimization Freelancers offer?

Freelancers may offer a range of services, including website audits, user experience optimization, A/B testing, and personalized strategies to improve your website’s conversion performance.

3. How do Conversion Rate Optimization Consultants work?

Consultants employ data-driven strategies, conducting thorough analyses, A/B testing, and user behavior studies to identify and implement changes that positively impact conversion rates.

4. What factors influence Conversion Rate Optimization pricing?

Pricing can depend on the scope of services, the website’s complexity, the level of expertise required, and the expected impact on conversion rates.

5. Are there any Conversion Rate Optimization consultancy services that focus on specific industries?

Yes, some consultants specialize in specific industries, bringing industry-specific knowledge and expertise to optimize conversion strategies accordingly.

The post How Much Does CRO Cost? Complete Agency & Freelancer Pricing Breakdown appeared first on Invesp.

23+ Questions To Ask Before Hiring a CRO Agency

Khalid Saleh — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:02:54 +0000

Reading Time: 14 minutes

Hiring the right conversion optimization agency can transform your business.

Hiring the wrong one can drain months of time and tens of thousands of dollars, with nothing to show for it.

After nearly two decades in the conversion optimization space, I’ve seen both stories play out. About 40% of my time is spent talking to companies evaluating CRO partners — some ask the right questions, most don’t.

The truth is, conversion optimization isn’t just about running A/B tests. It’s about understanding human behavior, building a culture of experimentation, and aligning insights with business growth. The agency you choose will directly shape how those principles are applied to your website.

This updated 2025 guide breaks down the 23+ most important questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency along with what a good answer (and a bad one) sounds like.

Whether you’re new to CRO or looking for a better long-term partner, these questions will help you separate firms that talk about optimization from those that actually deliver it.

Types of CRO Partners in 2025

Before determining the questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency, you need to have a better idea of the options you have, i.e., the type of CRO partners you can choose from.

When conversion rate optimization first became mainstream, your options were limited. You had a handful of specialists, a few tool vendors, and maybe a freelancer or two.

However, by 2025, the CRO landscape will look very different. AI-driven analysis, privacy regulations, and deeper integration between analytics, UX, and experimentation have expanded the scope of what a “CRO partner” can look like.

Below are the five main types of CRO partners you’ll encounter today:

Independent consultants: Solo specialists offering strategy, audits, or light testing support.
Full-service marketing agencies offering CRO: Traditional agencies that integrate CRO alongside SEO, PPC, and analytics.
Testing tool vendors with service arms: Platforms that provide add-on professional services for setup and test execution.
Specialized CRO firms (for example, Invesp): Agencies dedicated exclusively to conversion optimization and experimentation.
AI-augmented consultancies (emerging): New-age firms combining human CRO expertise with AI-driven data analysis and hypothesis generation.

Pros and Cons of Each CRO Partner Type

Type of CRO Partner	Pros	Cons
Independent Consultants	Lower cost and flexible scope Direct access to senior talent Great for smaller sites or one-time audits	Limited bandwidth and slower turnaround May lack design/dev resources Harder to scale large testing programs
Full-Service Marketing Agencies Offering CRO	Seamless coordination with paid, SEO, and analytics teams Unified campaign and CRO reporting Easier stakeholder alignment	CRO is often treated as an add-on, not a core capability Generic testing ideas (“best practices”) Shallow research and UX expertise
Testing Tool Vendors with Service Arms	Deep knowledge of their own platform Quick setup and QA of tests Good for teams new to structured testing	Narrow focus on tool execution, not research Strategic insights limited by platform scope Higher cost due to bundled software + services
Specialized CRO Firms (e.g., Invesp)	End-to-end CRO methodology (research → ideation → testing → learning) Dedicated, cross-functional team Proven frameworks and measurable impact	Higher retainers than freelancers/agencies Requires ongoing collaboration from client
AI-Augmented Consultancies (Emerging Category)	Faster data analysis and insight generation Machine learning aids segmentation and pattern discovery Scales testing velocity for mature programs	Still early stage, so human oversight is essential “AI-driven” claims vary in authenticity Privacy/compliance management adds complexity

Cost of conversion optimization companies

I wrote a detailed post about the cost of hiring conversion optimization agencies. Keep in mind that a good consultant should increase your annual online revenue from 30% to 50%.

CRO consultants will charge anywhere from $40 per hour to $250/hour. A specialized conversion optimization company will most likely charge a monthly retainer of $2,000 to $30,000 per month. Many of them will also require a multi-month commitment.

25 questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency

These are the specific questions you should ask before hiring a CRO firm:

1. How do you determine what pages you will optimize?

Choosing which page to optimize first and creating a conversion roadmap will impact your project. Remember that optimizing any page requires analysis, development of a test plan, implementation of that test plan, and finally waiting for testing results.

This could translate into 2 to 4 weeks’ worth of work per page.

If the CRO firm chooses the wrong page, time and money are wasted.

What you need to focus on is understanding the agency’s process to determine what to work on and how to prioritize different conversion-related work.

There should be no shortcuts here. Without following a process or providing a generic answer, such as using best practices, the firm is essentially making random guesses.

If they are randomly guessing from the start, avoid them.

A top-tier conversion agency will use a mix of the following activities to come up with a conversion roadmap for the site:

Expert reviews & heuristic analysis
Jobs to be done interviews (JTBD)
User research (qualitative analysis, including on-site polls)
Data analysis ((quantitative analysis)
Usability testing
Competitive analysis

2. How do you determine what changes you will make on a page?

This question helps you understand how the conversion company determines what changes they should make on the page. Again, you are digging deep to understand the process the conversion firm uses.

You want to validate:

The process they use to determine which elements will be changed and tested
How will that process be applied to your particular website

Best practices are great in theory, but difficult in practice.

How does that impact you?

Relying on good practices will not take you anywhere. We have seen this firsthand with over 3,000 A/B tests. What works for one website may or may not work for your website. Different conversion optimization designs and processes are effective for websites within the same industry.

You can find several renowned methodologies in the CRO space. For example, Invesp’s Conversion Framework and Widefunnel’s LIFT model are well-known conversion models in the industry.

It is beneficial when a company claims to follow a specific process, but you should always request a brief demonstration of how that process would be applied to your website. The CRO company should select a page on your site and utilize its conversion process to identify weak areas on that page.

3. What type of user research (qualitative research) will you conduct on the project?

User research explains the “why” question on your website and informs your assumptions about your visitors. Multivariate and A/B tests validate these assumptions.

Good conversion optimization requires the firm to conduct some level of user research to understand its customers.

CRO qualitative research is a vast and complex field, including:

Jobs to be done interviews
Online surveys
Focus groups
One-on-One interviews
Website exit surveys

You should avoid companies that ignore doing qualitative research, regardless of the excuse they might give.

Optimizing a website for conversion without conducting qualitative research is flying blind.

4. What type of data (quantitative) research will you conduct on the project?

Quantitative research answers the “what” question on your website:

What are visitors doing on your website?
What pages are performing well, and what pages are underperforming?
What areas of your website are leaking visitors?

Analytics software provides a wealth of information for quantitative research.

You should assess the firm’s ability to provide deep analysis and insights beyond exit and bounce rates. Assess the CRO firm processes towards:

Data segmentation
Funnel and goal creation
Heatmap analysis

5. What is the most challenging part of doing a conversion optimization project?

Increasing a website conversion rate is a complex problem. Otherwise, most websites will convert at 20 or 30%. Solving the conversion problems for a website requires a careful analysis that generates focused solutions with a higher probability of success.

You should ask this particular question to the team members who will work on your project. Listen carefully to their answer.

Do they find the analytics assessment challenging, or is it a qualitative research approach? Perhaps it is identifying problems on a page or creating a successful A/B test.

Your follow-up question is, “What are you doing to mitigate these challenges on my particular project?”

6. What was the worst conversion optimization project you worked on?

Most companies think of conversion optimization as a one-time effort, a campaign they conduct once, and they are done with it. Needless to say, that mentality is counterproductive.

As a result, a company that has been doing conversion optimization long enough must have run into a bad project now and then. If the company claims they never did, they are lying or have not been doing CRO long enough.

This is not unique to conversion optimization. It is the nature of doing business. Large and well-established consulting firms in various industries often have unsuccessful projects.

Assess the answer of the company about their worst project by analyzing:

The reasons the firm gives for the bad project. Are they blaming the client? Even with lousy clients, who do exist, a consulting firm should have a process in place to manage expectations and implementation.
How the firm handles bad projects.

7. How many experiments do you launch per month?

It goes without saying that the more tests you can launch on a website, the higher the chances are of increasing your website’s conversion rate. This, however, should NEVER come at the expense of following all the required and necessary steps to create a fruitful A/B test.

There is a delicate balance between launching a limited number of tests and an excessive number of tests.

You must understand how often the CRO company plans on launching tests on your website. You will also have to allocate your resources to conduct a test. If the company is running just a few tests, your development team would not be involved. These few tests are typically small and have a limited impact on your bottom line.

Different companies take different approaches to the number of tests they launch:

Some CRO companies conduct one test every four to six weeks
Some CRO companies conduct two tests per month
Some CRO firms conduct three or more tests per month

Conducting one test every four to six weeks is too slow. Following this approach, you will perform between 8 and 12 tests per year. In our experience, that will generate a lower ROI.

Conducting more than three tests per month means that tests are not carefully analyzed, nor are results studied to determine marketing insights. This approach of throwing things at the wall rarely works.

Conducting two tests per month is the ideal target, where careful analysis is applied to test creation and results. In this approach, you will launch 20-24 tests per year. An expert CRO team should easily generate a 35 to 65% uplift in conversions in this scenario.

8. Do you conduct concurrent split tests?

Our recommendation to conduct multiple tests per month comes with the caveat that:

The tests are not run concurrently, or
If tests are run concurrently, each test runs in a separate swim lane.

If tests run in separate swim lanes, traffic from one test intersects traffic from the other test. This rarely happens on large, complex websites where visitors jump from one side to the next.

9. How do you handle mobile website optimization?

Mobile traffic accounts for ~~35 to 50%~~ 70% of online visitors to most websites. Examining your website analytics will help you understand:

What percentage of your website visitors are coming from mobile devices
What is the conversion rate for mobile visitors compared to desktop visitors

Mobile website optimization requires a different set of processes compared to desktop optimization. Visitors on mobile devices typically progress through two stages: the research phase and the action phase. Presenting mobile visitors with the right information will have a significant impact on your bottom line.

When evaluating different conversion rate optimization companies, ask them for examples of their mobile device optimization. Also, understand their mobile optimization process.

Stating that mobile device optimization is similar to desktop optimization is a red flag!

10. Who will handle implementing the test on our website?

Understanding who will handle implementing the A/B tests ensures you will allocate the required resources to guarantee the project’s success. It will also provide you with insights into the types of tests the firm plans to introduce during the project.

AB tests require development time. The amount of time depends on the complexity of the AB testing that you will run on the site. Most AB tests are implemented using front-end developers. These tests use JavaScript to manipulate how a page appears on the site. Some CRO agencies ask you to handle the development of the AB tests yourself. Some clients prefer this approach since it helps them control the project’s cost.

This, however, is not a good idea.

I have seen it fail one too many times for two reasons:

Your development team gets busy.
AB test development is different from regular development. It requires an entirely different skill set.

Look for an agency that will handle the AB test development for you. That will save you a lot of time/effort/money.

11. What type of resource commitment do you require from my team?

Most conversion optimization services will require some level of commitment from you. You should meet with the company regularly to see their progress, provide feedback, and analyze results.

When you have a winner for an AB test, then your development team should implement that winner on your site. Please also account for some development time on your side.

12. What additional fees should I expect to pay in addition to the consulting fees?

Expectations must be set correctly. That will ensure the success of any conversion optimization project.

The conversion consulting agency will require you to install and use conversion optimization software to collect visitor data and launch the tests.

Some tracking and A/B testing software can be expensive.

This will largely depend on your website and the number of visitors it gets. If your website gets more than 100,000 visitors per month, the cost for the testing software can run you up to $500 per month. Even more, some software will require an annual contract commitment.

A recent company seeking conversion rate optimization services had 500,000 monthly visitors to their website. They were not allocating any money for the testing software. They had been negotiating with several optimization firms. No one bothered to explain to them that the cost of the testing software would run them close to $20,000 per year.

13. What type of education do you require from your conversion optimization staff?

Conversion optimization is an ever-changing field. If online marketing is on the cutting edge of marketing, conversion rate optimization is on the cutting edge of online marketing.

Effective conversion optimization companies should invest in and require their staff to be educated. At a minimum, a conversion rate optimization consultant should stay up-to-date with the latest in the conversion optimization field and analytics.

In addition, since conversion optimization impacts different aspects of a website, an expert conversion optimization consultant should have a well-rounded knowledge of SEO, PPC, and social media.

The education a firm requires from its staff is a great insight into how much it wants to see its clients succeed.

14. Can you guarantee an increase in conversion rate?

This is an easy one. If anyone guarantees results for conversion optimization services, run away from them as fast as you can.

Many factors impact the result of conversion work. Among these factors, several are not within the control of the conversion rate optimization firm.

Take, for example, the quality of traffic coming to your website. If the site receives a substantial number of visitors organically from search engines, a change in the quality of that traffic (such as an increase or decrease in rankings) will directly impact your conversion rate.

The conversion company also does not control some market factors. A major ad campaign of one of your direct competitors will impact your conversion rate.

In our experience, companies that guarantee conversion optimization results fall in one of two.

Companies that are trying to make quick money and will not be able to deliver on their promises
Companies that guarantee an uplift define the uplift as for any success on any test they launch. This includes conducting a test that generates a 0.00001% increase in conversions!

Both practices are somewhat deceptive.

15. How do you determine the success of the project?

Website owners conduct conversion rate optimization to increase their conversion rate and revenue. But as we clarified in the previous question, no reputable CRO company can guarantee the results of their work.

If you set expectations correctly from the start of the project, you will save yourself many headaches and heartburn.

When we talk to clients, we define the success of a project according to three factors:

The percentage of successful tests: In our experience, up to 70% of the tests we conduct generate a conversion uplift.
The detailed and well-thought-out process we demonstrate first-hand to the client in every interaction with our team.
The learning process that the client team receives from watching and interacting with our team on the project.

16. Why should we hire you vs. another?

Why is one firm different than another one?

Differences could include process, experience, deliverables, and cost.

All of these are valid differences that will have a direct impact on the success of your project. Ultimately, your goals are to:

Assess how their firm distinguishes itself from competitors
Validate the claim of the company on its differentiators

17. What is the makeup of the team working on my project?

CRO agencies employ various approaches to structuring their teams. At a minimum, your project team should include the following people:

CRO specialist
UX designer
Front-end developer
Quality assurance analyst

Smaller agencies might not have a project manager staffed. However, if you are going to run multiple experiments simultaneously, you will need someone to make sure the work is running smoothly.

18. How many projects does the team working with me handle

I’m often asked about the number of clients we handle at any given time. We limit the number of our projects to 15 at the same time. But that is our approach. We employ a high-touch approach to managing CRO projects. A better question is how many projects does a team handle at the same time?

Top-tier CRO agencies work in pods. A pod typically handles 3-4 projects at the most. That allows the CRO pod to focus on the clients and deliver the best results for them.

19. How often do we meet? Do you have weekly or monthly standing meetings?

There are two sides to this.

For you as a client, meetings are important. You get to know what the team is working on. You provide feedback. You learn. I can go on about the benefits of meetings.
For the agency, meetings eat up time that could be used in doing work (for you or other clients).

While I appreciate that agencies try to manage the time spent on a project, I believe that successful CRO projects require regular meetings. My recommendation is to expect at least a meeting every two weeks, preferably once a week.

20. What methods of communication will we use on the project?

In addition to the standing meetings, how else will you communicate with the CRO agency? Avoid email at all costs. It isn’t easy to track. Instantaneous chat programs are okay, but they are not a good idea if you run a high-velocity testing program. A good project management tool (there are hundreds of them) provides a central repository of all the work on the project.

22. How fast do you launch the first AB test on my site?

While conversion research is important, some companies spend six to eight weeks conducting research. Their first AB test is not launched until the end of the second month. I don’t think you need to wait that long to launch your first A/B test. Our goal is to launch the first A/B test within 2 weeks of the project start (at the latest, 3 weeks).

23. How much time do you spend on my project?

The agency’s goal is to spend as little time as possible on your project while generating the most wins for you. It is a win-win strategy.

At least, in theory.

CRO projects require a lot of time. There are too many resources involved.

Agencies that try to cut corners end up launching simple tests (test the color of a button or the text on a CTA). While some of these experiments yield results, it is not a winning long-term strategy.

Trying to measure the activity of a CRO agency by looking at the number of experiments they produce in a month is also not a good idea. You can create 10 experiments in a month in less than 10 hours.

I would like to understand how many hours the team I will be working with will dedicate to my project.

What if the agency doesn’t tell me how much time they spend on my project?

You can do simple math and figure this out.

Ask two questions:

How many people work in the agency?

How many clients do they handle at the same time?

Let’s say that an agency has 25 resources. Most likely, 20 of them will be working on projects. Let’s also assume that the agency handles 50 clients simultaneously.

Therefore, the time spent on these 20 resources is dedicated to working on 50 projects.

Let’s say a full-time resource spends 120 hours a month doing actual CRO work. That means that the company pays 20 resources * 120 hours = 2,400 hours working on client projects.

How much time do they spend working with each client?

2400 hours/ 50 clients =48 hours at best.

24. How do you incorporate AI or machine learning in analysis or experimentation?

AI is changing CRO from manual analysis into a faster, insight-driven process. Top firms now use machine learning to spot patterns, prioritize test ideas, and analyze qualitative data at scale.

For example, clustering models can surface hidden friction points like visitors who apply multiple filters having a 40% lower conversion rate than average. Multi-armed bandit algorithms reallocate traffic dynamically, helping tests reach valid results 30–50% faster. And natural language models can sort thousands of survey responses by themes like “trust,” “pricing doubts,” or “delivery anxiety” in minutes instead of weeks.

Ask your prospective agency all the pertinent questions related to AI:

Don’t just ask if they use AI, but how they apply it and whether they can show concrete examples of better decision-making through it.
How exactly do they use AI in their CRO workflow—data analysis, hypothesis generation, or traffic allocation?
Can they show a real example of an AI-driven insight leading to a successful test?

25. How do you address consent, cookie restrictions, and data privacy in user research?

With privacy laws tightening and browsers phasing out third-party cookies, CRO agencies must now collect and analyze data responsibly without losing insight quality. The best firms use first-party tracking, server-side analytics, and anonymized qualitative research to stay compliant while maintaining accuracy.

They also rely on consent management platforms (CMPs) to record user permissions and test privacy-friendly setups, like cookieless analytics and masked session recordings.

Good agencies treat compliance as part of UX optimization, even A/B testing consent banners for clarity and opt-in rates.

Here’s what you should ask a CRO agency before hiring:

How do they handle user consent and data retention in tests or recordings?
Can they still run meaningful analysis in cookieless or limited-data environments?

The post 23+ Questions To Ask Before Hiring a CRO Agency appeared first on Invesp.

The Conversion Framework: 7 Principles to Increase Conversion Rates

Khalid Saleh — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 04:20:28 +0000

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Conversion rate optimization is a science.

This means you should be able to reproduce a process, step by step, through a time-tested system, to achieve the increase in conversions you aspire for your website.

Sounds good, right? That is why we created the Conversion Framework.

The goal of the Conversion Framework is to remove the guesswork from the conversion optimization process. It provides anyone interested in optimization with a specific methodology to produce consistent results.

In the following chapters of this guide, you will discover the Conversion Framework and its different elements. This framework is the process we developed and deployed on hundreds of websites and thousands of successful A/B and multivariate tests to help increase conversion rates.

The framework puts the buyers at the heart of your optimization effort.

It forces you to think of the buyers’ needs, wants, motivations, and fears. By focusing on the buyers, you will ultimately persuade more of them to become your customers.

What is the Conversion Framework and Why Do You Need It?

The Conversion Framework is a 7-principle model that explains why visitors convert or don’t on a website. It provides a structured, repeatable way to improve conversion rates by focusing on trust, fears and doubts, incentives, engagement, visitor temperament, buying stage, and sale complexity.

Since the early days of Invesp, we recognized the need to follow a proven methodology that would consistently deliver results for our clients. Our methodology is ever-evolving and growing, but the objectives remain the same and still guide the Conversion Framework we developed in 2007.

At its core, the conversion framework helps you evaluate:

Trust (T): Does the visitor feel confident your site is credible and safe?
FUDs (F): Are fears, uncertainties, or doubts causing hesitation?
Incentives (I): What motivates the visitor to act now instead of later?
Engagement (E): Does the site create connection and long-term value?
Persona temperament (P): How do different visitor personalities make decisions?
Buying stage (B): Where is the visitor in their decision-making journey?
Sale complexity (S): How simple or complex is the purchase itself?

By running through these questions, you can spot where the page persuades, where it falls short, and what changes are most likely to lift conversions.

The 7 Principles of the Conversion Framework Explained

The Conversion Framework is built around seven principles:

Trust and confidence (T)
FUDs (F)
Incentives (I)
Engagement (E)
Visitor persona temperament (P)
The buying stage of visitors when they come to the site (B)
The sale complexity (S)

With these seven elements, you can find out how visitors interact with your website and whether they are persuaded or discouraged to convert.

We like to break down the factors in the Conversion Framework into two different groups: website-centric and visitor-centric factors.
Website-centric factors relate to your website and how information is presented on it through design, layout, copy, and flow. These factors include:

Trust and confidence (T)
FUDs (F)
Incentives (I)
Engagement (E)

As you delve deep into CRO, you will discover that there are many techniques that you can use to accommodate and enhance website-centric factors.

Let’s take an example of increasing visitors’ trust and confidence in your website. How can you do that? You can use a strong value proposition, social proof, continue messaging and many other factors. As a matter of a fact, there are over 50 things you can implement on your website with the goal of enhancing trust.

How about reducing FUDs (fear, uncertainty, and doubts)? Again, there are many things you can do on a website to reduce FUDs. But it all starts with understanding the major concerns and anxieties visitors have when they visit your website or your competitors’ websites. When you have a list of the top FUDs visitors have, you address them through copy and design.

How can incentives increase your conversions? Let me first state that incentives go beyond discounting your offer. Selling your products or services at a lower price is rarely a good long-term strategy. The goal of incentives is to encourage visitors to act right away, as opposed to postponing the purchase, by thinking “I will come back to this website next week.” You can encourage your visitors through urgency and scarcity, for instance, instead of offering discounts.

Finally, there is engagement. If you are looking for a long-term relationship with your customers, you must move beyond a single conversion, into customer retention. Engagement involves surpassing customers’ expectations, by creating Aha moments. That is easier said than done.

Visitor-centric factors relate to the website visitor’s mindset and nature of the purchase. These factors include:

Visitor persona temperament (P)
The buying stage of visitors when they come to the site (B)
The sale complexity (S)

You do not have control over these factors. That does not mean you ignore them. You have to accommodate them in your design, copy, and visitor flow.

By their nature, visitor-centric factors are more difficult to design for. They are more complex. That is the reason many conversion optimization consultants focus on website-centric factors. These tend to be easier to deal with.

Most marketers talk about personas and market segments. They know it all very well in theory. However, they fail in implementing it when they are designing their website or marketing campaigns.

Tech companies often fail at marketing because they take a fundamentally flawed approach to designing marketing strategy and campaigns. Subpar marketing leads to “me-too” uninspiring content on corporate blogs with insignificant social shares and superficiality from the target audience’s viewpoint. Tech companies struggle to create strategic messaging to describe their products and use undifferentiated messages, jargon and superlatives. The end result is that marketing drains significant resources on paid acquisition campaigns that have no market segmentation or designated landing pages.

Check Myk Pono’s How to Design Marketing Campaigns: The Importance of Market Segmentation

Not every visitor who comes to your site is ready to buy. Actually, studies by Invesp show that less than 20% of website visitors are in the action stage. Most websites focus just on these visitors, and ignore the remaining 80% who are interested in the products and services, but still unenthusiastic to make a purchase. However, visitors early in the conversion funnel should be addressed as well through copy and design.

Sale complexity, the final element of the Conversion Framework, deals directly with the nature of the item you are selling and how your prospect makes the decision of buying from you. To put things into perspective, consider the difference between selling t-shirts online versus enterprise software that costs millions of dollars. Your website and campaigns must account for both the complexities of selling your products as well as the many steps your visitors go through before making the conversion decision.
The following chapters in this guide go into details for each of Framework elements.

As you apply these principles to your website or campaign, you begin to see their impact. By implementing the science of online testing, you can measure the impact of any change you make on your bottom line.

Understanding the Conversion Rate Uplift Formula

The Conversion Framework Uplift Formula translates the different factors of the Conversion Framework in a formula you can apply to different pages on your website.

CRU = {3T-(2F-(I+E))] *B}^ (P * C)

This is not a mathematical formula.

This formula rather attempts to decipher human behavior on the web, recognizing which factors persuade visitors to convert on a website as well as which ones make them abandon the site.

Here are some notes you should keep in mind as you study this CRU formula:

Each element in the Conversion Framework is broken into several sub-elements. The seven elements of the framework translate into close to 300 sub-elements to evaluate on a website.
Trust (T) has the most impact on a visitor’s decision to convert. This makes sense. If the visitor does not trust the website, he will not buy from it. As you start analyzing your pages to determine what should be fixed on them, the first thing you look at is trust and its subcomponents such as value proposition, continuing in messaging, social proof and many others.
FUDs (fears, uncertainties, and doubts – F) play a determining role in reducing visitors’ trust of the website by increasing anxieties.
The best way to deal with FUDs is through incentives (I) and engagement (E).
The buying stage (B) visitors come at impacts whether they will convert. Only 20% of your website visitors are ready to convert. The remaining ones are early on the buying process. That does not mean you should ignore them, you just need to design for them.
The sale complexity (C) has a direct impact on the purchase decision. Some items are more of a considered purchase, while others are quick decisions. The more complex the sale, the more difficult it is to close.
The visitor persona (P) temperament impacts how fast a visitor converts on your website.

Using the Conversion Framework during a CRO program

During one of our webinars, we presented the use of the Framework elements across different classes of webpages on a CRO program we ran for one of our clients. The video below will give you insights into how to use the Conversion Framework elements to see greater ROI.

So, how do you apply the Conversion Framework during a CRO project?

You go through several steps as you are optimizing your website for conversions. At a very high level these steps are:

Conducting Heuristic Analysis
Conducting Qualitative Analysis
Conducting Quantitative Analysis
Conducting Competitive analysis
Creating Conversion Roadmap
Identify Problems
Use the Conversion Framework for assessing problems
Prioritize Problems on the Page
Create Hypothesis
Create New Designs
Conduct A/B Testing
Conduct Post-Test Analysis

As you can see, the Conversion Framework is used in step 7 of a CRO system. Increasing a website conversion rate comes with a lot of complexities. If that were not the case, most websites would be converting at 20% and 30%, but average website conversion rates remain quite below this mark.

The next few chapters will introduce you to each one of the elements of the Conversion Framework and provide many examples on how to apply them while conducting a CRO project.

The post The Conversion Framework: 7 Principles to Increase Conversion Rates appeared first on Invesp.

The State of Impulse Buying (Statistics & Trends 2025)

Khalid Saleh — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:37:00 +0000

Reading Time: 7 minutes

We’ve all done it—bought something we didn’t plan to. Maybe it was a “limited-time” offer or a bad day that needed a quick pick-me-up. These small, emotional decisions add up quickly: impulse purchases account for nearly 40% of all online spending.

This article talks in detail about what drives impulse buying and how smart design can turn those moments of temptation into conversion.

What Is Impulse Buying (Definition + Psychology)

Impulse buying refers to making an unplanned purchase driven by emotion rather than logic. It’s that moment when desire overrides deliberation and when a shopper clicks “Add to Cart” not because they need something, but because it feels good in the moment.

Psychologists refer to this as instant gratification, the urge to satisfy a craving immediately rather than waiting. Neuroscience research indicates that dopamine, the brain chemical associated with pleasure and motivation, plays a crucial role in this process. When dopamine levels rise, people become more likely to choose immediate rewards over delayed ones, even if waiting would be a more rational choice.

In fact, a well-known study on human impulsivity found that increased dopamine activity directly heightens the tendency to make impulsive decisions—the exact mechanism behind many impulse purchases.

That’s why clicking Add to Cart can feel rewarding in the moment, even when logic says otherwise.

Impulse Buying Statistics: How Common Is It?

84% of all shoppers have made impulse purchases

This high percentage suggests a significant influence of emotional and psychological factors on spending habits, as consumers often prioritize immediate satisfaction over rational decision-making.

It also sheds light on the prevalent phenomenon of impulse buying in today’s consumer culture. Common examples of impulse purchases include clothing and groceries, with trends indicating an increase in impulse buying during special occasions, such as the holiday season. This data underscores the pervasive nature of impulse buying behavior, where individuals make unplanned and spontaneous purchases.

The prevalence of impulse buying in the market highlights the need for retailers to understand and capitalize on these tendencies, while consumers can benefit from recognizing and managing their own impulses to make more informed purchasing decisions.

40% of all the money spent on e-commerce is attributed to impulse purchases

The data highlights the substantial impact of impulsive behavior in shaping the financial dynamics of e-commerce, emphasizing the role of immediate desires and spur-of-the-moment choices in driving online sales. Managing impulse buying is crucial to save money and make more mindful purchasing decisions. Businesses in the digital marketplace can leverage this information to tailor their strategies and capitalize on the prevalence of impulse buying in the online shopping experience.

54% of U.S shoppers acknowledge spending $100 or more on impulse buys

More than half of U.S. shoppers—54 percent—have admitted to spending $100 or more on an impulse buy, including 20 percent who have spent at least $1,000. By understanding the extent to which consumers are willing to spend impulsively, businesses can optimize their approaches to capitalize on this behavior, whether through strategic promotions, targeted advertising, or creating a shopping environment that encourages spontaneous purchases.

Compulsive shopping, however, is a dangerous progression from impulse buying, with detrimental impacts on finances and personal well-being.

8 out of 10 impulse buys are made in a brick-and-mortar store

This indicates the continued significance of physical retail spaces in driving spontaneous consumer purchases. Optimizing in-store experiences and strategically placing products can be pivotal in capitalizing on impulsive buying behavior. Creating visually appealing displays, offering limited-time promotions, and ensuring an easily navigable layout can enhance the likelihood of impulse purchases.

Impulsive shopping, often driven by emotional spending, is a common behavior where people buy things to reward themselves or cope with negative feelings. Strategies to manage this behavior include undertaking a no-spend challenge.

While e-commerce continues to grow, the tangible and immediate nature of brick-and-mortar environments provides a unique opportunity for businesses to leverage human psychology and boost spontaneous buying, emphasizing the need for a well-crafted in-store strategy to complement online efforts.

Single shoppers make 45% more impulse buys compared to married shoppers.

Marketing strategies and product placements targeting single individuals may yield higher returns in terms of impulsive purchases. Understanding the distinct consumer buying behavior of single shoppers versus married ones enables businesses to tailor their promotional efforts accordingly.

Only 13% of buyers engage in planned impulse buying on a shopping trip.

While a majority of buyers may adhere to predetermined shopping lists during planned trips, the 13% engagement in impulse buying suggests that there is still room to influence purchasing decisions through targeted marketing, appealing displays, and strategic product placements.

Recognizing and capitalizing on this minority’s openness to spontaneity becomes crucial, urging businesses to craft nuanced approaches that balance the predictability of planned trips with opportunities to stimulate impulse purchases and enhance overall sales.

46% of men regret impulse buys compared to 52% of women.

Understanding the varying degrees of post-purchase regret can inform targeted interventions, such as personalized post-purchase communication or specialized return policies, aimed at mitigating buyer’s remorse. By recognizing and responding to these gender-specific tendencies, businesses can refine their customer engagement strategies, enhance customer satisfaction, and potentially influence brand loyalty based on distinct consumer behaviors among men and women in the aftermath of impulse purchases.

52% of millennials were more likely to make impulse purchases

Studies show that millennials were 52% likely to engage in impulse shopping than any other generation, making it essential for businesses to understand and cater to the preferences of millennial impulse buyers.

Crafting marketing strategies that resonate with the spontaneity of their impulse spending tendencies, providing visually engaging displays, and promoting limited-time offers can capture their attention during unplanned purchases.

Recognizing the unique dynamics of millennial impulse buyers allows businesses to tailor their product offerings and promotional efforts effectively, capitalizing on the spontaneity inherent in their purchasing behavior to drive increased sales and engagement.

The average shopper will make an average of 3 unplanned purchases out of every 10 store visits they make.

Unplanned Purchases

All this highlights the prevalence of impulsive spending habits and impulsive buying behavior among consumers. Understanding this aspect of shopping behavior is crucial in developing effective strategies to capitalize on unplanned purchases.

Creating an in-store environment conducive to spontaneous buying, strategically placing enticing products, and leveraging promotional tactics can harness the impulse buying tendencies of customers.

Acknowledging and adapting to the frequency of unplanned purchases in the design of marketing campaigns and store layouts allows businesses to optimize their overall sales strategy, tapping into the dynamics of impulsive spending to enhance customer satisfaction and drive increased revenue.

The Psychology of Impulse Purchases

A combination of mental and emotional triggers often drives impulse purchases. Research suggests that the brain’s reward system is activated when a consumer sees a product or receives a promotional message, releasing feel-good chemicals such as dopamine. This can lead to a sense of instant gratification and pleasure, making it more likely for the consumer to make an impulse purchase.

Additionally, emotional states such as stress, anxiety, and boredom can also contribute to impulse buying. Consumers may use shopping as a coping mechanism to relieve negative emotions or to satisfy their temptation to buy. Understanding these mental and emotional triggers can help individuals develop strategies to resist impulse purchases and make more intentional purchasing decisions.

Why We Engage in Impulse Shopping

Impulse shopping is a multifaceted behavior influenced by various factors. One primary reason is the thrill of the hunt. The excitement of discovering a new product or snagging a limited-time offer can be exhilarating, leading to spontaneous purchases. Social and cultural factors also play a significant role. For instance, societal norms and peer pressure can drive individuals to make unplanned purchases to fit in or keep up with trends.

Marketing tactics are another powerful influence. Retailers use strategies like scarcity, urgency, and visually appealing displays to entice consumers into making impulse buys. The combination of these elements creates an environment where impulse shopping thrives, making it essential for consumers to be aware of these influences to manage their spending habits better.

Types of Impulse Purchases

Impulse purchases can be categorized into several types, each with its own characteristics and triggers:

Pure Impulse Buying: This is the most spontaneous form of impulse buying, where a consumer makes an unplanned purchase without any prior intention. An example could be grabbing a candy bar at the checkout counter.
Reminder Impulse Buying: This occurs when a consumer is reminded of a need or desire upon seeing a product. For instance, seeing a display of sunscreen might remind someone to buy it for an upcoming beach trip.
Suggestion Impulse Buying: In this type, a consumer makes a purchase based on a suggestion or recommendation, often influenced by marketing tactics. An example could be buying a new gadget after seeing an influencer’s review.
Planned Impulse Buying: This involves a consumer planning to make a purchase but not deciding on the specific product until they see it. For example, someone might plan to buy a gift but only choose the actual item when they find something appealing in the store.

Understanding these types of impulse purchases can help consumers recognize their buying patterns and make more informed decisions, ultimately aiding in saving money and reducing unplanned expenditures.

States of Mind When Making an Impulsive Purchase

When making an unplanned purchase, 50% of females express greater excitement, whereas only 47% of males share the same level of enthusiasm.

When intoxicated, 13% of males exhibit impulse buying behavior, while only 5% of females engage in impulse purchases under the same circumstances.

Infographic by- Invesp Conversion Optimization Services

The post The State of Impulse Buying (Statistics & Trends 2025) appeared first on Invesp.

The Importance of Word Of Mouth Marketing – Statistics and Trends 2025

Khalid Saleh — Mon, 26 May 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Everywhere you look, you see ads. Amid this chaos, word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) helps you cut through the noise by doing what algorithms can’t—building trust.

Whether it’s a quick recommendation in a WhatsApp group, a 15-second TikTok from a micro-influencer, or a glowing review in a niche subreddit, WOMM drives more credible, more lasting influence than traditional media ever could.

This article breaks down the importance of word-of-mouth marketing in 2025, the channels where it’s most active, and the latest data that proves why it’s still your most valuable growth driver. You’ll also find actionable strategies—backed by examples and tools—to help you scale WOMM for your brand.

What Is Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)?

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) occurs when customers organically promote a brand, product, or experience through conversations, posts, reviews, or recommendations. It can be spontaneous or sparked by a strategy (like a referral program or community campaign).

In 2025, it will not be just friends chatting that moves the needle. Every time you see referrals in private messages, niche forums, shared user-generated content (UGC), and everyday micro-influencer posts, you can safely say that it’s a part of WOMM.

Key channels for WOMM in 2025

In 2025, word-of-mouth marketing will spread through more nuanced and fragmented channels than ever before. It’s no longer just face-to-face chats or viral tweets—it’s happening across invisible networks, niche communities, and personal-feeling content formats.

Here are the key channels where WOMM is most active today:

Dark Social: Think WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Slack, and email—places where people share product links privately. This is where most recommendations happen, but they’re hard to track. (More on this later.)
Online Communities: Reddit threads, Discord servers, and closed Facebook groups often host authentic, high-intent conversations about brands, especially in niches like skincare, productivity, or sustainability.
User-Generated Content (UGC): Organic posts, videos, and reviews from real customers serve as modern-day word-of-mouth, especially in DTC and creator-led spaces.
Micro-Influencers: Smaller creators with strong community ties outperform larger influencers in trust and engagement. They often act as super-referrers.
Reviews & Testimonials: From product pages to Trustpilot, customer reviews influence discovery and reinforce purchase decisions. It’s one of the most scalable forms of WOM.
Offline Triggers: Thoughtful packaging, real-world experiences, and physical brand moments (like events or pop-ups) help spark conversations, both in person and online.

Word of Mouth Marketing Statistics to Know in 2025

Here are some statistics that prove the power of word-of-mouth in 2025:

People Trust People More Than Ads—By a Long Shot

A massive 88% of consumers say they trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other type of advertising.

Think about it: when someone you know says, “This worked for me,” you don’t question it like a paid ad or influencer post. You believe them. You might even go look the product up immediately.

That’s what makes word-of-mouth marketing so powerful. It moves people to act because it feels personal. Brands that focus on creating genuinely great experiences and then make it easy for people to talk about them get the kind of exposure money can’t replicate.

Word of Mouth is Still the #1 Way People Discover New Brands

A 2023 survey found that 36% of U.S. internet users said word of mouth was their leading source of brand discovery, beating out social media ads (32%) and mobile app ads (21%).

This means that, despite the rise of paid performance channels, people still trust people more than algorithms.

For marketers, this is a reminder: while paid reach gets you in front of people, trust gets them to act. If people aren’t discussing your product on group chats, dinner tables, or Slack threads, you’re missing the channel that drives the highest-intent traffic of all.

Referred Customers Don’t Just Convert—They Multiply

Word-of-mouth becomes a growth loop, not just a one-time win.

A Harvard Business Review study analyzing data from over 41 million customers of a cashback app found that customers who joined through a referral not only purchased more. They also went on to refer 30% to 57% more new customers than users acquired through other channels.

This turns word-of-mouth into a compounding asset. That’s the kind of retention plus acquisition combo most ad campaigns can’t touch.

Referred Customers Stick Around Longer and Spend More

According to multiple studies, customers who come through referrals stay 37% longer and deliver 16% more lifetime value than those acquired through paid ads or cold outreach.

In other words, they don’t just buy once and bounce. They buy again, engage more often, and are more likely to refer others.

This happens because they enter your brand ecosystem with built-in trust. Someone they know already gave you a vote of confidence, and that shortcut to credibility pays off long after the first purchase.

The takeaway? If you want higher-value customers, don’t just spend more on ads. Build systems that encourage your best customers to bring in more people like them.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing in 2025: Key Trends and How to Capitalize on Them

In 2025, word-of-mouth marketing is unfolding quietly across DMs, Discords, and creator-driven content.

As consumer trust in polished ads declines, brands are finding smarter ways to spark organic advocacy in the spaces people pay attention to.

Here are the key trends shaping modern WOMM and how to emulate them to make your business more successful and inspire customer loyalty.

Micro-Influencers and Nano Communities Are More Trusted Than Celebrities

In 2025, the most influential voices are small, specific, and deeply embedded in their communities. There’s a reason micro-influencers (10K–50K followers) and nano-influencers (<10K followers) are outperforming traditional celebrity endorsements across every primary metric: trust, engagement, conversion, and ROI.

The numbers tell a clear story.

87.7% of all TikTok creators are nano-influencers, and they generate an average engagement rate of 10.3%, nearly triple that of megastars.

Engagement rates decline across all influencer tiers (2021–2024), but nano (1K–10K) and micro (10K–50K) creators consistently outperform larger accounts, maintaining the highest average engagement through 2024.

63% of shoppers say they’re more likely to buy a product if it’s recommended by a social media influencer they trust.

But how do you capitalize on micro-inflencer WOMM in 2025?

Working with micro-influencers shouldn’t feel vague or hard to measure. Here’s how to turn it into a focused, repeatable channel that drives both reach and revenue.

1. Use Modash to shortlist 20–30 creators who already post about your category

Instead of working with whoever slides into your DMs, start with a focused shortlist.

Use a tool like Modash to filter for creators with 5K–50K followers, at least 3% engagement, and existing content related to your niche—like “mineral sunscreen” if you’re in skincare, for example.

Finding nano influencers in your niche and based on other filters (Source)

This approach helps you find creators whose audience already trusts them on the topic you’re trying to sell.

2. Send 10 of them your best product, no strings attached

Reach out with a simple note offering to send them your hero product. Don’t attach any posting requirements or approval steps. Just ship the product, include a handwritten message that reflects your brand tone, and trust the quality to speak for itself.

You’ll often find that 4–5 of those 10 will post something anyway, and organic, unsolicited content performs better than most paid collaborations.

This kind of no-ask gifting is called product seeding—you send your product to creators without asking them to post. It’s personal, low-pressure, and often more effective than paid campaigns.

Graza, a DTC olive oil brand, did precisely this. They shipped bottles to food creators they genuinely liked and thought aligned with their brand values, added handwritten notes, and didn’t ask for anything.

The posts came anyway. Small content creators who received the product shared their experiences, generating authentic user-generated content (UGC).

The result? Graza sold out during their first week in business, bringing in $100,000 in revenue. Within three months, they surpassed $500,000 in revenue, all without spending on traditional advertising.

3. Give each creator a trackable URL to measure real impact

The biggest mistake in micro-influencer marketing is not tracking correctly. Every creator should get a unique, UTM-tagged link using Bitly or Switchy. It can look like:

brand.com/lip-oil?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=influencer&utm_campaign=jenna

This link shows how many clicks each person made, whether they shared it via DMs, Stories, or in a private group.

Without this, all your traffic shows up as “direct,” and you’ll never know which creators helped you grab more eyeballs.

Most Shares Happen in Dark Social, Not Public Feeds

Word-of-mouth in 2025 will live in private, untrackable channels: DMs, text messages, WhatsApp, Slack, and even Discord. Beyond exchanging messages, these platforms are your customers’ most-used sharing surfaces, and they don’t leave visible traces in traditional analytics.

Analytics expert Steve Lamar recently ran a deep attribution experiment to understand how platforms pass referral data.

By redirecting clicks through uniquely structured subdomains, he managed to track what GA4 misses. Here’s what he found:

100% of clicks from TikTok profiles and apps like WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, and Mastodon were attributed as “direct” traffic—completely untrackable via default Google Analytics.
75% of clicks from Facebook Messenger were also misattributed.
Even mainstream platforms like Instagram (70%), LinkedIn (86%), and Pinterest (88%) mostly passed incomplete or no attribution data.

Dark traffic on major social networks (Source)

This means that even if people actively share your brand, you won’t see it in your dashboards unless you track differently.

But despite its untraceability, dark social is modern-day word-of-mouth. When a friend DMs a product link, shares a TikTok, or mentions your brand in a private Slack channel, they recommend it and influence purchase decisions.

But since it shows up as “direct traffic,” most brands don’t realize what’s working.

So, since you can’t see every share, how do you capitalize on dark social WOMM? Here are some quick tips that can help:

1. Track smarter with share-optimized URLs.

Many brands lose visibility because all shared links look the same in their analytics (“direct traffic”).

The fix? Use custom links with tags. Create trackable URLs using UTM parameters (small bits of info added to the end of a URL) so you know where the click came from.

For example, instead of sharing website.com/product-a, use website.com/product-a?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_campaign=drop1.

This helps you see if someone clicked the link from WhatsApp, email, or Instagram bio, even if it was shared privately.

Pro tip: You can use Bitly for branded, shortened links or Switchy for link retargeting and deeper analytics.

2. Make it easy to share products via WhatsApp, Messenger, or DMs

After someone buys a product, gets a discount code, or finishes a quiz, they’re in a high-emotion state. This is when they’re most open to sharing something they love (or just scored) with a friend.

To make the most of this, brands need to remove friction. The best way to do this is by adding “Send to a friend” or “Share on WhatsApp” buttons on post-purchase confirmation pages, wishlists, and quiz result screens.

A great example of this in action: Fashionette, a luxury fashion retailer in Europe, integrated WhatsApp sharing directly into a giveaway flow.

They launched a giveaway campaign where users could click a Facebook ad and join a sunglasses giveaway by clicking “Chat with us” on WhatsApp.

Once in the chat, users get real-time responses and can easily share the offer with friends, creating a conversational entry point for word-of-mouth.

Users click “Chat with us” on the ad to enter the giveaway via WhatsApp, making it easy to join and share the offer with friends in just a few taps (Source)

This shift to real-time, one-on-one messaging paid off. Fashionette’s WhatsApp flows converted 7.4 times higher than their most engaged email segments, driving a 25% increase in average order value.

3. Watch for sudden traffic spikes—then trace the source

Not all dark social traffic is invisible. Sometimes, the signal is a sharp rise in direct traffic to a specific product or blog page, primarily when you haven’t run paid campaigns or sent emails.

This often means someone shared your link in a WhatsApp group, Discord server, or Slack workspace. But instead of showing up as a referral, it shows up as “direct traffic.”

Here’s what to do:

Set up daily traffic alerts in your analytics platform. For example, in Google Analytics 4, you can use “Custom Insights” to trigger alerts when a page’s traffic exceeds a certain threshold—say, 200% of its weekly average. (This guide helps you set up custom insights in GA4.)

Setting up custom metrics in GA4 to track a sudden traffic spike (Source)

Cross-check those spikes with your marketing activity. Identify this by asking yourself:
- Did you publish a TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Story in the past 24 hours?
- Was your product linked in a newsletter, Substack issue, or X thread?
- Did someone post about you in a Reddit community (search via site:reddit.com yourbrand)?
- Did a micro-influencer quietly tag or mention you in a private story or channel?

Correlate timestamped events. Once you notice a traffic spike, dig into the timestamps in your analytics and compare them to when your content—or any third-party content—went live. Let’s say your product page for a “hydrating mist” usually gets around 120 visits daily. On May 5th, you notice 670 visits to that page within two hours, all showing up as “direct traffic.” That’s a red flag for dark social. You check TikTok and discover that a creator with 18,000 followers posted a GRWM (get ready with me) video that morning featuring your mist. That’s likely your referral source—just hidden from plain view in your analytics.

Private Communities Are Becoming Brand Powerhouses

In 2025, brands are seeing more word-of-mouth action inside closed groups than they do on open platforms. Think, Slack channels, Discord servers, subscription-based Substacks, even private Facebook or Geneva groups.

According to a 2024 report by TINT, 40.9% of consumers said they planned to increase their participation in online communities, marking a 9% year-over-year growth.

But more importantly, it’s working:

73.6% of consumers say they purchase more frequently because of a brand’s online community
75% agree that communities improve the customer experience
57% report better brand SEO tied to community discussions
90% of community managers say user suggestions directly inform product improvements
And in some cases, over 30% of total revenue can be traced back to the influence of a brand’s community

So, how do you tap into this in 2025? Here are some quick, actionable tips:

Find where your customers already gather. Instead of building your community from scratch, start by identifying where high-intent conversations are already happening. You can use platforms like Common Room to surface mentions of your brand or product across Slack groups, Discord servers, or Reddit threads you care about.

Don’t show up to promote, show up to participate. Community members can spot a sales pitch from a mile away. Join as a peer instead of leading with a CTA or product link. Offer value: answer questions, host an AMA (Ask Me Anything), or share honest behind-the-scenes updates from your product or team.
Seed early access or limited drops inside these groups. When members feel they’ve discovered something first, they share it naturally.

If you enter these groups thoughtfully, participate sincerely, and offer value early, the word-of-mouth that follows is more powerful and longer-lasting than any shoutout on a public feed.

Short-Form UGC Is the Most Believable Form of Marketing

Short-form UGC (think 10 to 60-second videos shared by real users) is now one of the most trusted and influential content types in marketing.

Whether it’s a quick “unboxing” on Instagram Stories, a GRWM (get ready with me) TikTok, or a 15-second “before and after” reel, short-form UGC feels real, spontaneous, and relatable. And that’s precisely why people believe it.

And the numbers back this up.

73% of consumers say they prefer short-form videos when researching products or services, because they feel more to-the-point and trustworthy.
Short-form videos generate 2.5x more engagement than long-form, making them more likely to be liked, shared, or saved.
And when brands use short-form UGC in paid ads, the results are hard to ignore: 4× higher click-through rates and 50% lower cost-per-click compared to traditional branded content.

As we mentioned earlier, a low-pressure seeding campaign is one of the most effective ways to spark this kind of UGC. You send your product to a curated list of creators without any obligations to them and simply trust that those who genuinely love it will talk about it.

Conclusion: Why Word of Mouth Marketing Should Be a Priority in 2025

At a time when paid ads are getting more expensive and less effective, WOMM gives you scalable, high-intent growth without burning budget. It turns your best customers into your best marketers. And in 2025, it’s happening where brands aren’t looking: inside DMs, private Discords, WhatsApp groups, and short-form creator videos.

If you’re serious about scaling WOMM in 2025, here’s where to focus:

Track private sharing behavior through better attribution (UTMs, GA4 custom insights, link tagging)
Encourage advocacy with smart referral, loyalty, and creator seeding programs
Optimize your site for post-purchase sharing, especially on mobile and messaging-first channels
Test how user-generated content impacts CRO on PDPs, review sections, and post-purchase flows

At Invesp, we help brands turn passive word-of-mouth into measurable conversion lifts by testing how, where, and why your best customers are talking.

Want to see how CRO and WOMM overlap on your site? Start a conversation with our team.

The post The Importance of Word Of Mouth Marketing – Statistics and Trends 2025 appeared first on Invesp.

Invesp Is Now a Shopify Plus Partner: Here’s What That Means for Your Business

Khalid Saleh — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:15:36 +0000

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We’ve got exciting news; Invesp is now an official Shopify Plus Partner!

If you’re running an e-commerce brand, you already know that Shopify Plus is more than just an online store builder. It’s a powerful platform designed for high-growth brands that need customization, flexibility, and serious scalability.

At Invesp, we’ve spent the last two decades helping e-commerce brands maximize conversions, increase revenue, and create better shopping experiences. Now, as an official Shopify Plus Partner, we’re taking that expertise even further.

What Does This Partnership Mean for You?

Shopify Plus is built for brands that are scaling fast; but growth brings complexity. You need to keep conversions high, optimize user experience, and ensure every experiment you run leads to real business impact. That’s where we come in.

Here’s how this new partnership benefits you:

1. More Advanced A/B Testing & Experimentation

One of the biggest challenges Shopify store owners face is platform limitations on testing and customization. But with Shopify Plus, we can unlock deeper insights and run more advanced A/B tests—whether it’s optimizing checkout, personalizing customer experiences, or refining product pages.

This means we can test bigger ideas, make data-backed changes faster, and drive more revenue for your business.

2. Exclusive Shopify Plus Tools at Your Disposal

Being a Shopify Plus Partner gives us access to exclusive tools like:

Custom checkout experiences – Optimize every step of the buying process to reduce cart abandonment.
Shopify Functions – Customize discounts, promotions, and backend logic to fit your business needs.
Enhanced automation – Set up workflows that streamline operations and improve efficiency.

With these tools, we can go beyond just “running tests” and create a more profitable, seamless experience for your customers.

3. Faster Implementation, Less Guesswork

When you’re optimizing an online store, speed matters. As a Shopify Plus Partner, we have direct access to Shopify’s resources, priority support, and insider knowledge—which means we can move faster and get results quicker.

Instead of spending weeks (or months) trying to implement conversion strategies, we can roll out tests, analyze results, and make high-impact changes without delays.

4. A CRO Agency That Truly Understands Shopify Plus

Not all CRO strategies work the same way on every platform. Shopify Plus has its own ecosystem, features, and best practices. Now that we’re an official partner, we’re deeply integrated into the Shopify Plus world; which means we can help you avoid common pitfalls and implement strategies that actually work.

Whether it’s increasing average order value (AOV), optimizing your checkout process, or improving mobile conversions, we bring two decades of CRO experience combined with Shopify Plus expertise to drive real, measurable results.

What’s Next?

If you’re already on Shopify Plus (or considering upgrading), this is the perfect time to take your conversion rates to the next level.

Are you struggling with abandoned carts?
Want to see how custom checkout experiences can increase conversions?
Need expert guidance on running A/B tests on Shopify Plus?

Let’s talk. As a Shopify Plus Partner, we’re here to help you turn more visitors into customers, more clicks into purchases, and more tests into wins.

Book a call with us today and let’s grow your Shopify Plus store together!

The post Invesp Is Now a Shopify Plus Partner: Here’s What That Means for Your Business appeared first on Invesp.

8 QUESTIONS ABOUT INCREASING YOUR WEBSITE CONVERSION RATES FROM QUORA

Khalid Saleh — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:16:24 +0000

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Although Quora existed for few years now, recently I started using it more regularly. Perhaps opening Invesp’s office in Istanbul, Turkey was a major factor there.

And yes, I am a big fan!

Spending my time between our US and Istanbul offices is an amazing adventure. At the same time, it comes with its own set of challenges. That is where Quora comes in handy. I usually ask questions trying to understand more about Turkish culture, economy, business practices and yes, even good restaurants to eat at.

The website has also a healthy section on conversion optimization where those who are looking for advice post their questions. As I went through that section, I noticed that some of the questions were repeated again and again.

So, in this blog post I will take the 8 most common questions on conversion optimization I see in Quora and answer them.

1. What Is the Best Strategy for Increasing My Website Conversion Rate?

You see this question asked in many different forms. Those who run an e-commerce website ask about getting more orders. Those who run lead generation website ask about ways to increase the number of leads from their website.

The problem is that many of the answers focus on tactics. Rarely do you find a thread that goes into strategy. That is fine, if you are looking for quick fixes. However, it comes with a problem.

Conversion optimization tactics may or may not work for your website.

There is a place for tactics but without a well through out strategy, you are most likely wasting your time.

Each web page in your website represents an opportunity. If you are working with an unlimited budget, unlimited resources and unlimited time, then you have all the time to test every little detail on your website.

If you are like the rest of us, then you want to start fixing these pages that present the most impact on your bottom line.

How do you find the pages with the highest potential?

To increase your website conversion rates, you should use analytics to understand how visitors are flowing from one area of your website to the next.

In order for you to get to the big “Yes” – a macro conversion – the visitor must go through a series of smaller “Yeses”, or micro conversions. Before visitors place an order with your website, fill out a contact form, or subscribe to your service, they go through a series of steps and follow different paths.

Our task as marketers is to identify all the possible funnels which visitors go through and to determine which of the funnels are working well and which funnels are leaking visitors so that we can focus on them.

The next question to think about is what changes should you make on a particular web page?

I will tell you what you should NOT do first. You do not randomly change things because best practices tell you to do so. Persuading visitors to convert requires us to anticipate the information they need and to present that information to visitors when they need it.

So, how do you identify conversion problems on a webpage?

At Invesp we use the Conversion Framework to determine the factors that impact visitor behavior on a web page. These factors are grouped into two main categories:

Website-centric factors
Visitor-centric factors

Website centric factors are the factors that relate to your website and the signals it sends to your visitors. The main categories under website-centric factors are:

Trust factors: Remember that if a visitor does not trust you, he will not interact with you.
FUDs: How do you identify and minimize the fears, uncertainty, and doubts that stop website visitors from doing business with you?
Incentives: How do you incentivize a visitor to interact with you immediately?
Engagement: How do you engage visitors so you move from a one-time interaction to a long term relationship?

Visitor-centric factors are the factors that relate to your website visitors, the nature of their purchase and where they are in the buying funnel. You have less control over these factors, however, you must account and prepare for them.

The main categories under visitor centric-factors are:

The visitor persona: How do you address the different types of visitors’ temperaments?
How do you design your website to address each of the different visitor buying stage?
The third factor is the complexity of the sale. Selling an item that costs $10 is a lot different than selling an item that costs $2,000

We typically evaluate every page (or class of pages) on your website using the Conversion Framework with the goal of determining possible conversion problems on that page.

A conversion rate optimization specialist can identify 50 to 150 problems on a single webpage.

You then prioritize these problems and focus on the top 3 to 5 problems by creating new designs to fix them.

But you do not stop there. You conduct A/B or multivariate testing by splitting your current website visitors between your original design and the new designs and watch which of these design generates more conversions.

Quora question: What’s the best ways to increase your conversion rate honestly?

2. Tools to Perform a Conversion Optimization Audit of My Site?

As of now, there are no tools that help you conduct a conversion optimization audit of a website. There are, however, tools that help you understand how visitors behave on your website which, in turn, will help you in the process of conducting a CRO audit for your website.

Some might think that I am splitting hairs. But a tool that is designed to conduct an audit will be designed in a completely different way compared to a tool that tracks how visitors behave on the website.

Having said that, here is a list of tool categories which we think every website owner should have installed on their website:

Analytics: Needless to say that analytics is a must have for every website. Any self-respecting analytics tool will help you track the performance of different pages on your website (how many visitors they are getting, what is the bounce and exit rates, etc). The main dominant player in this field is Google Analytics. And while GA is free (there is an enterprise option), you are giving your data to Google.

Suggested analytics tools:

Heatmap: Heatmap software record the clicks visitors make on any page of your website. They also provide a scroll map which shows how much visitors scroll when they view different pages of the website.

Suggested heatmap tools:

Video recording: Similar to heatmap software, the tools in this category record the interaction between website visitors and the different pages on the website.

3. Does the CRO Pay Per Performance Model Work?

Short answer:

We have not seen it work in the long run and we have been doing conversion optimization for over 11 years.

Long answer:

The idea of a pay per performance tests sounds good at the surface. The client will only pay for increases in conversion rate which shifts the burden and the risk of the project to the CRO firm. For the CRO firms there are two main reasons this model is appealing. First, if the project is successful, then the reward for success will be higher than charging a fixed fee. Second, this model works well for companies that are just starting out.

Here is the problem with this model. The success of any conversion optimization project depends on many factors. But the main two factors are:

How many tests do you deploy in a given time period and,
How sophisticated are these tests?

Most CRO firms end up relying on the client’s development team to implement the test. And here the problem lays in. The CRO firm is responsible and will be rewarded for the success of the project, but it will have to rely on the client to implement the tests.

In order for the CRO firm to deploy more tests, the firm must have access to the client’s website and should be able to make changes to it. The need for the backend of the website and its database becomes more prevalent, as the tests get more sophisticated.

But most clients, if not all, will not give unlimited access to the CRO firm because that assumes two things:

The CRO firm has good handle on the technology used by the client and,
The CRO firm has the technical knowledge to be trusted with making change on the website.

For any medium to large website both conditions are typically a no go.

So, most CRO firms end up relying on the client’s development team to implement the test.

And here the problem lays in. The CRO firm is responsible and will be rewarded for the success of the project, but it will have to rely on the client to implement the tests.

Some might say that the client is incentivized to see the project succeed and is motivated to implement tests faster. In our experience, that might have been the case but as the project progresses, development teams get busy and CRO work is pushed further behind and is given less priority.

As a result, these projects have an inherited conflict of interest built into them.

We believe that in order for a project to succeed, everyone must have skin in the game. For the client that will include paying a fee.

Now, there are instances where we agreed to lower our fees in return for an additional fee which the client pays, if we meet certain performance criteria.

Quora question: Which conversion optimization companies work on pay per performance model?

4. Running Multiple Overlapping A/B/n tests Simultaneously on One Page?

As you talk to different companies, you will hear differing opinions on this matter. It has been in our practice that multiple A/B tests on larger websites where 100% of the traffic is included in an A/B test can and will cause data pollution.

While we recommend running multiple tests at the same time, we also highly advice that:

The tests are not run concurrently, or
If tests are run concurrently, each test runs in a separate swim lane.

If tests run in separate swim lanes, traffic from one test does intersect traffic from the other test. This rarely happens on large complex websites where visitors jump from one swim lane to the next.

Good examples of concurrent tests include: running separate tests on desktop and mobile websites, running concurrent tests targeted for different countries, and running concurrent tests targeted for different sources and media of the traffic.

Quora question: Conversion optimization: Running multiple tests simultaneously on one page?

5. What Does “Confidence Level” Mean in Conversion optimization Lingo?

Statisticians have been debating confidence level for over 90 years.

Confidence level refers to the frequency which an observed interval contains a parameter (a test result). So, if confidence levels are constructed across many separate data analyses of different experiments, the proportion of such intervals that contain the true value of the test result will match the given confidence level.

The term confidence level is one of the least understood, yet most used terms in conversion optimization.

Confidence level does help in persuading people to test, but you need to understand how it works and affects your data.

Regina Nuzzo reports:

According to one widely used calculation, a P value of 0.01 corresponds to a false-alarm probability of at least 11%, depending on the underlying probability that there is a true effect; a P value of 0.05 raises that chance to at least 29%. So Moty’s finding had a greater than one in ten chance of being a false alarm. Likewise, the probability of replicating his original result was not 99%, as most would assume, but something closer to 73% — or only 50%, if he wanted another very significant result. In other words, his inability to replicate the result was about as surprising as if he had called heads on a coin toss and it had come up tails.

In calculating financial risks, the banking sector is sometimes required to see a 99% confidence level. The FDA also requires a 99% confidence level in some cases of drug testing.

Our goal is not to confuse you.

So, what does confidence level mean?

We recommend you think of the confidence level (p-value) as the probability of having a result as opposed to the potential frequency of that result.

So, what confidence level should you choose?

We recommend a 95% confidence level, but if an experiment runs for multiple business cycles and it repeatedly shows higher than 85% confidence level, you should definitely consider it.

Quora question: What does “confidence” mean in conversion optimization lingo?

6. How Do I Decrease the Bounce Rate of My E-Commerce Website?

Let’s start by defining what a bounce rate is. Bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who land on a web page from an external traffic source and leave the website without visiting a second page.

So, if a web page gets 100 visitors from an external traffic source (google organic traffic for example) and of those 100 visitors, 35 visitors decide to leave the website without ever visiting a second page on the website, then the bounce rate for the page is: 35/100 = 35%.

A common mistake we see with different websites is considering bounce rate for the website as a KPI (key performance indicator). For most websites, it is not.

A KPI should have a direct business impact. Bounce rate and exit rate are important metrics to track on your website. They rarely have an impact on a firm bottom line.

The conversion rate for a website or the average order value, on the other hand, are business KPIs. They impact your bottom line.

All these things make me doubt the general understanding of this question. An e-commerce website should focus on increasing its conversion rates, visits per value or average order value. Optimizing for bounce or exit rates is like chasing a ghost and will have no direct impact on the bottom line.

7. What Do I Need to See During My A/B Testing to Be Sure That One Variation Is the Winner?

There are three different criteria which must be met before you can call a winner for an A/B test.

You need a statistically significant winner. Statistical significance will provide you with an indication on how solid your test is. The higher the confidence level for the challenger, the less likely it is that the challenger is a false positive. For most tests, a confidence level of 95% is acceptable. There are however instances where the challenger reportedly remains at 80% confidence level or a bit higher. In these cases, you can still call the test with the challenger being a winner, knowing full well that there is a segment of the visitors which will likely convert better with the control (original design).
Both the control (original design) and the winning challenger (variation) must have recorded a minimum number of conversions: the goal from this criterion is to ensure that your challenger is NOT a false positive and that testing data stabilized. The minimum number of conversions will vary from one website to the next and will depend on the number of conversions your website gets per month. With smaller websites, we usually ask for a minimum of 100 conversions per design. For larger websites, the minimum can be as large as 3,000 conversions.
The test should have run for at least one week. Website visitors shop differently on different days of the week. At a minimum, you want the control to run against the challengers for at least one day in the week. If you want to be more cautious, you can increase the minimum time required to two weeks.

FOR MOST TESTS, CONFIDENCE LEVEL OF 95% IS ACCEPTABLE

CLICK TO TWEET

Another thing we recommend in cases where the test includes many challengers against the control is to run the winner of the test against the control in a head to head test. This new test will help ensure that your winning challenger actually beats the original.

Quora question: What do I need to see during my A/B testing to be sure that one variation is the winner?

8. What’s a Typical Conversion Rate for Online Retailers?

In the early 2000’s, Shop.org reported the average e-commerce website converted 3% of its traffic into customers. FireClick Index data from 2015 show that an average e-commerce conversion rate is close to 7.2% globally.

Business Metrics	Last Week
Conversion Rate: Global	7.20%
Conversion Rate: First Time Visitors	7.60%
Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors	6.90%
Cart Abandonment Rate	53.60%

Conversion data for fashion and apparel, from Fireclick index:

Business Metrics	Last Week
Conversion Rate: Global	5.90%
Conversion Rate: First Time Visitors	6.10%
Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors	5.60%
Cart Abandonment Rate	N/A

Conversion data for catalog websites, from Fireclick index:

Business Metrics	Last Week
Conversion Rate: Global	6.70%
Conversion Rate: First Time VisitorsC	6.90%
Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors	6.20%
Cart Abandonment Rate	55.20%

Conversion data for specialty websites, from Fireclick index:

Business Metrics	Last Week
Conversion Rate: Global	7.60%
Conversion Rate: First Time Visitors	7.30%
Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors	8.80%
Cart Abandonment Rate	50.20%

Conversion data for outdoors and sports websites, from Fireclick index:

Business Metrics	Last Week
Conversion Rate: Global	4.80%
Conversion Rate: First Time Visitors	4.90%
Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors	5.10%
Cart Abandonment Rate	60.10%

Conversion data for software websites, from Fireclick index:

Business Metrics	Last Week
Conversion Rate: Global	4.10%
Conversion Rate: First Time VisitorsC	4.20%
Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors	3.60%
Cart Abandonment Rate	76.10%

AVERAGE E-COMMERCE CONVERSION RATE IS ALMOST 7.2% GLOBALLY

CLICK TO TWEET

Back in 2010, outdoor and sporting stores converted less than 0.5% of the traffic they receive. In 2015 these stores were converting 4.8% of their visitors into customers. This is close to 900% increase in conversion rates.

The purpose of this data is to help you compare your site to the average conversion rates of your industry. But you shouldn’t necessarily feel better, if you are within your industry average because most online conversion rates are scant compared to brick-and-mortar rates.

Quora question:What’s a typical conversion rate for online retailers?

The post 8 QUESTIONS ABOUT INCREASING YOUR WEBSITE CONVERSION RATES FROM QUORA appeared first on Invesp.

Google Analytics Metrics That Impact Conversion Rate Optimization

Khalid Saleh — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 13:34:48 +0000

Reading Time: 9 minutes

As you focus on increasing your online conversions, you will have to spend time digging through and analyzing your analytics data. CRO is about looking at different Google Analytics metrics and putting them together to determine which pages to optimize and which hypothesis to pursue.

Let’s take a look together at some of the central features of your website data.

In this chapter, we explain the entrance, bounce rate, exit rate, average time on page, and traffic sources. Learn how to differentiate between bounce and exit rates, and find out how to interpret the behavior of your traffic segments.

This data will give you accurate directions to take on your site’s conversion optimization. Remember, conversion rate optimization is about looking at different metrics and putting them together to determine which pages to optimize and which hypothesis to pursue.

As we have mentioned before, while we have no preference for any of the analytics programs available on the market, we do recommend you use two different programs when tracking your website. Some web analytics software you might consider are Google Analytics, Clicky, and Omniture.

1. What Is An Entrance?

An entrance is an event of a visitor entering a website from an external source. Among the several terms associated with an entrance event, you can find “entrance page,” “entrance source,” and “entrance keyword.”

Entrance page or landing page is the first page a visitor lands on when he enters a website.
Entrance source is the source of traffic that drives a visitor to the website, either a paid campaign, organic search result, social media, or any other type of external source.
Entrance keyword is the keyword the user searches for organically or in PPC before he clicks on a website. This keyword is critical in determining the visitor intent which directly impacts the decision to stay on the website or leave.

In October of 2011, Google announced that search data would be encrypted via SSL for logged users to Google (personal accounts on Google). This HTTPS query protects your personal search data from getting abused by third parties. While this protected users, there was a secondary impact of this decision. Google itself could no longer see this data, so it would not be able to report on it. That meant a good percentage of the keyword data would disappear from analytics reporting. While Google estimated that this would impact only 10% of the queries, most webmasters reported that up to 60% of the searches did not provide keyword data.

You can see the keyword data at a landing page level in Google Analytics by going to Behavior and selecting the Landing Pages report. From there, click on any of your top landing pages.

Here’s an example of entrances in Google Analytics;

2. What Is A Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the website at a landing page but leave it without ever navigating to a 2nd page on the site. Google Analytics defines bounce rates as:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Based on this definition, the bounce rate is calculated as follows:

Bounce rate = Number of single page visits / Total number of entrances to that page

Analytics software reports the bounce rate for single pages as well as website average, usually calculated by averaging the bounce rate for all pages of the site. High bounce rates (more than 50 to 60%) indicate a problem in your online marketing. Assuming that your website performance is not an issue, then visitors are leaving your website because the landing page is not providing the information they need. In this case, you need to assess:

Messaging on the source of traffic
Continuity of messaging on the landing page
Page relevancy to the search term

A word of caution here! Website bounce rate can be misleading most of the time. Taking an average bounce rate of thousands of pages is too generic to measure the health of your website.

How do you use bounce rate in optimizing your website?

You can choose between two approaches when using bounce rate for CRO:

1st Approach:

Focus on pages with bounce rate higher than the website average bounce rate. For example, if a website has an average bounce rate of 52%, pages with a bounce rate higher than that should be considered first for optimization. We do not like nor recommend this approach.

2nd Approach:

Establish a mark for the highest adequate bounce rate on each type of page. Evaluate pages with a bounce rate above this mark.

For the home page of a website, we assess bounce rates above 40%.
On a lead generation website, we focus on pages with a bounce rate of 30% or higher.
In an e-commerce website, we look at category pages with a bounce rate higher than 20%.

Take into account that optimizing pages with high bounce rates only makes sense if these pages receive a large number of visitors. Optimizing a landing page that has a bounce rate of 80% will not make any sense if that page only gets 100 entrances per month. We recommend the following guidelines:

With smaller websites, focus on pages with a high bounce rate if they receive a minimum of 1,000 entrances to that particular page.
With mid to large websites, focus on pages with a high bounce rate if they receive a minimum of 10,000 entrances to that particular page.

To find the bounce rate overview of your website, or specific pages, go to reports, click on behavior, then click on overview. You’ll see the overview of your website’s bounce rate, average time on page, exit rate, etc.

If you want a specific bounce rate for a particular page, you can click on it below, or you go to behavior again, click on site content, click on landing pages, then you’ll see every page on your site and you can find out the bounce rate for a particular landing page.

Here’s an example of bounce rate in Google Analytics;

3. What Is An Exit Rate?

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website from a particular page after visiting, at least, one other page of the site.

This theoretical definition does not always coincide with how analytics programs calculate and display exit rate.

Google Analytics, for example, uses the following formula to calculate the exit rate on a page:

Single page exit rate = Number of page exits / Number of page views

The number of page views used in the formula includes single page visits. By doing so, exit rate as displayed in Google includes bounce rate.

You might be tempted to start optimization by picking pages with exit rates higher than the site average.

A better approach, however, is first to establish a standard acceptable exit rate for different pages on the site based on their function. Then, select for optimization only the pages that meet the following criteria:

Pages exit rate is higher than the established acceptable exit rate based on the type of page.
The number of unique page views is higher than x [where x is dependent on the size of the site]

For some websites, x is 500 page views, for others x is 50,000 page views.

To find the exit rate overview of your website, or specific pages, go to reports, click on behavior, then click on overview. You’ll see the overview of your website’s exit rate.

Here’s an example of the exit rate in Google Analytics;

4. What Is The Difference Between Bounce And Exit Rate?

Bounce and exit rates might sound similar to each other, but they measure different visitor behaviors on a website. Bounce rate deals with a visitor’s first impressions of a website. It measures the effectiveness of a landing page design and copy to persuade visitors to remain on the site and take a particular action on the landing page. Exit rate, on the other hand, is used to detect breakdowns in process flow in the website.

In simpler terms, a bounce rate refers to the first page a visitor enters and then leaves the site.

An exit rate refers to the last page a visitor visits before he leaves the site.

Here’s a visual to drive home the point.

Bounce Rate;

Exit Rate;

5. What Is the Average Time On a Page?

Average time on page calculates how long, on average, visitors stay on a particular page. Of course, you want to see visitors spend more time per visit on your site. In most cases, more time equals more interest and a higher chance of a conversion.

To find the average time on page overview of your website, or specific pages, go to reports, click on behavior, then click on overview. You’ll see the overview of your website’s average time on page.

6. What Are Traffic Sources?

Websites receive visitors either directly, through search engines, or via referring websites. Each of these sources drives unique quality of visitors based on specific products or services. The breakdown of the traffic between the several sources varies for each website. The following figure shows how different sources of traffic drive disparate percentages of visitors to particular websites.

How different sources of traffic drive different % of visitors to the website

While we have been speaking of conversion rates in general terms here, we rarely do that on our projects.

At a minimum, conversion rates should be tracked at the level of the different sources of traffic. General and un-segmented conversion rates do not tell us a whole lot about how well a website is performing.

Typically, the breakdown of conversion rates based on the traffic source shows a higher conversion rate of direct traffic compared to referring websites or search engines. Direct visitors already recognize the brand, thus having a higher chance of converting.

7. Putting Google Analytics Metrics Together To Determine Optimization

For each of your site’s traffic sources, examine how well the traffic converts. Sometimes traffic from Google converts better than traffic from Bing. If traffic from a search engine converts better than others, it might be worthwhile to increase PPC spending with that engine. But that is not enough.
Also, examine the average time visitors spend on your site based on the traffic source. Remember that a higher average time means higher interest and a higher chance of conversion. If visitors from Google spend twice as much time as visitors from Yahoo, probably they are more interested in your product or service.
Next, examine the bounce rates for each of your site traffic sources. Higher bounce rates for a source of traffic compared to other sources means that your landing page does not match the type of customers coming from that source.
The following step is to ask yourself why there is a difference in conversion rates among the traffic sources. Are visitors using different keywords to get to your website from these different engines? Is your ranking different in search results? Analyze and determine why traffic from one source converts better compared to another source. After you come up with some possible reasons, assess what you can do to increase conversions for each of the different traffic sources.

Let’s examine the following example:

	Google	Yahoo	Bing
Conversion rate	1.2%	2.3%	0.4%
Average time on site	7:33	9:12	12:01
Bounce rate	22%	26%	39%

In this example, Bing is the worst engine for converting traffic. Most companies would decide not to spend any money on PPC if they see this data.

However, you should also examine the average time a visitor from Bing spends on the site. You will notice that Bing visitors spend significantly more time on the site. But why aren’t they converting? Somehow the site is not giving visitors from Bing what they are looking for, but these visitors are still willing to spend the time.

Also, notice that Bing has the highest bounce rate. That means spontaneous visitors from Bing are not able to find what they are looking for immediately after landing on the site, in contrast to visitors from Yahoo and Google.

8. Evaluating A Homepage Using Key Metrics

You can check in the video below the use of web analytics for evaluating a homepage. During one of our webinars, we explain the key metrics and how their data help you decide on your CRO focus.

Watch below as we talk about typical bounce rates and exit rates, page value, and percentage of page views. Learn how to cross references when assessing the pages of your website for conversion optimization.

Video – Evaluating Your Homepage For Conversion Rate Optimization by Invesp

Additional Resources

7 Little Known Tips to Cut Down Your Bounce Rate

Landing Page Optimization Tactics For Different Sources Of Traffic

How To Convert Different Types Of Visitors On Your Website

Landing Page Optimization Checklist: What To Do When Your Landing Pages Are Underperforming

The post Google Analytics Metrics That Impact Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Invesp.

Khalid Saleh, Author at Invesp

Ecommerce Category Page Design: Best Practices, Examples, and Tests That Work in 2026

1. Define the purpose of your category page

Browsing-focused category pages

Creating A Conversion Roadmap: How to Prioritize Conversion Problems on Your Website

The Four Phases of a CRO Program (The SHIP model)

1. Scrutinize — Gather Data and Identify Issues

Bugs, usability issues, and conversion blockers

Beyond problems – adding new website features

Understanding your initial AB test plans: the research opportunities list

Prioritizing your AB testing ideas (the research opportunities list)

Pie by Widerfunnel

Hotwire framework

PXL framework from CXL

Invesp Prioritization framework

Is there a perfect prioritization framework?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

What is a Conversion Funnel?

What is A/B Testing?

How Do I Prioritize My A/B Testing Ideas?

What are FUDs in CRO?

What Does ‘Above the Fold’ Mean

How Long Does It Take to See Results from CRO?

How Much Does CRO Cost? Complete Agency & Freelancer Pricing Breakdown

Quick version: How much does it cost to hire a conversion agency?

What Drives CRO Pricing?

1. Cost related to the staff who are doing the CRO work

2. Software and tool costs

3. A/B test implementation costs

4. Cost of hardcoding AB test winners on the site

CRO Provider Options: What Each Costs and Includes

1. Hiring a digital marketing agency

2. Hiring a freelancer

3. Hiring a specialized conversion optimization agency

How much do smaller CRO agencies charge?

How much do large CRO agencies charge?

Performance-based conversion optimization agencies

Just CRO recommendations – no development included

Conversion Rate Optimization Services FAQs

1. What does a conversion rate optimization specialist do?

2. What services do Conversion Rate Optimization Freelancers offer?

3. How do Conversion Rate Optimization Consultants work?

4. What factors influence Conversion Rate Optimization pricing?

5. Are there any Conversion Rate Optimization consultancy services that focus on specific industries?

23+ Questions To Ask Before Hiring a CRO Agency

Types of CRO Partners in 2025

Pros and Cons of Each CRO Partner Type

Type of CRO Partner

Pros

Cons

Cost of conversion optimization companies

25 questions to ask before hiring a CRO agency

1. How do you determine what pages you will optimize?

2. How do you determine what changes you will make on a page?

3. What type of user research (qualitative research) will you conduct on the project?

4. What type of data (quantitative) research will you conduct on the project?

5. What is the most challenging part of doing a conversion optimization project?

6. What was the worst conversion optimization project you worked on?

7. How many experiments do you launch per month?

8. Do you conduct concurrent split tests?

9. How do you handle mobile website optimization?

10. Who will handle implementing the test on our website?

11. What type of resource commitment do you require from my team?

12. What additional fees should I expect to pay in addition to the consulting fees?

13. What type of education do you require from your conversion optimization staff?

14. Can you guarantee an increase in conversion rate?

15. How do you determine the success of the project?

16. Why should we hire you vs. another?

17. What is the makeup of the team working on my project?

18. How many projects does the team working with me handle

19. How often do we meet? Do you have weekly or monthly standing meetings?

20. What methods of communication will we use on the project?

22. How fast do you launch the first AB test on my site?

23. How much time do you spend on my project?

24. How do you incorporate AI or machine learning in analysis or experimentation?

25. How do you address consent, cookie restrictions, and data privacy in user research?

The Conversion Framework: 7 Principles to Increase Conversion Rates

What is the Conversion Framework and Why Do You Need It?

The 7 Principles of the Conversion Framework Explained