If digital marketing plays a role in your go-to-market strategy, improving your digital experiences based on real user behavior can significantly increase conversions—whether that means subscriptions, sign-ups, demo requests, or sales.
Today, high-performing teams focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) best practices to systematically improve their websites and apps. CRO is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action by making informed, data-backed improvements. If attracting traffic is only half the battle, experimentation is how you guide users toward conversion.
The impact is measurable. Organizations that run consistent A/B testing programs often see meaningful gains in growth and revenue, alongside reduced bounce rates. These results underscore the value of investing in CRO best practices that turn insights into action.
Let’s break down the essentials.
Understanding User Behavior
Understanding user behavior is the foundation of effective conversion rate optimization. This involves analyzing how visitors interact with your site, what they’re trying to accomplish, and where friction appears along the journey.
Why it matters:
When you understand where users hesitate, drop off, or engage most deeply, you can design experiences that feel intuitive and relevant. These insights help teams identify which elements drive engagement and which create confusion or resistance.
Example:
Experimenting with the placement, design, and imagery of product recommendations can reveal valuable behavioral insights. By testing where recommendations appear on a page and how they’re presented, teams can observe changes in engagement and conversion. Over time, these experiments help refine layouts that better align with user intent and purchasing behavior.
Optimizing Landing Pages
Landing pages are often the first meaningful interaction users have with your brand. As a result, they play a critical role in conversion.
Strategies for optimization:
Effective landing pages combine clear messaging, strong calls to action, and focused design. The layout should guide users naturally toward the intended outcome without unnecessary distractions.
Example:
A team might run a server-side A/B test comparing two versions of a landing page—one featuring a time-sensitive promotional banner and one without it. This test could reveal whether the incentive drives urgency and conversions or introduces friction that causes users to bounce. These insights inform future design and promotional decisions with confidence.
Implementing Social Proof and Trust Signals
Trust is a prerequisite for conversion, especially in industries handling sensitive financial, healthcare, or personal data. Social proof and trust signals reassure users that your brand is credible and reliable.
Why it matters:
Customer testimonials, reviews, case studies, and security certifications help reduce uncertainty for first-time visitors. These elements provide validation that others have had positive experiences and that your platform is safe to use.
Example:
Prominently featuring a short testimonial that highlights a real customer outcome can significantly influence conversion decisions. Similarly, displaying compliance badges or third-party endorsements reinforces trust at critical decision points.
Leveraging A/B Testing for Continuous Improvement
A/B testing is essential for making data-driven decisions and continuously improving digital performance. If you prioritize only a few CRO best practices, ongoing experimentation should be one of them.
For more advanced programs, hybrid experimentation has become a best practice. By combining client-side and server-side testing, teams can experiment across visual elements and underlying logic at the same time.
Example:
A marketing team might test layout and messaging updates while a product team experiments with server-side pricing logic or checkout flows. Running these changes together provides deeper insight into how front-end presentation and back-end functionality interact to influence conversions.
This approach accelerates learning, reduces dependency on code release cycles, and enables cross-functional teams to collaborate more effectively. Over time, it allows organizations to adapt quickly to changing user expectations while maintaining performance and accuracy.
Final Thoughts
Implementing conversion rate optimization best practices is essential for organizations looking to improve digital performance and drive measurable growth. By understanding user behavior, optimizing landing pages, reinforcing trust, and committing to continuous experimentation, teams can create experiences that convert more consistently.
Forte, Monetate’s network-layer experimentation offering, supports these best practices by enabling secure, high-performance experimentation across UI, logic, and infrastructure—helping teams optimize with confidence.