Our CRO audits come in three packages and give you hard, objective data about everything that’s happening on your site. Facts about the behaviour of your real customers, and what they think about your product, offering and brand. How you stack up against UX and CRO best practices, and what is stopping your visitors converting. Most importantly, how to brief your designers and developers to ‘fix your bridge’: optimising the conversion rate of your website and turning more visitors into customers, and ultimately into profits.
Let us help you to stop losing customers, money and ground because of a poorly-performing website.
Ready to get going?
show me the auditsOn one side of this bridge are all the people you’re sending to your website. They’ve arrived there through Social Media campaigns, Google ads, or solid marketing and word of mouth. More and more are arriving every day.
On the other side of the bridge are your customers.
How many people get across that bridge is your conversion rate.
Your problem — you don’t know how strong that bridge is, whether people are too uncertain to cross it, or whether they’re falling off along the journey. You don’t know how to make it stronger, how to help more people to the other side and how to convert more of those hard-earned visitors into customers, turnover and — most importantly — profit.
Without knowing these things, you’re losing. Losing money in marketing spend, losing opportunity to expand your business and losing ground against competitors.
“It’s been great to see what impact your changes have made and makes me excited to make more of them!”
founder, phomo
“Working with Rob and his team feels like a true partnership. They will push back if necessary to ensure a design that is results focussed — proof being that the first set of improvements on our website resulted in a 3x conversion increase. We are so pleased that we are extending the scope of the work and adding in longer term projects.”
founder, lovestruck
“We get approached by 100s of agencies each year who talk a big game but ultimately fail to deliver, so when Rob got in touch I was naturally sceptical. With 12+ years of digital marketing experience, I thought I had websites down to a T, but boy was I wrong. From the outset, Northern Comfort’s proactive attitude and insight stood them out from the pack. But ultimately, what matters is results. Our conversion rates have doubled on their pilot page (and continue to climb) which we were truly gobsmacked at. We have briefed them to review the rest of our site and I am hugely excited about our future partnership (as is our bank manager!)”
co-founder, exalt
We begin by going through the site ourselves as a customer would, taking the routes through to purchase and checking the functionality, process, layout and user experience to see what makes sense, what works, what is confusing, and what breaks.
It’s often hard for someone internal to a company to do this; they’re so at ease with their own website that they just ‘know’ how everything works. We call this the “AirBnB problem”; ever checked into an AirBnB and spent 5 minutes opening every cupboard door to find the fridge? To the person who owns the place, it’s obvious; but to you, starting afresh, it’s never where you’d expect it to be.
By going through the whole purchase process, with all and every option, we can highlight which parts of the process work, which are confusing, and which are broken.
We do this work before anything else, so that we’re coming to the site completely fresh. We can then use this experience to put the rest of the work into context; we can see how our problems with the site align with real customers’ experiences, and how those issues impact on your sales.
We have a 100+ checklist of best practices across UX and CRO, which we’ll run the site through. Not all of these are always relevant, it depends on your website. All of these points will be backed up with academic research to show that we’re highlighting quantifiable UX issues, rather than expressing our own opinion on what ‘good’ looks like. Again, everything is backed by data.
This is where we put everything together. We’ll document all the findings from the above work, and create a list of suggested changes. Some of these you’ll be able to do immediately, some you can use to brief in your existing agency. All research, documentation, etc, will be provided as evidence and context for the work suggested. This will be in appendices and referred to in the main document.
We’ll present everything on a Zoom call so you leave with a full understanding of what the issues are and how you can solve them.
There is a mountain of data with Google Analytics; the problem is finding and understanding it all. We go through it all for you, and create a review to show what!s working on the site, where people are dropping out, which users and user journeys are performing well and which aren!t. How your current marketing strategy is performing and where there are opportunities to improve it.
This begins to make sense of the customer experience, and helps in understanding which broader changes on the site will move the needle in terms of conversion. It will create for us a baseline for the current conversion rates and how they vary across device, page and campaign.
If you don!t already have this, we!ll set up a GA dashboard for you. This will be an “Exec Summary!#of what!s happening on the site showing all the relevant KPI!s, conversion funnels, highest performing customers by device/source/etc, site speed – basically, all the things you need to know from GA in an easy to use format, rather than fighting through analytics.
This will form the background for any A/B testing in future, showing how experiments are performing and how conversion rates are changing over time. This also works well as an early warning mechanism—if sales of a certain product drop dramatically, you want to know why and check it, rather than wait until customers tell you.
HotJar is a powerful tool that creates screen recordings users interacting with your site. This is incredibly useful as it highlights things like:
User behaviour is tracked across all devices, revealing a deeper layer of insight. We’ll share relevant videos to show you where/why/what we should be changing on your site. We’ll review all the visual data — i.e heatmaps and scroll-depths, and also the user videos on the site too. All of this is extremely important; it’s what your real customers are doing — in the context of your product, your market, your audience, your price-point — rather than abstracted recommendations based on ‘best practices’, which are important, but contextual.
We interview a sample of users to help understand where further improvements can be made to the user experience and your conversion, whether usability or proposition focused. This brings qualitative insight that delves into the behaviours and attitudes of your customers to further bring our quantitative insights to life.
What do they think you offer, from the homepage? What do they think of your product, or your packaging? What problems do they think your product solves? What price point would they expect to pay for your product? All of these can be answered by real customers—and you’ll have the option to submit questions we can put to customers as part of this process.
All this ‘real world’ content will feed into our final report, and can be a valuable addition, especially if you are considering new product offerings or have some alternative business objectives which are at a stage where some direct feedback could help make a decision.
“We want to continually improve and test our site once live, making considered changes that support and improve our bottom line. Northern Comfort are proven experts at doing this, and we’re delighted to be working with them.”
ceo, vegums
“I was impressed by the creativity and strategy Northern Comfort brought to testing on our website, quickly driving strong results. They are a true partner, always bringing a data driven perspective to the conversation.”
head of marketing, uncle
“We would not hesitate to recommend them.”
mD, ecocleen