CRO Glossary

A/B testing is a method where you show two versions of a webpage to different visitors simultaneously to determine which performs better. This controlled experiment allows you to make data-driven decisions by comparing how each version impacts conversions before implementing changes site-wide.

Above the fold refers to the portion of a webpage visible without scrolling when it first loads. This prime real estate is critical for capturing attention and communicating your key message quickly, as many visitors decide whether to stay or leave based on what they see immediately.

The baseline conversion rate is your current performance level before making changes, which serves as the control against which test variations are measured. Establishing this benchmark is essential for determining whether optimizations actually improve results and by how much.

Bayesian testing is a statistical approach that continuously updates the probability of each variation being best as data accumulates, allowing for more flexible interpretation throughout the test. This method provides the likelihood that one variation is better than another rather than just a yes/no answer, making it easier to make informed decisions.

A Call-to-Action is a button, link, or instruction that prompts visitors to take a specific action, such as 'Buy Now,' 'Get Started,' or 'Download Free Guide.' CTAs are critical conversion elements because they tell visitors exactly what to do next and make it easy to take that action.

A click map is a type of heatmap that shows exactly where visitors click on a page, including both interactive elements and areas where no links exist. This reveals whether visitors are clicking on intended CTAs or trying to interact with non-clickable elements, indicating potential confusion or missed opportunities.

Cohort analysis groups visitors who share common characteristics or experiences during a specific time period and tracks their behavior over time. This helps you understand how different groups behave differently, whether changes affect new versus returning visitors, and if improvements have lasting impact.

A confidence interval is a range around your test result that indicates where the true conversion rate likely falls, typically expressed as 95% confidence. A narrower confidence interval means more precise results, helping you understand not just whether one variation won but by approximately how much.

The control is the original, unchanged version of your webpage that serves as the baseline in an A/B test. All variations are compared against the control to determine if changes improve performance, ensuring you have a consistent reference point for measuring impact.

A conversion occurs when a visitor completes a desired action on your website, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter. It's the primary metric that measures whether your website is successfully turning visitors into customers or leads, making it essential for evaluating your marketing effectiveness and business growth.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, calculated by dividing conversions by total visitors and multiplying by 100. This metric tells you how effectively your website turns traffic into results, making it the cornerstone measurement for evaluating and improving your online performance.

Conversion Rate Optimization is the systematic process of improving your website to increase the percentage of visitors who complete desired actions. By testing changes and analyzing user behavior, CRO helps you get more value from your existing traffic without needing to spend more on acquiring new visitors.

Customer journey mapping is the process of visualizing every step and touchpoint a customer experiences from initial awareness through conversion and beyond. This helps identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and where potential customers drop off, guiding your optimization priorities.

Drop-off rate is the percentage of visitors who leave at a specific step in your conversion process without completing the desired action. High drop-off rates indicate problem areas where friction, confusion, or lack of motivation causes people to abandon, signaling where optimization efforts should focus.

Exit intent technology detects when a visitor is about to leave your site based on mouse movement patterns and triggers a targeted message or offer at that moment. This last-chance engagement can recover abandoning visitors by addressing objections, offering incentives, or capturing email addresses before they leave.

Fitts's Law states that the time to click a target depends on its size and distance from the cursor—larger, closer buttons are faster and easier to click. Applying this principle means making important CTAs large and positioning them near where users are likely looking, improving usability and conversion rates.

Flicker occurs when visitors briefly see the original page before the test variation loads, creating a jarring visual transition. This technical issue can negatively impact user experience and skew test results by causing confusion or distrust, making proper implementation of testing tools critical.

Form field optimization involves reducing friction in forms by minimizing required fields, using clear labels, providing helpful error messages, and improving the overall completion experience. Since forms are often the final step before conversion, even small improvements can significantly impact completion rates.

Frequentist testing is the traditional statistical approach that requires you to set a fixed sample size upfront and wait until the test completes before drawing conclusions. This method determines whether results are statistically significant based on whether the observed difference would rarely occur by chance, typically requiring 95% confidence or higher.

Friction refers to anything that creates hesitation, confusion, or difficulty in completing a desired action, such as complex forms, slow load times, or unclear messaging. Identifying and reducing friction is essential for improving conversion rates because even small obstacles can cause visitors to abandon their journey.

Funnel analysis tracks the step-by-step path visitors take toward conversion and measures how many complete each stage versus dropping off. This analysis reveals where you're losing the most potential customers, helping you prioritize which steps in the journey need optimization most urgently.

The Gutenberg Diagram describes the natural reading pattern where eyes move from top-left to bottom-right in a Z-shaped flow across a page. Understanding this pattern helps you place important elements like headlines, key benefits, and CTAs where visitors are most likely to see them.

A heatmap is a visual representation showing where visitors click, move their mouse, or focus attention on a webpage using color-coded overlays. Heatmaps quickly reveal which elements attract attention and which are ignored, helping you understand if important content and CTAs are being seen and engaged with.

Heuristic analysis is a systematic evaluation of your website against established usability principles and best practices to identify potential issues affecting conversions. This expert review provides quick insights into problems like unclear value propositions or poor navigation without requiring extensive data collection or testing.

Hick's Law states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number of choices available. This principle guides CRO by encouraging simplified navigation, focused landing pages, and streamlined forms, as reducing options helps visitors make decisions faster and reduces abandonment.

A hypothesis is an educated prediction about how a specific change to your website will impact user behavior and conversions, typically formatted as 'If we do X, then Y will happen because Z.' Creating hypotheses before testing ensures you're making strategic, data-informed changes rather than random tweaks.

Information Architecture is the structural organization of content and navigation on your website, determining how information is grouped, labeled, and accessed. Well-designed IA helps visitors find what they're looking for quickly and understand their options, reducing confusion and abandonment.

An invalid test produces unreliable results due to problems like insufficient traffic, premature ending, implementation errors, or external factors affecting one variation differently. Invalid tests can lead to poor decisions, which is why proper test setup, duration, and statistical rigor are essential.

A KPI is a measurable value that shows how effectively you're achieving important business objectives, such as conversion rate, revenue per visitor, or cart abandonment rate. These metrics help you focus on what matters most and track whether your optimization efforts are driving real business results.

A landing page is a standalone webpage designed with a single focused objective, typically where visitors arrive from ads, emails, or campaigns. Unlike general website pages, landing pages minimize distractions and guide visitors toward one specific conversion action, making them essential for campaign success.

A macro-conversion is the primary goal you want visitors to complete, such as making a purchase, requesting a demo, or submitting a lead form. These are the conversions that directly impact your bottom line and are the main focus of your optimization efforts.

A micro-conversion is a small action that indicates progress toward a main goal, such as adding an item to cart, watching a video, or clicking to a product page. Tracking these smaller steps helps you understand where visitors engage or drop off in their journey, allowing you to optimize each stage of the conversion process.

The Minimum Detectable Effect is the smallest improvement in conversion rate that you want your test to be able to detect reliably. Setting an MDE helps determine how much traffic and time you need for a test, ensuring you don't waste resources on tests that can't produce actionable results.

Mobile-first design is an approach that prioritizes designing for mobile devices before adapting to larger screens, ensuring optimal experience for smartphone users. With mobile traffic often exceeding desktop, this approach ensures your site works well for the majority of visitors and typically improves overall conversion rates.

Motive is the underlying reason or desire that drives visitors to take action on your website, such as solving a problem, achieving a goal, or fulfilling a need. Understanding visitor motives helps you create compelling messaging and experiences that align with what they're trying to accomplish, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Multivariate testing simultaneously tests multiple elements and their combinations on a page to identify which mix produces the best results. While more complex than A/B testing, MVT helps you understand how different page elements interact with each other, though it requires significantly more traffic to reach reliable conclusions.

Personalization is tailoring website content, offers, or experiences to individual visitors based on their characteristics, behavior, or preferences. By showing more relevant content to each visitor, personalization can significantly improve engagement and conversion rates compared to a one-size-fits-all approach.

A prototype is an interactive mockup of a webpage or feature that simulates the user experience without full development. Prototypes allow you to test concepts, gather feedback, and identify issues before investing in complete implementation, reducing costly mistakes and speeding up optimization.

Qualitative data provides insights into why visitors behave certain ways through feedback like survey responses, user interviews, and session recordings. While quantitative data shows what's happening, qualitative data reveals motivations, frustrations, and reasoning behind user behavior, helping you understand what changes to make.

Quantitative data consists of numerical metrics that can be measured and compared, such as conversion rates, page views, bounce rates, and revenue. This data tells you what is happening on your website and how much, providing objective evidence for identifying problems and measuring the impact of changes.

Sampling size refers to the number of visitors included in your test, which directly affects the reliability of your results. Larger sample sizes provide more accurate and trustworthy results, while tests with too few visitors may show misleading patterns that don't reflect true performance differences.

A scroll map visualizes how far down a page visitors scroll before leaving, showing what percentage of users see content at different depths. This helps you determine if important information and CTAs are positioned where most visitors will actually see them or if they're buried below where people stop scrolling.

Segmentation is dividing your audience into distinct groups based on shared characteristics like demographics, behavior, or traffic source. Analyzing and optimizing for specific segments helps you understand different user needs and create more targeted experiences that convert better than generic approaches.

Session recordings are video-like playbacks of individual visitor interactions showing their mouse movements, clicks, scrolling, and navigation through your site. Watching real user sessions helps you identify usability issues, confusing elements, and friction points that quantitative data alone cannot reveal.

Social proof uses evidence that others have successfully used and endorsed your product or service, including customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, or user counts. This psychological principle increases conversions by showing prospects that people like them have made the same decision and been satisfied.

Statistical significance indicates whether your test results are likely due to actual differences between variations rather than random chance, typically requiring 95% confidence or higher. Reaching statistical significance ensures you can trust your test results before making permanent changes to your website.

Trust signals are elements that build credibility and reduce anxiety about doing business with you, such as security badges, guarantees, professional design, or industry certifications. These signals are essential for conversions because visitors need to feel confident and safe before sharing information or making purchases.

Usability measures how easily visitors can navigate your website and complete tasks without confusion or errors. High usability means people can quickly find what they need and take action, while poor usability creates friction that drives visitors away before they convert.

User Experience encompasses all aspects of how visitors interact with and perceive your website, including ease of use, visual design, and emotional response. A positive UX makes it intuitive and pleasant for visitors to accomplish their goals, which directly impacts whether they convert or leave frustrated.

User surveys collect direct feedback from visitors through questions about their experience, needs, or reasons for not converting. Surveys provide valuable qualitative insights into customer motivations, objections, and preferences that help inform what changes to test and how to improve messaging.

Your value proposition is a clear statement that explains what benefit you provide, how you solve customers' problems, and what makes you different from competitors. A compelling value proposition immediately answers 'why should I choose you,' making it one of the most important elements for driving conversions.

A variation, also called a challenger, is the modified version of a webpage being tested against the original to see if it performs better. Each variation contains specific changes to elements like headlines, images, or CTAs, with the goal of discovering which version drives higher conversions.

A wireframe is a basic visual layout that shows the structure and placement of elements on a webpage without detailed design or content. Wireframes help plan and communicate page organization before investing in full design, making it easier to test different layouts and get feedback early.