Bench 01: CRO foundations and measurement
What conversion rate optimisation actually is, how to measure a baseline honestly, and how to decide what to work on first when traffic is small.
The bench guide
Working guides on this bench
Foundations and measurement Choosing What to Fix First: A Prioritisation Method for Small Stores You cannot fix everything, and the order matters. A simple scoring method sized for one person's time: size of the leak, certainty of the evidence, and cost of the fix, in that order of honesty. Foundations and measurement How Long to Run a Change Before You Judge It Judge a change on complete trading cycles and a meaningful count of conversions, not on a nervous week. This guide sets the timing rules for small stores: minimum windows, what invalidates a read, and the kept-and-watched middle path. Foundations and measurement How Much Traffic Do You Need Before Testing Means Anything? Statistical tests need conversions, not just visits. This guide gives the working rules for small stores: how many orders a fair test needs, what to do below that line, and when to stop pretending. Foundations and measurement Keep a Change Log: The Small Habit That Makes CRO Compound A change log is one page per change: what changed, why, what you expected, and what the read said. It is the cheapest tool in conversion work and the one that turns isolated fixes into accumulated knowledge about your buyers. Foundations and measurement Micro and Macro Conversions: Count the Steps, Not Just the Sale The sale is the macro conversion; the steps that produce it - product views, adds to cart, checkout starts - are micro conversions. Measuring both turns one vague number into a map of where buyers are lost. Foundations and measurement Read Your Conversion Rate by Traffic Source, Not in Total A blended conversion rate mixes visitors who arrived with completely different intent. Reading the rate by source - search, email, social, paid, direct - separates site problems from audience problems. Foundations and measurement Set a Baseline Before You Change Anything A baseline is the honest before-picture: conversion by device and source over the last 60 to 90 days, written down before any change ships. Without it, every result afterwards is a guess wearing a number. Foundations and measurement Set the Right Conversion Goal for Your Kind of Business A store, a tradesperson and a software product convert on different actions, over different timescales. Setting the goal wrong - counting leads when you need qualified leads, signups when you need activated users - bends all the work that follows. Foundations and measurement The Funnel, Explained for a Store With Real Numbers The funnel is just the sequence of steps between arriving and paying, with a count at each step. This guide builds one from a small store's real dashboard numbers and shows how to read it. Foundations and measurement What Is a Conversion Rate, and How Do You Calculate Yours? Conversion rate is orders divided by sessions, times one hundred. The simple formula hides three decisions - what counts as a conversion, sessions or visitors, and over what period - that change the number. Foundations and measurement Why Published Average Conversion Rates Will Mislead You Industry averages blend different stores, definitions and intents into one number that describes nobody. This guide shows what published benchmarks can and cannot do, and the comparison that actually helps.