Over 96% of Digital Marketing professionals in Australia and New Zealand are involved in Conversion Rate Optimisation – according to Catchi’s latest poll
Sydney, Australia – Google sponsored Catchi’s forum for Conversion Rate Optimisation professionals called CRO PROS which was focused on Super charging your CRO and Personalisation programs.
Over 140 marketers and e-commerce managers gathered together at Google’s amazing office in Pyrmont to discuss the current state and trend of CRO moving into 2017.
Cornelius Boertjens, co-founder and Managing Director of Catchi, talked about the emerging trend and need for Mobile Optimisation and Personalisation in the Australasian digital marketing and online sales industry.
“Over the past couple of months, we have received an increased demand and budgets for mobile optimisation and more advanced personalisation from both existing and new clients,” said Boertjens. “This is a huge shift from a few years ago, when companies hardly allocated any budget to A/B Testing and conversion rate optimization, let alone Personalisation.”
This trend is accompanied by a shift in the expertise surrounding CRO available within Australia and New Zealand.
The participants in Sydney answered a live poll asking them a range of questions linked to their experience with CRO. The same poll was asked at a CRO PROS event held at Catchi’s main office in Auckland, New Zealand a few weeks later.
When asked about their experience in CRO Programme, over 96% said they are involved in some form of CRO – broken down into four categories (CRO Gods, It’s key to our digital marketing, we are testing on a regular basis, and ad hoc optimisation, as stated in the graph below). Only 4% of the attendees did not know what CRO was.
However, only 9% of the attendees see themselves as CRO Gods – some of which came from the Catchi team members who completed the poll….
Around 18% see CRO as key to their (Digital) Marketing and just under 30% are testing on a regular basis.
A whopping 40% is still doing some ad hoc optimization. This means that they have run some split-tests on some pages in their funnel but does not necessarily have a testing strategy.
This is a definite sign of the shift happening in the CRO scene in this part of the world.
Over the past couple of years, Catchi has also partnered with both ADMA in Australia and the Marketing Association in New Zealand to roll-out CRO courses and educational programmes to raise the awareness of CRO as a separate Digital Marketing discipline.
The poll also asked the biggest pitfalls and challenges that experts run into when running a successful CRO Programme (see wordcloud below):
The biggest challenge for most is still “hippos” or Highest Paid Person’s Opinions. This is why any successful CRO Programme needs a champion in the board room. Due to lack of understanding of what CRO can actually do, there is still a lot of resistance from high-level members of the company.
Other notable pitfalls were: “resources” and “alignment.” So many companies would love to have a CRO programme but they just cannot handle the process in-house. Either they have a long backlog of development queue and cannot allocate development resources to testing or they do not have the marketing expertise to run an air-tight CRO programme.
And finally, the most important CRO goals for the attendees is sales and leads. This is also reflected in the goals with the clients that Catchi work with.
“The key insight for us from this quick poll is that CRO has come a long way over the last 5 years since we founded Catchi,” said Boertjens. “The same challenges are still there: not having enough time and not having the right resources. But companies are clearly beginning to understand that it is something they cannot grow without and it’s now often being discussed at boardroom level.”
Other speakers at the event were Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate @ Google, Paul Keen, CTO @ Airtasker and Kiran Kumar, Founder @ CompeteShark