Audit
Conversion rate optimization audit
Thirteen areas of the conversion path, ending in a test backlog you can actually run.
A conversion rate optimization audit is a read of the whole path from the click to the completed action, looking for the places people are being lost and the reasons they are being lost there. It covers thirteen areas, from whether the page answers the query that brought someone to it through to form friction, funnel drop-off and accessibility, and it ends in a prioritised experiment backlog rather than a list of opinions about your button colours.
Coverage
What does a CRO audit cover?
Thirteen named areas of the conversion path, from the click through to the completed action, ending in a prioritised experiment backlog.
The audit covers thirteen areas of the conversion path. The whole list is here so you can see where the work goes rather than trusting an adjective.
The conversion path end to end
Every step from the click to the completed action, walked in order, on the devices your visitors actually use. Most of the loss happens at a step nobody has looked at since it was built.
Message match
Whether the page continues the sentence the ad or the query started. A visitor who has to re-read the page to work out whether they are in the right place has already half left.
Above-the-fold clarity and value proposition
Whether a stranger can tell what you do, who it is for and what happens next, in the first few seconds and without scrolling.
Page structure and information hierarchy
Whether the page answers questions in the order a buyer asks them, or in the order the internal team happens to be organised.
Form design, field count and friction
Every field, what it costs in completions, and whether the business genuinely needs it at this stage. Fields that exist because someone once asked for the data are the most expensive furniture on a site.
Mobile experience
Read as its own path rather than as a narrower desktop. Tap targets, keyboard types, viewport behaviour and the parts of a form that only misbehave on a phone.
Trust and credibility signals
What the page offers a stranger as a reason to believe it, and whether the signals are placed where the doubt actually occurs rather than in a row at the bottom.
Speed where it affects conversion
Only the parts that change behaviour. A page that is fast enough is fast enough, and chasing a score past that point buys nothing a visitor can feel.
Funnel drop-off analysis
Where people leave, segmented by source, device and page, so the biggest loss is found from data rather than from a hunch about the hero image.
Micro-conversions and secondary paths
What the site offers people who are not ready to buy today, and whether those paths are measured at all. A site with one conversion and no alternative is discarding most of its traffic.
Objection handling and content gaps
The questions a buyer needs answered before acting, and whether the page answers them or leaves them to a search that ends somewhere else.
Accessibility where it affects conversion
Contrast, focus order, labelling and keyboard operation. This overlaps with compliance, but it is on the list because a form a person cannot complete is a conversion lost before any of it is a legal question.
A prioritised experiment backlog
The output rather than an area of study: every finding turned into something testable, ordered by expected value against effort, with what to test first stated plainly.
Method
How is a CRO audit run?
Analytics first to find where people leave, then the pages themselves to work out why, then the backlog ordered by expected value.
This is the same audit we run on an account before we agree to take it on. We use it to decide whether we can help, which is a stronger reason to make it accurate than any promise about it would be.
Read-only access, agreed first
You grant read-only access to the analytics property, and to a heat mapping or session tool if you already run one. We make no changes to the site during an audit, and access can be revoked as soon as the walkthrough is done.
Data first, opinions second
We find where people leave before looking at why, because a page read cold produces a list of things somebody dislikes rather than a list of things that cost money. The analytics decide where the attention goes.
The page read, by hand
Most free and cheap audits in this market are tool-generated scans: a crawler or a script runs a fixed rule set and formats the output. Ours is run by hand by the senior specialist who would do the work, which is why it reads like a person wrote it and why it can tell you which three findings matter out of forty.
Turning findings into experiments
Each finding becomes something you can test or ship, with an expected effect and the traffic it would take to prove it. Findings that your traffic cannot support a test on are marked as ship-and-monitor rather than dressed up as experiments.
The walkthrough
We take you through the backlog in priority order and agree what the first three are. The document is yours afterwards whatever you decide.
Deliverables
What do you receive at the end?
A written document, the drop-off evidence behind each finding, and a ranked experiment backlog stating what to test first and why.
- A written findings document covering all thirteen areas, ranked by impact and effort
- The drop-off evidence behind each finding, by source, device and step
- A prioritised experiment backlog with what to test first and what to ship without testing
- The traffic each test would need to reach a result, so nothing is queued that cannot be proved
- An implementation order, including what to leave alone and why
- A call to walk through it, and the document afterwards whatever you decide
Where this leads
- Conversion rate optimization services
What the ongoing work covers, if the audit concludes it is worth doing.
- Conversion rate optimization cost
Third-party market data, named and dated, with what each figure does not tell you.
- How pricing works
Why an audit is quoted against scope rather than listed, and what drives the figure for a given account.
The do-it-yourself version
The method is published rather than held back. If you would rather run it yourself, these are written so you can.
Fit
Who is a CRO audit for?
Sites with traffic that is not converting, and teams whose testing programme has stalled or keeps producing results nobody trusts.
- Sites with steady traffic and a conversion rate that has not moved in a year
- Anyone paying for clicks who suspects the problem is after the click rather than before it
- Teams whose testing programme has stalled, or keeps producing results nobody quite believes
- Businesses about to spend on more traffic, who would rather fix the leak before filling the bucket
- Sites where the form is the whole business and nobody has audited it since launch
When it is not the right thing to buy
If the site has very little traffic, a CRO audit will find things worth fixing but you will not be able to prove any of them, and you are better off spending on demand first. If conversion tracking is not trustworthy, the drop-off analysis has nothing solid underneath it, so the tracking audit comes first and we will tell you that rather than working around it.
If that is where you are, the free audit is the better place to start. It costs nothing and it will tell you whether there is enough here to be worth a paid one.
Questions
What do buyers ask about CRO audits?
Whether they have enough traffic to test, what access is needed, whether we run the tests, and what happens with too little volume.
Do I have enough traffic for this?
For the audit, almost certainly. For the testing programme it produces, often not, and that is worth knowing before you buy either. The audit states the traffic each test would need to reach a result, and where the volume is not there it says so and recommends shipping the fix and monitoring instead of running an experiment that cannot conclude.
What access do you need?
Read-only access to the analytics property, plus your heat mapping or session recording tool if you have one. We do not need access to the site itself or to any content management system, because we are reading it as a visitor does.
Do you run the tests as well?
Only if you want us to, and it is quoted separately. The backlog is written so your own team or another agency can run it, including the sample sizes, so nobody has to guess when a test is finished.
Is this the same as a design review?
No. A design review is an opinion about how a page looks. This starts from where people are measurably leaving and works backwards to the reason, which regularly turns out to be a form field or a missing answer rather than anything visual.
What if the real problem is the traffic?
Then the audit says so. Poorly matched traffic looks exactly like a bad landing page in the conversion rate, and the two are told apart by segmenting the drop-off by source. If the fix belongs in the ad account rather than on the page, that is what the document will tell you.
How does this compare to the free audit?
The free audit is a review that surfaces the biggest issues we can see and tells you which are worth fixing first, delivered on a call. This is the thirteen-area read, ending in a prioritised experiment backlog with the sample sizes attached. If you mainly want to know whether the page or the traffic is the problem, the free one will usually answer that.
The other audits
Google Ads audit
Eighteen areas of the account, read by hand by the person who would run it.
SEO audit services
Sixteen areas, read by a person, with the findings ranked rather than dumped.
Conversion tracking audit
Fourteen areas across GA4, Google Ads, the tag manager and the CRM, verified rather than assumed.
All four, and how they fit together, are on the audit services page.
Request the CRO audit
Tell us what you are running and we will scope it, then quote against that scope in writing before anything starts. You keep the findings whatever you decide afterwards.