DE
BRGlossary
Keeping abreast of conversion optimization trends and technologies can be tiring. Even more so when the terms/keywords used by conversion experts are going over your head. This glossary aims to help you by bringing all popular CRO terms — basic as well as advanced — in one place. To make the list comprehensive, the terms have been compiled from a wide range of conversion optimization disciplines such as A/B testing, Website Design, Online Ads, SEO, and more.
A
A/A Testing
A/A testing is a statistical test performed to compare two identical experiences on a random set of users. While the traffic is distributed equally among both variations, the objective of an A/A test is to validate a statistical test that it returns no difference in conversion rates between the two experiences.
Application Programming Interface (API)
An interface/intermediary that allows two applications/programs to talk to each other.
Authority Site
Authority sites play a pivotal role in establishing trust and expertise in a specific niche. They provide valuable, in-depth content that resonates with audiences. By focusing on quality and relevance, these sites can significantly enhance search engine visibility and attract organic traffic. Building an authority site not only offers monetization opportunities but also establishes you as an industry leader.
B
Bayesian
Bayesian is one of the two mutually exclusive sets of statistical fundamentals (the other one being Frequentist statistics) that can be used to model any statistical problem. Bayesians consider the parameter of interest to be subjective (a distribution of possibilities) described by a belief distribution that is updated on observing data.
C
Campaign Scheduling
Campaign scheduling allows you to plan when your campaigns will start and stop, making sure they reach your target audience at the optimal times. You can set start and pause dates and times, and even repeat your campaigns on a set schedule. Scheduling your campaigns helps you avoid conflicts, optimize your data, and maximize the impact of your campaigns on your target audience.
Clickmaps
Clickmaps serve as a great way to perform qualitative analysis and understand user behavior at a granular level. Analyzing these maps tells you the number of clicks on each of your website elements. They inform you about how users browse your website, what elements they interact with the most, and what causes friction in their journey.
Confidence Interval
A confidence interval is the degree of uncertainty in a particular metric of interest, typically an average. It tells you how confident you can be that the experiment's estimated metrics reflect what you would expect to find if it were possible to obtain data of the entire population instead of a limited sample.
Cookies
Cookies are one or more little pieces of information from a website that are preserved in a web browser that can be retrieved by the website at a later time. Cookies are used to inform a server that a user has returned to a specific web page. When visitors return to a website, a cookie remembers their preferences and allows the site to offer customized settings and content.
Custom Conversion
Custom conversion is a goal type that allows users to track custom events that are not triggered by clicks/page visits. This goal type will trigger a javascript code snippet when the condition is fulfilled.
Customer Journey Management
Customer journey management is the process of utilizing technological advancements and behavioural orientation to enhance the customer experience. It aims to reduce consumer effort on various channels and platforms, creating a smooth experience each time a user engages with your business.
D
Date-Range Filters
Date-range filters is the ability to filter a report for a specific date range. For example, view a Goal’s conversion report when a marketing campaign was live for a week on the website.
Digital Customer Experience
Digital customer experience or DCX refers to every digital interaction a customer has with a brand. The activities might include conducting an online search to understand your product, looking at customer reviews on the online marketplace, requesting customer support or self-service portal assistance, or interacting with your mobile app.
Digital Marketer
A digital marketer produces new leads, increases brand recognition, and promotes products and services through numerous digital channels, such as social media, emails, blogs, and online adverts. Digital marketers build, execute, and enhance a company's overall digital strategy.
Directional Cues
Directional cues are visual elements of a website that are used to direct visitors’ attention to a specific area on the website (a CTA or an information box).
E
Elements List
Element list is a report type under website heatmaps that shows the list of elements on a page sorted by its relative importance in terms of clicks it has received.
Engagement Ratio
Engagement ratio measures users’ interactions, encompassing activities like scrolling, clicking, typing, zooming in, and more on a website. A high engagement score signals high user attention, leading to positive user experiences and increased conversion rates. Zeroing in on customer feedback and creating customer-focused content can help improve the engagement ratio on a website.
F
Feature Toggles
Feature toggles are a technique in software development that enables teams to turn features on and off without deploying new code. This allows for continuous delivery and enables teams to quickly test and validate new features without impacting the end-user experience. By using feature toggles, you can increase the speed of delivery, reduce risk, and increase agility in your organization's development process.
Field Level Statistics
Field level statistics is that part of a form analytics report that provides insights on the performance of individual fields in terms of time spent, refills, ignores, etc.
Friction
Friction is caused by elements of a website that confuse or distract visitors, resulting in a loss of conversions. Friction-causing website elements can be complex navigation links, cluttered boxes, CTAs with a lack of visual contrast, etc.
G
H
Hesitation Time
Hesitation time is a field-level stat in a form analytics report that shows the time spent by the visitor on the field when they were not actively filling it up.
I
Interruption
Interruption is a practice of providing attention-grabbing content to website visitors that purposely breaks their usual website navigation experience. Exit pop-ups can be considered as a form of interruption.
Inverse Metrics
Inverse metrics are considered better when their values decrease. A reduction in their value is seen as an indicator of improvement in the overall visitor experience on a website. For instance, a lower bounce rate suggests higher visitor engagement, and a lower form abandonment rate signifies smoother visitor interactions with webforms.
J
JS Variable
JS variable is a targeting condition that evaluates a custom criteria using javascript variables defined on a page.
L
Live Chat
Live chat is a real-time chat-based customer support service that websites provide to their visitors.
M
Mobile App A/B Testing
Mobile app A/B testing is a way to test different versions of an app to see which one works best. It is used to figure out which version of the app will make people more likely to take the desired action, or which version will have a better impact on the app's business goals.
Multi-Variate testing vs A/B testing
Both A/B and MVT use the same testing process, which involves splitting designs among several website users and identifying which website variation has the most influence on company KPIs based on how visitors engage with the variation after viewing it. But the distinction depends on what is being tested. In contrast to an A/B test, which changes and tests just one element, an MVT may modify and test many elements…
N
O
Omnichannel Marketing
An omnichannel marketing approach involves nurturing leads and engaging users. It ensures a positive and seamless customer experience through the integration of multiple offline (retail store, events, call centre) and online channels (website, app, social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp) while maintaining a consistent brand presence.
On-Page Surveys
An on-page survey is a tool that allows you to gather feedback on a particular page of your website from visitors by conducting a survey and asking them questions about it. These surveys are usually embedded within the page for which feedback is required and are simple, straightforward, and quick to complete.
P
Peeking
Peeking in A/B testing occurs when results are checked before a test's predefined endpoint, which can lead to false positives. This premature analysis increases the risk of drawing incorrect conclusions. Effective A/B testing requires maintaining a consistent test duration or sample size to avoid peeking. To ensure reliable results, businesses should implement techniques to reduce this risk, such as peeking corrections, predefined stopping rules, and a disciplined approach to test…
Q
R
ROPE
The Region of Practical Equivalence in statistics delineates a zone around a baseline where differences, though statistically significant, are considered trivial in practical terms. In experimentation, ROPE enables the early discontinuation of variations that are statistically unlikely to outperform the baseline, helping you avoid wasting time and resources on ineffective changes. Further, if you want to test whether a variation is equivalent or better (but not worse) than the baseline,…
S
Sample Ratio Mismatch
Sample Ratio Mismatch (SRM) arises when traffic allocation to the groups in an A/B test deviates from the intended distribution. Maintaining intended sample size allocation between control and treatment groups is crucial for accurate test results and sound decision-making based on them. Hence, early detection and correction of SRM are critical to optimizing test resources and achieving reliable outcomes.
Scarcity Marketing
Scarcity is a psychological tactic that marketers use to push visitors towards a conversion action. It takes advantage of the human fear of 'shortage' or in today's terms, FOMO (fear of missing out) - “Only 5 items left” and “Sale only till 8 PM” are some examples where scarcity marketing is used.
Scrollmap
A scrollmap is a type of website heatmap that provides a visual representation of a user’s scrolling behavior. It offers insights into how users scroll across a specific website area, allowing for the identification of UX improvements, the implementation of changes, and a boost in conversions.
Sequential Testing Correction
Sequential testing correction consists of techniques used in statistical analysis to mitigate the risk of increased false positives while continuously monitoring test statistics for significance. Sequential testing can increase the chance of declaring a variation to be a winner when it is actually equivalent to the baseline. That is where sequential testing correction helps control this risk by adjusting the level of confidence required before declaring something as significant.
Split-Url Testing
In a Split-URL test, you create multiple versions of your website hosted on different URLs. On these versions, traffic is distributed randomly and a randomized controlled experiment is conducted. The performance of each of the variant is monitored and evaluated to identify the most effective variation. A split test enables you to determine which of multiple variations of your web pages has a higher conversion rate for your visitors.
Standard Error
The degree to which the result of an A/B test can be apart from the actual figure is called standard error.
T
Test Duration
The test duration comes from a sample size calculator which estimates the number of samples needed to estimate a significant effect within the chosen error bounds correctly. This calculation is performed before running an experiment to plan resources such that a timeline of an experiment is decided.
Testing in Production
Testing in production is a standard practice in the modern software development cycle to ensure the release of high-quality products and improve user experience. Using this methodology, marketers can run tests to understand users’ responses to any new feature releases, while product managers can use these data to improve product experiences.
Type-1 Error
In an A/B test, if both variations are similar and don’t affect the metric being tested any differently, an error may occur where the null hypothesis is rejected after the test concludes. In such a case, if it’s determined that there is a statistical difference between the variations, the result is a Type I error.
U
User Intent
User intent is the intention or goal users have in mind when making search queries. Creating content that meets user intent is imperative if you want your page to rank highly for the keyword you’ve targeted on the SERP. This is because Google considers user intent when displaying relevant search results to users for specific search queries.
V
Visitor Segmentation
Visitor segmentation refers to the practice of identifying certain user groups sharing common characteristics that have a conversion rate very different from the conversion rate when all visitors are considered for analysis. Segmentation analysis is useful to move the metrics in a positive direction by enabling businesses to build a personalized experience for their visitor segments.
W
Website Banner
A website banner is a form of digital advertisement which is mostly a rectangular graphic displayed on a website and, is usually, the first contact a potential customer has with a brand. When users click on a banner, they generally are redirected to the advertiser’s own website.
Sign up for a full-featured trial
Free for 30 days. No credit card required
Set up your password to get started
Awesome! Your meeting is confirmed for at
Let's talk
Talk to a sales representative
Awesome! Your meeting is confirmed for at
Thank you, for sharing your details.
I can't wait to meet you on at
, thank you for sharing the details. Your dedicated VWO representative, will be in touch shortly to set up a time for this demo.
We're satisfied and glad we picked VWO. We're getting the ROI from our experiments.
Christoffer Kjellberg CRO Manager
VWO has been so helpful in our optimization efforts. Testing opportunities are endless and it has allowed us to easily identify, set up, and run multiple tests at a time.
Elizabeth Levitan Digital Optimization Specialist
As the project manager for our experimentation process, I love how the functionality of VWO allows us to get up and going quickly but also gives us the flexibility to be more complex with our testing.
Tara Rowe Marketing Technology Manager
You don't need a website development background to make VWO work for you. The VWO support team is amazing
Elizabeth Romanski Consumer Marketing & Analytics Manager
Trusted by thousands of leading brands
Awesome! Your meeting is confirmed for at
Thank you, for sharing your details.
Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon based on the idea that individuals are more likely to adopt certain behaviors or make certain decisions if they see others doing the same thing.