{"id":"cro-methodology","name":"cro-methodology","summary":"ウェブサイトやランディングページのコンバージョン問題の監査や、エビデンスに基づくA/Bテストの設計。","body":"# CRO Methodology\n\nScientific, customer-centric approach to conversion rate optimization based on the CRE Methodology(TM). Extraordinary improvements come from understanding WHY visitors don't convert, not from copying competitors or applying generic tips.\n\n## Core Principle\n\n**Don't guess -- discover.** Every visitor who doesn't convert has a reason. Discover those reasons through research, then systematically eliminate them with evidence and proof. This evidence-based approach consistently outperforms \"best practices\", intuition, competitor copying, and expert opinion.\n\n## Scoring\n\n**Goal: 10/10.** Score any landing page, funnel, or conversion flow against the seven Quick Diagnostic rows below: award ~1.4 points per row answered \"yes\" (7 rows = 9.8, capped at 10). Bands: **9-10** = single clear action, research-grounded O/CO table, value prop legible in 5 seconds, proof at every friction point, funnel mapped, path free of UX blockers; **5-6** = guessed objections, generic best-practices copy, proof buried in FAQs; **<=3** = competing CTAs, no funnel map, claims with no proof. Report the current score and the specific diagnostic rows failing.\n\n## The CRO Frameworks\n\n### 1. The CRO Process\n\n**Core concept:** A systematic 9-step process moving from defining success metrics through research and experimentation to scaling wins across the business.\n\n**Why it works:** Random optimization skips research. The process forces you to understand visitors before changing anything, so every change rests on evidence, not opinion.\n\n**Key insights:**\n- Define success metrics aligned with business KPIs before touching any page\n- Map the entire funnel to find \"blocked arteries\" (high-traffic underperforming paths) and \"missing links\" (absent funnel stages)\n- Research visitors in three dimensions: who they are, what blocks them (UX problems), what stops them (objections)\n- Gather market intelligence from competitors, reviews, and other industries\n- Prioritize ideas with ICE scoring; design bold experiments, not \"meek tweaks\"\n- Run experiments with statistical rigor (95% confidence minimum, full business cycles), then scale wins across the business\n\n**Product applications:**\n\n| Context | CRO Process Step | Example |\n|---------|-----------------|---------|\n| **Landing page audit** | Define goals, map funnel, research visitors | 70% bounce because value prop is unclear |\n| **Checkout optimization** | Map funnel for blocked arteries | Shipping cost shock causes 40% cart abandonment |\n| **Email sequence** | Scale wins | Winning objection-handling copy reused in drip emails |\n\n**Copy patterns:**\n- \"What's preventing you from [action] today?\" (exit survey to discover objections)\n- \"Here's what [X] customers found...\" (counter-objection with social proof)\n\nSee [funnel-analysis.md](references/funnel-analysis.md) when mapping the funnel -- step-by-step mapping, blocked-artery/missing-link diagnosis, industry funnel benchmarks, and impact-based prioritization.\n\n### 2. Customer Research & Objections\n\n**Core concept:** Visitors fail to convert for specific, discoverable reasons. Exit surveys, chat logs, support tickets, sales calls, and reviews reveal the \"voice of the customer\" and their real objections.\n\n**Why it works:** Teams' guesses about why visitors leave are almost always wrong. Research uncovers objections no one anticipated, and the customer's own language out-persuades any copywriter's invention.\n\n**Key insights:**\n- Primary sources (exit surveys, live chat, tickets, sales calls) give direct visitor language; secondary sources (reviews, social media, competitors) reveal industry-wide objections\n- The \"Big 5\" universal objections: Trust, Price, Fit, Timing, Effort\n- Quantitative research (analytics, heatmaps) shows WHERE problems are; qualitative (surveys, interviews) shows WHY\n- Non-converter surveys should ask ONE question for maximum response; post-purchase surveys (\"What almost stopped you from buying?\") reveal the objections that matter most\n\n**Product applications:**\n\n| Context | Research Method | Example |\n|---------|---------------|---------|\n| **Exit intent** | On-site survey | \"What's preventing you from signing up today?\" |\n| **Post-purchase** | Email survey within 7 days | \"What almost stopped you from buying?\" |\n| **Objection mining** | Support tickets + reviews | Search \"but\", \"however\", \"worried about\"; negative reviews = unaddressed objections |\n\n**Copy patterns:**\n- Use exact customer language in headlines and body copy -- it outperforms polished marketing copy\n- \"What's the one thing we could change to make you [action]?\"\n- \"How would you describe [product] to a friend?\" (reveals positioning in customer terms)\n\n**Ethical boundary:** Anonymize data, get consent for recordings, and don't survey so aggressively that you degrade the experience.\n\nSee [RESEARCH.md](references/RESEARCH.md) when planning research -- ready-to-use survey questions per channel, recommended tools, and how to turn raw responses into a ranked objection list.\n\n### 3. Persuasion Assets\n\n**Core concept:** Every company sits on overlooked proof -- undisplayed testimonials, unmentioned awards, hidden credentials, buried guarantees. Inventory these \"persuasion assets\", acquire missing ones, display them.\n\n**Why it works:** Visitors decide on evidence, not claims. A modest claim with overwhelming proof beats a bold claim with none.\n\n**Key insights:**\n- Audit five categories: Credentials & Authority, Social Proof, Risk Reversal, Data & Specificity, Process & Methodology\n- Create a wish list for missing assets and actively acquire them (request testimonials, apply for awards, compile statistics)\n- \"Proof sandwich\" structure: Claim (bold promise), then Proof (evidence), then Reinforcement (secondary proof)\n- Proof hierarchy, strongest first: specific results with context > named testimonials with photos > case studies > statistics > logos > generic testimonials\n- Place proof at points of friction, not in FAQs; specific numbers beat round ones (\"47,832 customers\" beats \"About 50,000\")\n\n**Product applications:**\n\n| Context | Persuasion Asset | Example |\n|---------|-----------------|---------|\n| **Landing page header** | Logo bar + rating | \"Trusted by 10,000+ companies\" with 5 recognizable logos |\n| **Pricing page** | Risk reversal | \"30-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked\" |\n| **Checkout flow** | Trust badges near forms | Security certification, payment logos, guarantee seal |\n\n**Copy patterns:**\n- \"Here's how we did it for [Company X]...\" (case study proof)\n- \"[Specific number] businesses trust us\" (not \"thousands of customers\")\n- Lead with benefits, not features: \"Never delete another photo\" beats \"256GB storage\"\n\n**Ethical boundary:** Never fabricate testimonials, inflate statistics, or display fake trust badges -- all proof must be genuine and verifiable.\n\nSee [PERSUASION.md](references/PERSUASION.md) when auditing or acquiring proof -- the full five-category asset checklist and psychological triggers. See [COPYWRITING.md](references/COPYWRITING.md) when writing the proof copy itself -- headline formulas, benefit-led phrasing, and proof-element wording.\n\n### 4. The O/CO Framework\n\n**Core concept:** The Objection/Counter-Objection table is the core CRE technique: map every visitor objection to a specific, evidence-backed counter-objection.\n\n**Why it works:** The table forces every counter to be placed where its objection arises in the reading flow, so a concern is answered the instant the visitor feels it -- not pages later, by which point they have already left.\n\n**Key insights:**\n- Research objections from surveys, chat logs, tickets, and sales calls -- don't guess\n- Implicit objections (ones visitors won't admit) require \"CO Only\": counter without stating the objection\n- Place counter-objections at the point of friction (credit-card objection near the payment form), not buried in FAQ\n- Address primary objections above the fold; repeat the same counter in multiple formats (text, video, testimonial, data)\n- Canned support responses are goldmines of tested counter-objections\n\n**Product applications:**\n\n| Objection | Visitor Question | Counter-Objections |\n|-----------|------------------|--------------------|\n| **Trust** | \"Why should I believe you?\" | Named testimonials, media logos, awards, guarantee |\n| **Price** | \"Is it worth the money?\" | ROI calculator, cost comparison vs. alternatives, payment plans |\n| **Fit** | \"Will it work for MY situation?\" | Similar-customer case studies, segmented pages, free trial |\n| **Timing** | \"Why act now?\" | Cost-of-delay math, genuine limited offers, seasonal relevance |\n| **Effort** | \"How hard will this be?\" | \"Done for you\" framing, \"Set up in 5 minutes\", step-by-step breakdown |\n\n**Copy patterns:**\n- Bad (states implicit objection): \"Worried you're too lazy to learn a language?\"\n- Good (CO Only): \"Let the audio do the work for you.\"\n- \"What almost stopped you from buying?\" (post-purchase survey to validate the O/CO table)\n\n**Ethical boundary:** A counter-objection must resolve the concern with real evidence, not dismiss a legitimate worry as unfounded.\n\nSee [OBJECTIONS.md](references/OBJECTIONS.md) when building the O/CO table -- per-category counter-objection technique catalogs, CO-Only patterns for implicit objections, and how to mine objections from support logs.\n\n### 5. Hypothesis Design\n\n**Core concept:** Every experiment needs a documented hypothesis linking a specific change to an expected outcome for a research-grounded reason, prioritized with ICE scoring (Impact, Confidence, Ease).\n\n**Why it works:** A hypothesis forces you to articulate WHY a change should work, grounding it in customer research. ICE scoring stops teams wasting traffic on low-impact tweaks.\n\n**Key insights:**\n- Format: \"If we [change X], then [metric Y] will improve because [reason based on research]\"\n- Define primary (decides winner), secondary (monitoring), and guardrail (must not decrease) metrics before testing\n- ICE, 1-10 each: Impact (could this double conversion?), Confidence (how strong is the research?), Ease (how easy to implement?); prioritize by the average\n- The 10x screen: if a change couldn't 10x results, deprioritize it. Worth testing: complete redesign, new value proposition, fundamentally different offer. Not worth testing: button color, font size, image swap\n\n**Worked example:** \"Customer language from surveys will lift signups because visitors see their own words\" scores I:8, C:9, E:10 = 9.0 -- a top-priority test. A button-color swap scores ~I:2, C:2, E:10 = 4.7 and gets skipped despite being trivial to build.\n\n**Copy patterns:**\n- \"Based on our research, visitors' #1 objection is [X]. This test addresses it by [Y].\"\n- Document before: hypothesis, primary metric, sample size, duration. Document after: raw numbers, confidence interval, learnings, next steps\n\nSee [testing-methodology.md](references/testing-methodology.md) when prioritizing or scoring a backlog -- per-axis ICE scoring rubrics, a worked prioritization table, and the weighted-ICE variant.\n\n### 6. A/B Testing Methodology\n\n**Core concept:** Run controlled experiments comparing page versions with proper statistical rigor, so results reflect reality rather than random noise.\n\n**Why it works:** Without rigor you can't distinguish real improvements from random variation -- peeking, undersized samples, and ignored practical significance all manufacture false winners.\n\n**Key insights:**\n- Calculate required sample size BEFORE starting (baseline rate, minimum detectable effect, 80% power, 95% significance)\n- Run at least one full business cycle (1-2 weeks), covering weekdays AND weekends\n- Never peek at results and stop early -- it dramatically inflates false positives\n- Practical significance matters: a statistically significant 0.1% lift isn't worth implementation complexity\n- Use multivariate only with 100k+ monthly visitors on a proven winning page\n- Promote winners to the new control; a failed test that teaches you something beats a win you don't understand\n\n**Product applications:**\n\n| Context | Test Type | Example |\n|---------|----------|---------|\n| **Concept validation** | A/B test (2-4 variants) | Two fundamentally different layouts based on different customer insights |\n| **Low traffic** | Bold A/B test | Dramatic changes reach significance on far smaller samples than timid ones |\n| **Post-test** | Scale wins | Apply winning insights to landing pages, ad copy, email sequences |\n\n**Copy patterns:**\n- \"We increased [metric] by [X]% with [Y]% confidence over [Z] weeks\"\n- \"Test showed no significant difference, teaching us that [insight about customers]\"\n- Document learnings: Test, Hypothesis, Result, Learning, Applicable to\n\n**Reporting rule:** Decide sample size and duration up front, then report whatever the pre-set test returns -- never stop early on a peeked \"winner,\" rerun a test until it yields the answer you want, or bury an inconclusive result. (This is the one honest-reporting constraint for the whole methodology.)\n\n## Common Mistakes\n\n| Mistake | Why It Fails | Fix |\n|---------|-------------|------|\n| **Copying competitors blindly** | You don't know if it even works for them | Research YOUR visitors' objections, build YOUR evidence |\n| **Testing button colors before understanding objections** | Surface symptoms, tiny effects, wasted sample | Customer research first, then test big changes |\n| **Assuming you know why visitors leave** | Teams are almost always wrong about motivations | Exit surveys, chat logs, support-ticket analysis |\n| **Applying \"best practices\" unvalidated** | May not fit your audience, product, or context | Treat them as hypotheses to test, not rules |\n| **HiPPO decisions** | Highest Paid Person's Opinion is not data | Let research and test results decide, not seniority |\n| **Optimizing pages without funnel context** | Fixes shift problems elsewhere; misses biggest wins | Map the funnel, find blocked arteries, prioritize by impact |\n| **Meek tweaks instead of bold changes** | Rarely reach significance; waste time and traffic | Test changes that could double conversion, not nudge it 2% |\n| **Giving up after one failed test** | The opportunity still exists | Investigate why, return to research, try a bolder change |\n\n## Quick Diagnostic\n\nAudit any landing page or conversion flow:\n\n| Question | If No | Action |\n|----------|-------|--------|\n| Do we know the ONE action visitors should take? | Page lacks focus | Define a single conversion goal; remove competing CTAs |\n| Have we researched (not guessed) why visitors don't convert? | Optimization built on assumptions | Run exit surveys, analyze chat logs and tickets |\n| Do we have an O/CO table? | Objections go unanswered | Build it from research; place counters at friction points |\n| Is the value proposition clear within 5 seconds? | Visitors bounce before understanding | Run a 5-second test; rewrite headline in customer language |\n| Are persuasion assets visible (testimonials, awards, guarantees)? | Claims without proof aren't believed | Audit assets, acquire missing ones, display prominently |\n| Have we mapped the funnel for blocked arteries? | Optimizing the wrong page | Map traffic per stage, compare to benchmarks, prioritize |\n| Is the path free of UX blockers (speed, mobile, form length)? | Friction kills converts who already decided to act | Fix load time, mobile layout, and over-long forms first |\n\n## Further Reading\n\nFor the complete CRE Methodology(TM), detailed case studies, and advanced techniques:\n\n- [*\"Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites\"*](https://www.amazon.com/Making-Websites-Win-Customer-Centric-Methodology/dp/1544500513?tag=wondelai00-20) by Dr. Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson\n\n## About the Author\n\n**Dr. Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson** are cofounders of Conversion Rate Experts, the agency whose CRE Methodology has doubled the sales of many leading websites -- clients include Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Dropbox -- and earned a Queen's Award for Enterprise (Innovation). Blanks holds a PhD and led usability teams at Hewlett-Packard; Jesson's background is direct-response marketing. Their book *Making Websites Win* distills the methodology into a repeatable, evidence-based process.","author":"@wondelai","ownerProfile":null,"authorContacts":null,"sourceUrl":"https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/cro-methodology","license":"MIT","category":"writing","lang":"en","tokens":3518,"stars":0,"calls30d":1,"claimed":false,"visibility":"public","origin":"crawler","version":"0.1.0","createdAt":"2026-08-22","updatedAt":"2026-08-22","files":[{"path":"references/COPYWRITING.md","size":4026,"sha256":"076943081756ea8e039f04609931cd65718c957f6a226baaabcae79921a90dc0"},{"path":"references/funnel-analysis.md","size":11224,"sha256":"f7df0f118e06dd0bd40bdca2a9f3c389af7000bab9a82e71f79a30d5f6896511"},{"path":"references/OBJECTIONS.md","size":4033,"sha256":"61ef2cbd8a975dd7095a03971f64ac0fd7a22a8cdb361b026e1a74de5e63faaa"},{"path":"references/PERSUASION.md","size":3934,"sha256":"baf108abfa03d516a43448b733bbc35ac4f0cb41f0d185db0b62b97525fc3f42"},{"path":"references/RESEARCH.md","size":5342,"sha256":"398476032019cfebc3b557ec4ead0303982585d510bdad90faa3d2dcce27ad66"},{"path":"references/testing-methodology.md","size":10247,"sha256":"02f1d19c751bc44bdcd3e9a91a6808ad219312be249b7d1bc1adf16d08b88cb1"}],"requires":{"mcp":[],"tools":[]},"safety":{"flags":[],"scannedAt":"2026-08-22","hasScripts":false,"networkEndpoints":["www.amazon.com"]}}