Un.covered – Getting to know CRO with Yasser Mohammed
04/03/2019 - Digital Marketing
Tell us about your background and how long you’ve been a part of the Un.titled gang.
I’m originally from South West London, and did an Economics degree and then a Master’s degree in Strategic and Digital Marketing at De Montfort University in Leicester.
I originally joined Williams Commerce in 2017, with my main focus being on our PPC and SEO services. But over the course of time my role has developed, and I’ve worked to enhance our CRO offering. This has seen me progress into the role of CRO expert for Un.titled and the wider Williams Commerce Group.
For anybody not familiar, what is CRO and how can it benefit businesses?
I look at CRO in the context of Kaizen – the famous Japanese belief of continuous improvement.
What was great five years ago may be a barrier for conversion today. My job is to uncover and highlight any barriers to conversion and develop a strategy on how to overcome them.
CRO is not just for B2C businesses, it’s also essential for B2B customers – especially when their primary objective is lead generation.
Do you see many companies making oversights and not being aware of the potential blockers to conversion?
Yes. Sometimes I believe this is due to companies opting for internal preferences on how a website should be laid out, rather than following industry best practices.
That’s why CRO is so beautiful and beneficial. It looks at numbers and multiple user behaviours to gain an understanding on conversion barriers. It does not take into consideration the personal preferences of managing directors or heads of department, but focuses on the numbers to prove a case for change.
What kind of benefits can businesses realise by engaging in a dedicated CRO approach?
Businesses get to uncover and understand the bottlenecks to conversion.
Say a company is running a lead generation campaign, and has a detailed contact form designed to get as much information as possible and remove work later on. However, it may be possible that by removing one or two requirements on the form, there could be a significant increase in conversions.
Another approach would be looking at how product pages are laid out. Using CRO, you are able to lay your webpage out to ensure critical call to actions are placed at relevant locations.
For example, we noticed that one of our clients had high bounce rates on product pages, especially from PPC campaigns and on mobile devices. We noticed that this would largely be due to them running Shopping Campaigns. So we started looking at what barriers there were on mobile product pages and found that the user would have to perform multiple scrolls to get to the critical call to action. We proposed removing unnecessary top fold content and moving converting content higher up. The changes provided us with a 40% increase in mobile conversion rates from PPC traffic. It’s amazing how small tweaks can make such a big difference.
Outside of work, what are your interests?
I love to cook. Like I seriously love to cook. I also love spending quality time with my family. And I love to travel but I’m scared of heights.
One of my biggest drivers is motivating and inspiring people to be the best they can be. I know – I’m a bit of a saint. I’m also really into comedy, and I’d do stand-up but I’m too short.
And of course, I can’t not mention my beloved Manchester United. I'm happy Ole got the job because he deserved it after the form we had. Even though we are struggling, he's still behind the wheel...but it's an old banger at the moment! Hopefully I can update this soon.
To work with or find out more about Un.titled, get in touch.
