Note – Article by Ilan Nass from Taktical Digital (NYC).
Modern businesses spend a lot of time and money driving traffic to their websites. While getting traffic is important, businesses also need to make sure they are getting the most from the traffic they get.
This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. With CRO, you define an action you want website visitors to take, and you design the page or conversion funnel in order to increase the chances that they will complete that action. For many websites, a conversion is a sale, but it could be actions like downloading your app, signing up for an account, subscribing to an email list or filling out a form.
CRO is one area where many new businesses have trouble. They have ideas about design that may not align well with the goals of their website or they just don’t know many of the best practices for a successful CRO strategy. With this post, you will learn more about some of the more common CRO mistakes start-ups make and some of the things you can do to avoid them.
Only Testing Pages that have Obvious Problems
It is common for start-ups to think they don’t need to optimize the pages that perform well. You might analyze your website and see a few pages that do well and several that are getting poor results. Understandably, you want to focus on the pages that are having obvious problems, but you shouldn’t assume that there is no room for improvement with the pages that perform well. Analyze and run tests on every page. Even a small change to one of these pages could make a significant difference in the conversion rate.
Following Tips Instead of Data
You’ll find a ton of great CRO tips you can follow. While these tips can get you started, you can’t base your entire CRO strategy on tips and tactics that worked for other websites. Your website is unique to your business. If you want to maximize the potential of your site, you have to do your own research, form hypotheses based on that research, develop tests based on those hypotheses and analyze the results of those tests. Tips and tactics might give you a small boost on their own, but they are no substitute for doing the real CRO work on your website.
Not Accounting for Context
Many new businesses just assume a visitor is a visitor and a conversion is a conversion. The problem with this assumption is that there is a lot of context that surrounds every website visit and every conversion. The time of year or the day of the week may impact the behavior of different visitors. Traffic that comes from a PPC marketing campaign is likely to behave differently than visitors that found your site in search engine results. If you want to get the full value of CRO, you need to account for context when developing tests and analyzing data.
It Goes Beyond Split Testing
CRO is more than just split testing. Running split tests is important, but it is not the perfect tool for every CRO goal. In some cases, you might not be able to obtain a large enough sample size to get meaningful results. You might also need to get customer opinions to help inform your broader CRO strategy. There are many tools like surveys, user testing, and customer reviews can be a valuable part of optimizing your site for conversions.
As a final mistake to mention, don’t think CRO is something you just do once. You are going to need to test new pages and online assets as they roll out. Along with that, you may need to retest and make new changes to pages that have been optimized in the past.
Source: Speedcurve Performance Analytics | HD photo by Luke Chesser (@lukechesser) on Unsplash.
Note – Article by Ilan Nass from Taktical Digital (NYC).