Conversion Rate Optimization Misconceptions (and How They’re Costing You Money)

Conversion rate optimization is one of those marketing practices that always have misconception among marketers.
Some think it is totally wastage of money and time that don’t really help in their business growth.
On the other hand, some find it effective enough that fulfill their all marketing needs. From growing traffic to converting visitors into leads – CRO is the solution for all their problems.

However, some of these misconceptions aren’t dangerous, while some might cost you time, money and other external resources.

To help you with it, I’m going to clear some of the common misunderstandings about conversion optimization that is holding you back from achieving the success.

#1. CRO is a one-man army

This is one of the biggest rumors spreading around the businesses that CRO is a single skill set.

Most of them like to summon their CRO Guy, whenever they need more conversion from their websites.

In reality, CRO is a set multiple skill. To be a master in conversion rate optimization, you must need at least three different skill sets:

1. Copywriting: No matter how beautiful your ads or website, still it can’t beat effectively written ads that play the major role in your final conversion rates.
2. Design: Writing effective ads alone isn’t enough your site’s UI/UX also matters when it comes to conversion rates. To do that you’ll need an expert UI/UX designer who knows about conversion rate optimization.
3. Analytics: Only writing ads and design won’t take you far unless you know how effective your ads are performing. In order to that that you’ll need skilled people who run tests and analyze the results.

You may need to take help of a developer to run tests. These are the important skills you’ll need whenever you use CRO on your site.

#2. Follow the conversion rate optimization best practices

Before reading this post, you might already have stumbled the “best tips to improve conversion rate optimization” OR “conversion rate optimization best practices” on Google. Didn’t you?

You may also have gone a step forward and implemented those so-called best tips and tricks – but I’d like to know did they really work out for you?

If yes, then do you know why exactly did they work?

The truth is that there is no one size fits all “best practices” that guarantee of success for your industry.

Instead of following best practices that worked for others, better try to focus on how you can remove the obstacles that are causing the low conversion.

For instance – a common piece of advice people will give you to change the CTAs color from green to red or vice versa.

However, it works sometimes. In one study, changing button color from green to red actually increased the conversion rate by 21%.

 

Understand conversion rate optimization isn’t a checklist that you can apply every time on your business.

Rather, try to learn how you can improve the user experience of your website without losing revenue. Your job is to find out your targeted clients and what will work on your website to attract them.

To make it happen, you need to do:

• Conduct your own audience research to find out what your users expect from you
• Conduct research to understand where users are leaving out your website
• Makes changes and A/B tests based on the collected data

Remember to examine the results you must run your A/B tests at least 4 weeks; therefore it’s not advisable to try every possible “best practice.”

#3. CRO is all about making small changes that lead to success

What is the first thing comes to your mind after seeing these types of case studies?

 

Awesome! Changing a single word (“my” instead of “free”) attracted 90% more clicks.

But this is where the real problem begins.

In fact, following blindly such case studies might make you lost. Because when you see such case studies, the first thing you do is to start looking for that silver bullet where making small changes will bring you huge success.

In general, that never happens. Case studies often mislead people – because they share only partial information.
They don’t explain you:

• How long the test was done
• If the traffic was constant during the testing period
• What other changes were made on the website

If you really want to double your conversion rate, focus to build a framework that tests all necessary elements of your website that could improve user experience and conversion of your website.

Don’t fall into the trap of the silver bullet – it won’t take you anywhere, but cost your time and money in redesigning your website.

#4. Conversion rate optimization is all about A/B testing

Many people think that conversion rate optimization is all about split testing site elements.

As a matter of fact, CRO is all about looking for the opportunity that leads users to buy from you. ACRO guy job isn’t just testing the elements but identifying the obstacles and remove them to increase conversion on a site.

For that, ask yourself a question – if your website is providing the solution that your users are looking for? Try to learn user’s behavior and what is holding them back to buy your product.

And the good thing is – you don’t even need lots of traffic to run this test. A simple usability test using the “think aloud protocol” may help you to identify lots of user-experience roadblocks.

Here is a great model to understand what to focus on:

According to this pyramid, your CRO practice should work on the following (in decreasing order of priority):

• Functionality: If the website working on all devices. Do all the buttons are clickable?
• Accessibility: Can everyone easily access the website, in terms of devices and locations?
• Usability: Can people easily find the items on the website without any guidance?
• Intuitivity: Can users easily navigate through the site and content without any help?
• Persuasiveness: Can your site is smart enough to convince the users to share their contact information or buy a product?

Keep in mind, don’t unnecessarily run the spilled tests, instead try to learn when the right time to implement.

#5. CRO alone can help you build a successful business

Because of seeing others success with CRO, some businesses think if they master in conversion rate optimization their online business will start growing.

CRO may increase your conversion rate from 1% to 5% that, of course, increase your sales. Yet, still, you need to get traffic, establish your business brand, and keep attracting clients to back to your site.

Let’s say you’re selling a $200/month product with a 2% conversion rate and 100,000 visitors/month, there are lots of ways you can double your earnings:

• You can increase your conversion rate to 4%
• You can increase your conversion rate to 200,000 visitors/month with the same conversion rate
• You can increase customer engagement
• You can increase the conversion rate to 2.5% and traffic by 10,000 visitors

Focusing on conversion rate optimization is great because it gives you proven and data-driven information to convert visitors into customers. Although this may be true, it doesn’t mean you stop focusing on other aspects of your online business such as marketing, sales, and the product.

Final Thoughts

CRO can make a big difference in your conversion rate, but only if you build a conversion rate optimization strategy and follow that with your heart.

Don’t believe in conversion rate optimization myths – until you try them yourself.

Before you go for split tests first think about your customers and their problems. Stop blindly following best practices, instead do your own research and collect the data about your customers and users behaviors.

Try to figure out why visitors are not converting into leads and then apply the right solution to make them convert.

Let me know what conversion rate optimization myths you still believe.

CONTENT MARKETING CONCEPT– stock image

 

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