Are You Blindly Following “Proven CRO Tips” – Read This!

“They say 74% of the CRO activities give guaranteed boost to the online sales, yet thousands of companies struggle to drive the conversion to more than 0.5%”

Scroll through the top results of the search pages and I bet you will find millions of CRO tips bloggers love to call “proven”, but the question arises- “are these proven tips giving the proven results to all the companies?” And if yes, then, “why the online marketing industry is still filled with disparities?”

The success stories of the top-notch will tempt you to adapt their certified CRO tips, but there is a lot more you need to know prior taking a walk on the side that seems greener…

Blindly Copying Will Not Lead You Anywhere

Marketers need to acknowledge that no same set of recommended CRO tips could ever work equally well for all types of websites, just like the same medicine cannot cure all types of diseases. Blindly following the best CRO practices listed by one of the top-notch adept or borrowing a test hypothesis might work for you once, but chances are they will not give you the anticipated results most of the time. In order to implement what is the best suited for your website, you need to follow an analytical approach to identify the core issues of your website and how could they be resolved.

A Strong Hypothesis Is Necessary For An Effective AB Test

While optimizing his/her website for conversion, the worst mistake one can do is blindly following the listed CRO tips without an underlying test hypothesis. In place of opting for directionless testing, having a solid test hypothesis lets you take decisions based on your goals and insights. It is the assumption you plan your CRO activities upon and summarizes what you seek to change, and how you plan to achieve it. Remember, forming strategies based upon your instinct can make you pay back severely, for which a strong hypothesis based on lots of research and analytics can provide you a solid optimization framework to work upon.

Qualitative And Quantitative User Search Never Go Out Of Style

Trusting yourself is good, but taking decisions based entirely on your gut could prove to be a risky affair in optimizing your business for conversions. Before reaching any conclusion based on what you feel, gather as much data as you can along with the behavioral research about your website’s visitors. Furthermore, you will find hundreds of tips that will tell you to depend majorly on numbers and analytics, but always remember sometimes even the numbers lie; therefore, it is vital to have a blend of qualitative and quantitative information about your audience to make the most out of your conversion optimization strategies.

Expecting Instant Returns Will Give You Instant Disappointments

Anticipating an immediate outcome from your CRO practices will only hand you a bag full of disappointments. It happens with most of the marketers who invest in CRO; they expect to see a boost in the conversions every month, but not always, the results manage to meet the expectations. While evaluating the outcome, do not expect to incur the ROI from your CRO practices at least for the initial three months. “From my experience, I could tell, that you cannot expect to get handsome returns every month; you will just get a few big wins yearly that will cover most of your website’s revenue boost.”

 Instead Of Conversions, Optimize For The Proceeds

What if I say, increased conversion can sometimes decrease your revenue?

While optimizing for the website conversion, most of the consultants forget to focus on the basic goal of all the strategies, i.e. “revenue”. Emphasizing on conversion rate is undoubtedly important, but not at the cost of shrinking proceeds. Make sure that the consultant you are dealing with has his focus on the revenue throughout the process, and keep your prices up to attain more profit in the quickest way. “Say, you charge $50 for a chair, to which you welcome 6% conversion out of the 1000 visitors that visit your website. Now increase the cost to $80 per chair, even if the conversion will move from 6% to 4% due to the increased prices, still you will earn $3200 for the same chair you were earlier getting $3000.”

Always Integrate Testing With Analytics For CRO

“CRO has nothing or very less to do with the analytics” This is perhaps one of the biggest myths which are associated with conversion rate optimization. Assuming what works for your website is easy, but it is the data that gives you the true picture. In addition, a hold at the analytics helps you to crosscheck the data when you feel unsure of the test results and pick up the bugs even at a later stage. Data analytic plays a major role in conversion rate optimization, which is why most of the experts begin their CRO process with data interpretation. Integrating analytics in CRO also provides you an insight into the other important metrics like bounce rates, time spent on site, average order value, secondary conversions, etc.

Optimizing Your Value Proposition Never Fails

Marketers should remember that the only thing that will help you to stay afloat against all the odds is your unique value proposition that tempts the visitors to buy your services or products. Marketers focus heavily on the design of the website but fail to notice that nothing would work unless your brand is offering something that your users will love. The aesthetics and the functioning surely play a prominent role in boosting your website’s conversion rate, but the soul of your conversion rate optimization remains to be the value proposition exhibited on your page. Therefore, focus all your optimization practices and experiments around your product value if you seek to compel the visitors to convert.

[Tweet “Focus your #cro practices and testing on your product value to compel visitors to #convert.”]

Small Changes Lead To Small Differences

Small tweaks and moderation are easy to implement, and give results in a short period, but often they evade you from focusing on the root cause behind the low conversion rate of your website. I am not saying that making small changes will harm your website by any means, but if you are seeking drastic results then you have to take the risk and incorporate drastic changes in your website. From the landing page to the payment gate, you have to make big changes to get big returns. For instance, the team of quick sprout turned their contact page into an infographic and tripled their contact requests as the result.

Don’t Stop Too Soon

While optimizing for conversion, the common mistake most of the marketers do, is ending the tests very soon. It is not a very smart idea to judge the effectiveness of one variation when your variation does not even have 100 conversions to run the test on. Therefore, determine pre-calculated test duration, and make sure you run your tests until you feel sure about the results. Wait at least for 100 conversions per variation and then jump to any conclusion. Experts have witnessed several tests showing 95% confidence in the beginning of the test, but falling out later without making any difference in the results, which is why, Peep Laja, from ConversionXL, recommends keeping the sample size to 100 conversions to assure the best outcome.

Conversion Rate: Important, But Not The Only Metric To Care About

Conversion is indubitably one of the most important metrics to focus upon, but aiming at conversion rate alone might make you brush aside a lot of work that sets the stage for those conversions. When we talk about CRO, all of the efforts focus on up-surging the Conversion Rate, but we fail to notice that in order to receive the most out of their optimizing practices, marketers also need to lay their eyes on the other metrics like cost, revenue, bounce rate, etc. Concentrating on the other useful metrics along with the conversion rate makes you stand out from the league of “conversion rate centric” websites, and helps you in focusing on all the metrics that support conversion on a website.

[Tweet “Concentrate on useful metrics along with #cro to stand out from “conversion rate centric” websites.”]

Conclusion

A short piece of advice for all the readers- any CRO tip that assures you instant benefits irrespective of your website’s distinct metrics, goals, and functioning, could probably fail to give you the expected outcome. Instead of blindly following the CRO tips listed by the adepts, dig deeper into the roots of your website’s conversion issues, and come up with a low hanging solution that could serve you anticipated results.

In addition, winning or losing will not ever mean you can discount on conducting those constant tests, always remember that CRO is a never-ending game, which requires long-term work and regular testing to lure the optimal results. With the hope that the listed details will help you to optimize your site better, I take your leave. Thank you!