Even the slightest Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO) mistake could lead to a great loss in sales. But not surprisingly CRO mistakes are ones you can easily avoid if you learn more about the strategy and the tools that are readily available.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into conversion rate optimization, and explain why CRO is so valuable. Primarily, in this guide, we are dealing with the basic mistakes you are already making and how you can fix them.
Whether you are a small business owner and want to increase your revenue, or if you are a marketing professional helping clients to develop a marketing strategy, Conversion Rate Optimisation should be in your daily routine.
By helping you stay away from these CRO pitfalls, you will soon be able to boost your conversion rates, i.e. turn more visitors into qualified leads and, in turn, more leads into customers. Put simply, when you optimize your conversion rates, you are able to reap more benefits (i.e. revenue) with the same resources.
What are some advantages of CRO?
Conversion rate optimization is the art and science of streamlining your buyer’s journey to help more paid or organic traffic take the next step. In practice, this could relate to how many web visitors will make an inquiry or subscribe to your newsletter or buy a product.
In any case, improving your rate of conversion will be extremely beneficial.
Picture this: if you double or triple your conversions, then you are essentially doubling and tripling your incoming leads or sales. Same effort – double the result. In a digital world where every business is fiercely competing for a portion of traffic, it’s crucial that you make the most of every click/visitor you get.
What’s more, conversion rate optimization helps you understand your target audience. With CRO, you learn what makes customers tick, and which elements or features are most likely to trigger their enthusiasm to the point that they perform a particular action, like placing an order.
Ultimately, CRO helps companies target audience. It prevents you from using the same old tactics that just don’t work. Instead, with CRO, you get a higher ROI from your campaigns by focusing on parts of your sales funnels that bring in more leads, customers, and money.
Having explained how CRO benefits your business, let us now look at the mistakes you might be making with your CRO, and how you can avoid or fix them.
Common CRO mistakes
Mistake #1: Website is slow
Studies indicate that 47% of users expect a site to fully load within two seconds or less. We know, this seems like too fast, but in today’s internet era with a lot of information and distraction, users expect sites to load instantly. Slower sites equal higher bounce rates and a drop in conversion rates.
Don’t keep your users waiting. This CRO mistake is easy to fix. We highly suggest you try to reduce the content on each page of your website. Particularly, you can optimize the size of images and video, if you are using them.
Use tools to minimize javascript and CSS – there are a lot of WordPress plugins that will do that with the click of a button. Switch over to a faster server to host your pages. Or maybe you can use a CDN for faster page serving across the globe.
It shouldn’t be too hard to optimize your pages for speed, and the results can be dazzling. To see how fast your website is currently loading, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
So, the goal with this CRO factor is to get your website under the two-second threshold.
What’s more, you need to understand that high-conversion pages don’t need to be packed with information; simplicity wins.
See, for example, how we use clean landing page designs with short and to-the-point web copy to achieve dazzling conversion rates for our own business and for our clients. Download our ultimate lead generation template or sign up for this free video course that will teach you how to skyrocket your conversion rates.
Mistake #2: Outdated or ugly web design
Research indicates that around 75% of buyers will judge a company based on the style of their website. If your own isn’t beautiful and functional, then you are already losing out on a significant amount of leads. Traffic may come in but people will leave your pages as soon as they see them.
Now, the obvious question is what makes a beautiful website?
Of course, you need to follow the design trends so your pages don’t look outdated. Besides having a modern site, you need to consider how the structure and various elements function and help create a buyer’s journey for your visitors. In other words, does your site design and layout serve your conversion rate goals?
A big part of your CRO strategy should focus on product/service pages. Product pages are where users go to learn more about your offer and eventually hit the button to place an order or inquire further. A product page is an essential part of your web design project as you need to keep it simple for visitors; they need to be able to easily find product information, images, navigation elements and exactly how to take action.
Here’s a checklist to help you review potential CRO mistakes you might be making with your web design:
- Is your website mobile responsive?
- Are all the elements displayed well on mobile?
- Is there a core focal point to captivate the user’s attention the minute the page loads?
- Do you have clear navigation menus to help visitors browse and find the information they need?
- Can web visitors figure out what to do to order or inquire?
- Is the content easy to read?
- Is your color combination attractive?
Improving your website design and layout can have a great impact on your CRO. To start with, you will see more and more people staying on your web pages for longer, and the bounce rate should drop.
Mistake #3: Struggling to track web visitors properly
A large component of CRO is understanding user behavior patterns and testing out new paths or elements in those paths. We will say more about testing later on in this article, but this particular mistake, the inability to track users, is a CRO roadblock. Click here to learn more about how web tracking and analytics work, and how they can benefit your business.
Our proprietary analytics tool, Statly, works by simply installing a code snippet to your website. It allows you to track every visitor from the minute they arrive at your landing page all the way through to every stage of your sales funnel. It is a real-time and advanced analytics solution and one of the most essential tools for effective conversion rate optimization.
Apart from sales funnel analysis, you can even set up a heat map tool that shows where the users’ cursors go and what they’re doing on your web pages. Then, you can replay the whole session and see exactly what the user did. The benefit of heat maps is that you can follow a user all the way from landing on your site, through to taking an action step and finally exiting the site.
With user behavior analysis, you should be able to discover common patterns that will help you reduce friction. For example, you can compare how different landing pages perform using the same paid ads and the same target audience. Then, you can both improve your low-performance landing page and ramp up the investment in the best-performing page. By all means, you can examine the landing page that’s delivering the highest conversion rate, and try to design other pages like it to generate the same results.
By failing to keep track of users, you miss out on every piece of important CRO information. Essentially, you’re participating in a guessing game with every person that visits your website. But business is not about guessing; it’s about making decisions based on data.
If you don’t have much of an idea how folks found your website, how they acted when they were on your pages, and the buyer’s journey they followed or they didn’t follow, then there’s not much you can improve.
Mistake #4: Landing pages aren’t optimized for conversions
Another common conversion rate optimization mistake is when landing pages are not specifically put together to convert traffic into leads or buyers. In other words, the misstep is that you are not placing enough significance on the role landing pages in CRO. You may have too few, or you don’t have any set up at all.
The advantage of a landing page is that you can customize it to tempt users into performing a specific action. A landing page provides you with the opportunity to practically map out the user experience, and guide them to your ideal conclusion of the buyer’s journey.
This happens because a landing page is part of a sales funnel, which consists of different pages and automated email messages, as well as other assets, like lead magnets or webinars. Each of these elements has a specific role and objective, and they all work together to guide the visitor through the process of transformation you have mapped out for them.
Mistake #5: Your tests don’t yield accurate results
Split testing or A/B testing is the backbone of virtually every conversion rate optimization method. It begins with running the original page (the base scenario) and evaluating the conversion rate. Then, you change an element of the page (e.g. where you place a video, or how many fields a form has) and see if this change yields a better conversion rate, and so on.
Changes should be made ceteris paribus – don’t change multiple variables at once or you won’t know which alteration yielded in an increase in conversion rate.
Among the most typical CRO mistakes is that your tests are delivering inaccurate results. How does this occur? It usually boils down to three things:
- You are running a multivariate testing without even realizing it.
- Your sample size is far too small. Go back to your statistics textbook to see how you can define a proper sample.
- You’re not taking the seasonality factor into consideration. For example, websites may see a better conversion rate during a holiday period like Christmas.
- The tests aren’t being run for long enough.
- You fall into the trap of seeing what you want to see – just seeing the piece of data that confirms your initial hypothesis.
- You run the test only once. To see true validity, you have to run multiple test cycles and analyze the data you receive.
Misinterpreting the data at hand can get your into real trouble with decision making. You need to cross-check and verify that what you are seeing paints an accurate picture of what’s going on in your business. Keep an open mind and think outside the box to allow you and your team discover what’s really hiding behind those numbers.
Get help with CRO
Of course, A/B testing, sales funnels analysis, and conversion rate optimization can be complicated and take up a lot of your precious time. You would probably need to assemble a team to tackle all of these tasks effectively – but this is where we come in.
Our team at Done For You is ready to lend a helping hand. For several years now, we’ve been building high-conversion sales funnels, setting up tracking and A/B testing, and tackling all the issues that are needed to improve CRO.
Our goal is to get you more traffic, better leads and more sales. We are experts at driving your ideal customer to your landing page, and helping you to turn them into leads who are ready to take an action like fill out an inquiry form, call you to book an appointment, or simply give up their email to download your material.
There’s no need to wait any longer to make your website finally work; Hit us up using this form and we will get back to you with all the insight you need.