Conversion rates are incredibly vital for the success of your business. The conversion rate determines how many people took a call to action upon visiting your website. Furthermore, this data can help optimize your website.
Optimizing to boost conversion rates is something every business does. Moreover, many businesses get conversion rate optimization (CRO) wrong and cost themselves precious sales or conversions.
In 2016, Econsultancy and RedEye prepared a CRO Report. It suggested that 55% of companies consider CRO as vital for their digital marketing strategies. Thus, CRO is essential to succeed in the online world.
A conversion rate optimization mistake can occur unknowingly or knowingly. Moreover, these mistakes go a long way and cost you business and sales.
In this article, I’ll break down some of the most common CRO mistakes you might make.
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Top Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes
Conversion rate optimization ensures that customers or viewers take action on your web page. Moreover, this action can be a purchase, filling out a form, or making an inquiry. Furthermore, such actions will make your customer invested and engaged.
But many business owners make crucial mistakes while doing CRO. Let me provide an insight into the major conversion rate optimization mistakes for your business.
Not Split Testing Changes
The changes you implement on your website need testing. These tests will determine if your changes are effective or not. Hence, the process of split testing comes in handy. Furthermore, the data collected will help you implement future changes better.
A split test provides stats such as statistical confidence. However, these stats don’t represent success or failure this easily. Many businesses make the common mistake of taking these results at face value.
For example, if the statistical confidence of your changes is 95%, that doesn’t mean you have a success rate of 95%. This number means that even if your results are zero in the long term, there is a 5% chance you’ll get success.
Hence, it is essential to assess the statistical significance of data when it comes to CRO.
Implementing Too Many Changes
Not testing changes is a problem. Likewise, implementing too many changes at once is an error. Several changes make the test results unreliable. The data gathered is either too little or too varied to get conclusive findings.
Too many changes will also lead to little to no progress. Furthermore, this will also hamper long-term changes and their planning.
Hence, you should implement changes in short numbers. Limit your changes and do split testing to understand their effectiveness.
Thus, implementing changes in moderation will increase the conversion rates of your website.
Slow Loading Times
Slow load times are always a nuisance to customers and visitors. 47% of viewers expect websites and landing pages to load in under 2 seconds. Furthermore, the slow load times will increase the bounce rate of your website.
They can also reduce conversions by at least 7%.
Improving your load time can go a long way in retaining customers. Moreover, if more customers stay on your site, higher are the chances of conversions.
You can improve website load time by employing various methods. Some of these are –
- Use services like Google Page Speed Insight’s to evaluate your pages speed regularly
- Conduct stress tests to improve your server’s response time
- Minimize HTML and JS files
- Compress and optimize the images you use on the website
- Enable caching to boost performance
Thus, boosting the speed of your website will help improve your conversion rates.
A Lack Of Appealing Images And Videos
Good quality images are the only insight customers can get into your business. Websites lack physical touch and rely on images and videos to provide insight. Hence, your images and videos must be attractive and high-quality.
Studies have found that websites with images get about 94% more views. Low-quality photos and videos will result in customers leaving the websites.
Here are some more tips on improving the image and video quality –
- Add larger images
- Provide a zoom-in feature
- Include real-life images
- Add smooth transitions to videos
- Provide background music to your videos
These tips will help boost your conversion rates and retain your viewers.
Forcefully Optimizing Bad Websites
Often, businesses believe that conducting CRO will automatically increasing conversions and views. But this might not work if the website design itself is not very intuitive and appealing.
This problem occurs due to various reasons. Your website is the medium through which customers gain insight. Hence, your website must be appealing.
Most often, websites have a poor design and have extremely cluttered homepages. This clutter doesn’t allow viewers to pass through the different sections. Moreover, a significant landing page or section might get lost in all the chaos.
Hence, you must optimize your website to be user-friendly. Here are some tips –
- De-clutter your homepage
- Make important sections larger and more in the field of view
- Move contact and other such sections to the sides or bottom
- Ensure the load times are fast
Thus, optimizing your website will help you retain your audience and boost conversion.
Hiring The Wrong Experts
Conversion rate optimization is a niche. The field has trained experts and professionals with a lot of experience. Furthermore, these experts can understand statistics and their findings.
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is not hiring experts. Non-experts can’t comprehend data as accurately. Furthermore, they can’t help you implement minor changes to boost performance.
Hence, hiring the right experts goes a long way in conversion rate optimization efforts.
Testing On The Wrong Crowd
The difference between random traffic and your targeted audience is massive. Your target audience provides you the most reliable data and insights.
On the other hand, random traffic might provide more data, but it might also be inaccurate. Your website needs to be optimized to serve your target audience.
Your target audience’s response will help you plan your changes better. Furthermore, it’ll help you implement them effectively with regular feedback. Hence, you must always test on your target audience and not random traffic.
Final Thoughts
Conversion rate optimization is a highly crucial part of online websites. It provides you with essential data that will help you get more action on your website. Furthermore, these actions can boost sales or engagement.
But CRO leaves room for a lot of mistakes. While they might seem small, they can hurt your website in the long run. Hence, you mustn’t unknowingly make these mistakes. This list has the top 7 most common mistakes you can learn from.
If you find my tips helpful or have one of your own to add, leave a comment below!
