Most marketing teams of the day see website traffic and conversion rate as the litmus tests of digital marketing success. Not all visitors become paying customers, and we know that already. The prime focus of these marketing experts and strategists is to design the web pages in such a way that drives more visitors to become customers. Whether it is by targeted advertisement or website content, the idea is to create each page is such a way that they can facilitate and support conversions.

When is the time to start conversion rate optimization?

Once you have a website and a strong team of marketers who can dedicate time and resources to drive more traffic, it is time to think about conversion rate optimization or CRO. It usually follows keyword optimization and development of off-page SEO. The basics of SEO are always necessary for any CRO initiative. There are tools like the Google Global Market Finder that help you find your target customer demand.

Here are a few ideas that can help you determine achievable goals to optimize your traffic and conversion rates -

• You can obtain the exact number of new customers by dividing the new revenue goal by the average sales price.
• The lead goal is the dividend of the number of new customers and customer close rate percentage.
• The percentage of conversion rate depends directly upon the leads and inversely upon the website traffic.

These are a few standard formulae even you can use to tackle your CRO goals at your company.

A few CRO mistakes that are keeping you from achieving your maximum business potential

The very first step towards creating a site that converts is to create a website that is user-friendly, easy to navigate, intuitive and provides a general direction to the visitors.  A LeadPages Case Study shows, your new visitors must understand the flow of actions including which subcategories to visit, how to find particular products, how to leverage discount coupons and avail customer support for purchasing queries. Here are six mistakes you need to avoid while considering CRO to realize the full potential of your business site -

Methodology trumps design instincts

You need to start thinking about a methodology even before you start the website construction. Any successful CRO plan has the five essential components of scientific experimentation - observation, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, and conclusion. Just moving a banner ad around, changing the color of the Buy Button or changing the shopping cart icon cannot be CRO without clear statistical analysis. Today, we know a brighter colored buy button works because Amazon has shown us. If your website uses a similar flow of structure, it might be useful for you as well, but you need to run A/B tests to know for sure.

Do not be whimsical while making designing decisions

While running a website, you should not make snap decisions without digging into relevant data first. It includes heat maps and dwell-time on a web page. Website traffic is essential, but no longer the only factor that contributes to conversion rates. You need to find out where you are losing your visitors. There might be a couple of dead ends like 404s or heavier pages that take too long to load. Tests should include quantitative, qualitative and observational data only. Steer clear of instincts and whimsy while you are trying to optimize your page for your new leads.

CRO does not equal A/B testing

We have been harping on about tests for a while, which may lead you to think that CRO is all about A/B testing. However, it is apparently much more. It is a broad aspect of digital marketing that includes customer journey mapping, optimization of website content and copy, personalization and segmentation tools, usability testing, heat testing, bounce rate and a variety of emails. If you focus on A/B testing alone, you will not be able to explore all the possibilities of the optimization process.

Believe in none other than stats and facts

You need to gather as much data as you can from your user interactions and sales. The lack of microdata from the website can be debilitating for a CRO plan. You need confirmed numbers to set up your conversion goals and find the success percentage. For example - you might have a landing page that has a high bounce rate. This subpar landing page is doing away with a considerable part of your conversion rate. The goal of your CRO should be to work on the improvement of this landing page and to create a better one with more chances of customer conversion.

Think about optimizing the parts of a website that works too!

Another common mistake even experts make is to "correct" only the things that are not performing well. CRO might be a lot about optimizing the web pages that are not performing well, fixing 301 redirects and taking care of 404s, but it is not ALL about fixing the broken stuff. You need to help the practical aspects of your site evolve to keep the intrigue of your visitors alive. Use proven CRO tactics on high-performing web pages to increase your conversion rate.

Optimizing a bad website does not work

If your site is a traffic repellent and a conversion killer, there is no point wasting more effort and money on it. Sometimes, it is easier to start fresh than to struggle with a bad website. A bad site can be "bad" by the way it looks, feels and handles. People may not like the navigation options, or the website may merely lack user-friendly aspects of design. Achieving optimization of conversion rate on these is not just difficult, it is quite impossible.

Websites need to consider buyer psychology, recent trends, the psychological impact of designs, user-friendly designs, new navigation options and other conversion factors during the design process. If your bad website design is keeping you up at night, it is time to invest some thought in a new website design that converts from the initial days.

Conclusion

These common CRO mistakes can kill all your digital marketing efforts and website sales with ease. When it comes to conversion rate optimization, do not trust anything more than sound statistics, facts, and studies. Many researchers show how websites can improve their website traffic and conversion rates without spending tons of cash, and you can check them out too if you want to welcome a positive change.

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