7 All-Too-Common Mistakes in CRO That Are Affecting Your Sales
May 20, 2024
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) gets a lot of attention in the marketing expert circles. That’s not surprising, considering how crucial it is. Badly optimized page can kill your sales even if your traffic is high. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of information, available on this topic.
We are here to help you out with our practical expertise in CRO by sharing 7 major “don’ts” when it comes to this process. So you don’t waste your time and money falling into all-too-common pitfalls that can be avoided, and set up your CRO properly from the get-go.
Online marketing is all about tangible business outcomes: leads, conversions, sales, and ultimately profits. And it achieves that by driving traffic. One of the worst-case scenarios is when that hard-won traffic gets onto the page that does not convert. That means the budget is spent, traffic is there, but business results are lacking. Another unwelcome scenario is when competition pages convert at outstanding rates, but yours show sluggish and disappointing results.
The Importance of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
That’s why Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is vitally important and gets so frequently discussed in the marketing community. Conversion rate is calculated via formula (Number of Conversions ÷ Total Number of Website Visits) x 100, with a “good” conversion rate falling anywhere between 2 and 5% across all industries. An expert CRO is what separates a page that hardly converts at 0.1% from a top performer that easily generates a high volume of sales at a 5% conversion rate or more. Some unicorn pages reach astonishing conversion rates of 10% and more – with product offering and precise audience targeting playing into this as well.
CRO techniques can include various enhancements to user experience (UX), sales copy, images, CTAs placements, even formatting of your text or choice of colors. There is a ton of advice out there on how to optimize your landing pages for CRO. How to know which tools and tactics to use? You are in the right place – we are happy to share our experience in the field, so you can avoid the costly mistakes and set up your CRO properly from the get-go.
Seven Common Mistakes in CRO
1. Avoid Haphazard Experimenting
If your company lacks a comprehensive workflow for analysis and testing, any “best CRO practices” that you might find on the Internet won’t work for you.
An efficient conversion optimization workflow can look like this:
- Observe.
- Formulate hypotheses.
- Conduct experiments and collect data.
- Analyze results.
- Draw conclusions.
- Go back to step #1.
Moreover, this framework needs to be supported by accurate data that’s available to you. The approach when you throw things at the wall and see what sticks won’t work. Moreover, it can bring disastrous results of wasted budget or stagnation.
This would be our key advice – have a comprehensive analysis and testing workflow for your CRO in place. From here, you can venture forward.
2. Don’t Drive Traffic to Pages That Are Not Optimized
Many businesses out there do not realize just how important the UX and design are for their online sales. Marketers are tasked to bring in as much traffic as possible, and they deliver. Meanwhile, sales can be starving for quality leads and conversions. It’s simple: more traffic ≠ more conversions. Before you invest into your PPC campaigns, or any other traffic-generating activities, make sure your page is well-optimized. Otherwise, you are spending your marketing budget and efforts unwisely.
3. Don’t Rely On Assumptions, Use Data Instead
When we perform CRO for B2B SaaS companies, we sometimes hear from clients that they’ve attempted some structured testing, including A/B testing, but it didn’t bring desired results. When we dig deeper, it turns out that it was due to how the results were generated. In effect, it boiled down to one or two decision makers and their subjective judgement of “good” and “bad”. For a smart CRO, you want to avoid assumptions and reliance on personal preference of any team member. Aim to use data and data-backed insights on user behavior wherever possible to prove or disprove your test hypotheses.
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Get Started4. Avoid Obsessive Fixation on One Conversion Goal
Another common mistake we sometimes spot in our industry is when marketers overly focus on a single conversion goal, such as form submission or purchases. Meanwhile, they ignore other important conversion goals. These can be calls, or newsletter subscriptions, or even clicks on company’s social media networks.
When you fixate solely on one goal, you effectively ignore various other opportunities for your site to convert. You also dismiss the amplified effect of several conversion goals working together to bring your customer from the consideration phase to purchase. We advise studying the entirety of your user’s journey and building your conversion goals around it. A good marketing practice is to create a Customer Journey Map. It should be based on your sales funnel and visualize all actions (conversion points) at each stage, from awareness to purchase.
5. Don’t Settle for Mediocre Load Times
An average website takes approximately 8.6 seconds to load on mobile devices. For websites ranking on the first page of Google, this number is 1.65 seconds. Do you see the marked difference here? Every year, the page load speeds become faster, so you need to stay on top of this. Avoid mediocre loading times and aim for outstanding results. We advise that your in-house development team or agency regularly monitors your website performance and strives for 1–1.5 seconds loading time.
6. Don’t Overlook Optimization for Mobile Devices
As of 2024, nearly 61% of traffic comes from mobile devices. This number will only continue to grow. Overlooking mobile optimization will cost you conversions, big time. Moreover, just making your website responsive for mobile is not enough. All of its elements and usability should be optimized for mobile viewers. We advise checking your audience insights, too. If the majority of your users come from mobile devices, it might be time to consider a mobile-first approach for your web-design and CRO.
7. Don’t Become Impatient
Remember the stages of testing workflow we’ve mentioned in our first point? The truth is, this “rinse and repeat” process will not only take a structured approach, but time and patience. But, as with all good things in life, it’s worth it. A well set-up page will bring in conversions and sales for years to come.
Takeaways
A good Conversion Rate Optimization is critical for the success of your marketing. We’ve shared the most common mistakes that you should avoid when performing your CRO. We hope our experience and know-how will allow you to escape the pitfalls of this journey and get to the point, where your pages are performing at a top level.
In this limited time, we couldn’t go in depth and personalize our advice to your concrete case. For this, you can schedule a call with our team. We will check your landing page and come back with a personalized CRO analysis, where we’ll demonstrate in detail how to improve your page and make it convert like a superhero.
Ann is a skilled UX/UI Designer and CRO expert who effectively shares her knowledge and insights in her field.