What are some common conversion rate optimization myths and mistakes?

Effective CRO requires a thorough understanding of user behaviour, website analytics, and business objectives. Before conducting any tests, it's essential to conduct research and gather data on user preferences, pain points, and motivations. This research can then be used to inform the development of a hypothesis and a testing strategy that is aligned with the business goals. CRO is about optimizing the entire user journey, from the initial click to the final conversion, rather than just focusing on individual elements of the website. CRO should be used in conjunction with other techniques, such as user research, data analysis, and website optimization, to achieve optimal results.

CRO isn't just about testing website elements like headlines or buttons. It's a comprehensive strategy that delves into user behavior, aligns with business objectives, and goes beyond mere testing. Effective CRO is based on well-researched hypotheses and data analysis, focusing on optimizing the entire user journey, not just parts of a website. It's a collaborative process, involving various stakeholders like UX/UI designers and developers, to enhance the user experience and demonstrate the program's business value. This holistic approach is essential for effective CRO and team growth.

Simple terms, the biggest mistake people/agencies make in CRO is testing a bunch of random ideas without forming an alternative hypothesis that challenges the null hypothesis that has data to back it up.

Can I change the myth name? Myth 1: Decision Science is all about testing. No. It's about making better decisions with data. And there are many, many tools in the toolbox to help us do that, including research (both qualitative and quantitative), as well as many different methods of testing. And it's not just about testing - it's about testing the right way - with well-defined experiments (regardless of the methodology selected). You still should still pre-design your experiment, pre-calculate your runtime, align on your OEC, and have a decision plan. And stop with all this marketing vs product testing nonsense. Do both. Same with validation vs innovation. Do both. It is not an either/or argument. Less is not more. More is more. Always.

Subjective bollocks here! If you turn over 9 million a day via your website then testing everything you change is advisable because 1% is detectable... and has massive impact. You should absolutely test everything you do. Other companies should strive for this but there are a number of reasons they won't achieve it.. Low traffic Poor development Comments like this ^^ ??

The most important reason why CRO is not a one-time project is that you learn from every experiment you conduct. Testing things is more than just to achieve a significant uplift. It is also to learn about the needs, motivations, and behaviors of your (potential) customers. When you set correct hypotheses and have solid documentation, you learn more and more with every experiment you run. This will lead to rich insights beneficial for the entire organization and several follow-up experiments, meaning CRO is never done. You keep learning and optimizing.

CRO is not just a one-off task; it's a continuous journey. It involves regular monitoring and updates to match evolving user needs and market trends. Through ongoing testing and learning, you gain insights into user behavior and preferences. Each test is a chance to learn more about your audience, beyond just boosting conversion rates. This continuous improvement cycle ensures your website remains relevant and effective, making CRO an essential, ongoing process in your digital strategy.

Businesses who think of CRO as a one-off project that can be 'completed' every couple of years are missing out on the true benefits of site optimisation. Firstly, this is because your customers are changing all the time. As new devices, browsers and operating systems come onto the market, users will be approaching your site in new ways, and finding new pain points. User preferences will also be changing as they are exposed to different UX journeys across the web What might have worked 6 months ago, might not work now. The second point is that a, well researched, testing roadmap can never be completed. Even if you aren't adding new ideas, iterations and next steps on the existing items will keep your roadmap full for months and years!

Each test is an opportunity for further learning. Testing is a form of research, and as you validate your hypothesis you learn more about a specific issue. Through iterative testing you can exhaust a hypothesis and push different variants to improve an area.

If you ever feel you've reached a plateau in your goals, try looking at them from a different perspective. Adapt your strategy to always ensure your goals are relevant to the way your users and the market are behaving. Your user experience should constantly evolve to meet the needs of your users and keep generating more conversions over time. In the end, everything that can be improved, should, and there's always something to improve.

CRO is for any and all websites, plain and simple. As long as you can identify a conversion goal you can create tests to improve it. Whether that be performance based tests, UI tests, UX tests, etc. You can always find ways to enhance the user’s journey.

Many people equate "Conversion" Rate Optimisation solely with increasing sales or revenue, therefore have the myth. While increasing sales and revenue is indeed significant for many businesses, conversion can encompass a wide range of desired actions or outcomes beyond direct transactions. These actions, like lead generation, user engagement, or app downloads, feedback collection, etc, may not directly impact sales and revenue immediately but are crucial for nurturing relationships with customers, building brand loyalty, and ultimately contributing to long-term business success. Each of these represents valuable interactions that contribute to overall growth and sustainability of the business, even if they don't result in an immediate sale.

Contrary to popular belief, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) isn't limited to e-commerce sites. It's a powerful tool for any website with a clear goal, be it lead generation, user engagement, trust building, or awareness raising. CRO's versatility lies in its ability to optimize for various conversions - sales, subscriptions, downloads, registrations, or inquiries. It's about enhancing the user journey to achieve specific objectives, thus maximizing ROI. Whether it's A/B testing, UI/UX improvements, or performance tweaks, CRO is applicable to a wide range of websites, including B2B and B2C. Essentially, if your website has a goal, CRO can help you reach it more effectively.

There are a ton of conversion points ALL websites have! Or should have. That includes signing up for the newsletter, downloading a checklist, etc. So, with that being said, CRO works for virtually any business that expects to make money from its website.

CRO is for all websites and much more than that. CRO, or experimentation, is both a mindset and a way of working and can be applied to optimize any business-related activity. CRO can be applied to all websites, digital products, 'offline' products, entire marketing, processes, innovation, and strategy. Ideally, CRO should be done by every team for every activity and process to mitigate risk and make better business decisions.

You can get great insights by conducting usability tests on your competitors website. There are two types of usability tests you can conduct. 1. Direct comparison test: Let participants complete a task on your website and a competitor’s website. For instance, participants could buy an item on your website and a competitor’s website. 2. Isolated test: Let participants complete a task on one website. For instance, one participant buys an item in your webshop and another on a competitor’s website. With this information you can analyze which website works best at what stage in the buying process. If your visitors get stuck at a certain point on your website, but at your competitor’s website there is no problem, use it to improve your flow.

Copying your competitors without actually conducting any research on your own users is bad. "Monitoring" competition is fine, but outright copying them is problematic in many regards. Mostly in the fact that you are making an assumption the SAME users going to your competition are then coming to your site (without any way to verify that). In addition, you are assuming what works for your competition (on their site) will work for your site (if you are 'copying') - which, I'd say, you should still be testing that out.

I disagree actually. While a wholesale copying of competitors is bad, monitoring what your competitors are doing and paying attention to see if they keep it up or take it down is actually a really great strategy for feeding your ideation pipeline. After all, your customers and prospects aren't just seeing your site. They're likely shopping around and what they see elsewhere may set they're expectations. So doing a quarterly review to see what key competitors (and out of industry best in class performers) are doing across some key areas of your site you're considering (maybe navigation or mobile design) is a great way to feed your pipeline for ideation.

I like to quote Pablo Picasso here: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Copy: blindly mimic without understanding. Steal: To take something and make it your own. To steal means to understand what you're taking. So dissect it, strip for parts and adapt it to meet your needs, if it even meets your needs. Copying is easy, stealing is hard.

CRO is not a one-size-fits-all process. Your competitor's goals will most likely differ from your own, so copying their tactics could potentially yield negative results for yourself. Yes, it is important to constantly monitor your competitors so you always know what they're up to, but remember to always be strategic about how you respond to their actions. Keep in mind that testing and optimization in CRO is all about guiding users through the easiest path to conversion in your own website and that might differ entirely to the way your competitors' users behave. Never forget you're optimizing for your users, not theirs.

Balancing intuition and data in CRO is crucial. Intuition sparks ideas, but data validates them. Intuitive hunches should lead to hypotheses, tested through experiments to gain empirical evidence. This approach mitigates biases and enhances decision-making. Data-driven strategies underpin intuition, transforming subjective assumptions into actionable insights. When data is unavailable, treat experiments as research, using intuition to guide initial hypotheses. This balanced approach ensures that intuition is a starting point, not the sole basis, for CRO strategies, fostering growth through objective analysis.

Intuition is valuable but the most growth comes from leaning in on data and being objective. In time your mind will change and you'll find yourself a "data-driven optimizer".

This might be controversial, but I disagree with this statement. It's way too rigid and very black and white. Experiments are a source of research/data/evidence in themselves. So, if an assumption or hunch can be tested cheaply: test it. Learn from it. I mean, if you have data, great. Use it. If you don't. Treat experiments as a form of research/learning.

(This is the worst advide ever) Intuition is a great source of experiment ideas. The classic "low hanging fruit" is almost always intuitive and fairly obvious. These ideas however should be backed up via experimentation data.

While data-driven decision-making is important for CRO success, it's also valuable to leverage your experience and intuition to inform test hypotheses, even in areas where data may be limited or inconclusive. Lead with data but don’t limit yourself. I’ve seen success with going with my gut even when the data did not support it. Keep testing and learning!

How does each step in your users' journey impact their ability to convert? Are you clear on every variable you can (and can't) control and how it contributes to that final goal? Don't just optimize for conversions. Optimize the whole journey to make sure that when a user reaches the conversion, everything has been so seamless they don't have a chance but to convert. Keep in mind that whatever your end-goal is, whenever a user arrives at the option to convert, they've gone through several steps. For them it's not a goal, but a destination, and you have to make sure they have the best journey possible to get there.

Mistake: Ignoring the big picture. Reality: Neglecting the broader context is a mistake. Success requires considering overarching goals, market trends, and long-term strategies rather than focusing solely on isolated details.

Mistake #4: Not taking statistics into account. A very common mistake is to run experiments with insufficient traffic and conversions. Doing so will lead to under-powered experiments, meaning results could be caused by chance. If you flip a coin 10 times, resulting in 6 times heads and 4 times tails, the difference of 50% is obviously caused by chance. When you flip the coin 10,000 with 6,000 times heads and 4,000 times tails, you can confidently say your coin is not balanced. The same goes for A/B testing. With too little traffic and conversions, results are caused by chance, making you draw the wrong conclusions. So always take statistics into account using (free) calculators to calculate your sample size and test duration.

CRO requires a certain organisational maturity and a desire across the board to actually discover insights about a customer. If that's not in place you will have an environment where you are testing to win and not testing to learn.

Twyman's Law. "Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong." Sadly, when you see a huge win - something too good to be true... well, it probably isn't. Remember how stats work. That's probably a false positive. We cannot actually PROVE anything with a test. Again, that's not how stats work. We can only disprove the null. Unfortunately, we so often get excited & mistake 95% confidence as "Truth" & take it to the bank. Even when it's 99%! It's REAL! Sorry. No. Probably not. Replication is your friend. That was probably a false positive. 205% lifts are fairy tales told to sell software by salespeople who don't actually understand stats. (Sorry to those of you who don't do that - you know who you are).

Hot take: When the pros forget where they started. When seasoned professionals treat website performance akin to developing pharmaceuticals. The downside is fewer conversions and not sickness or death. Which can lead to public shaming instead of healthy criticism or sharing learning resources.

Myth #4 - Price decreases will drive conversion. Even in an economy with strong headwinds against the dollars ear-marked in consumers pockets for product consumption, low prices do not guarantee increased conversions. Don't forget that 2023 is the era of content. Find new ways to excite, educate, and engage your key audiences. Whether on your website, detail pages, or across your advertising efforts - it will be your message, your consistent branding/reach, and your overarching content that will determine consumer propensity to convert.