Once you are at a solid starting point with the proper tool and analytics in place to measure your current optimization results, making small adjustments to everything from your website and landing pages, to your emails and calls to action will help you improve your conversions…but only if done the right way.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid once you decide to improve on your current conversion rate optimization.
Tip #1: Not Strategizing Your Testing Efforts
Like everything else in your marketing efforts, it’s best to not randomly shoot in the dark to pick what to trial and just see what happens. You should make sure to review your data to figure out what are the best things that you should test, and make a proper hypothesis for it.
Check your analytics data to identify areas where visitors drop off, and review competitors sites to see where you can potentially make improvements. Set up a few tests to check your hypothesis, and then run these trials for several weeks, aiming for a solid number of conversions to compare From there, take a look at your results, and sort out what to test next!
Tip #2: Not Waiting Long Enough to Make Conclusions
When putting together your strategy, you also need to make sure that you are allowing your tests to run long enough to sufficiently make a comparison. Try to run each test for around a month, or aim for about 100 conversions. If you aren’t letting things run long enough, you won’t have a large enough dataset to make a significant comparison.
Tip #3: Making Too Many Changes at Once
Also, keep in mind that you should minimize the number of changes or items that you are testing at once. If you change multiple colours, move around the Call to Action buttons, change the wording, and completely revise the form on your landing page, for example, how will you know what is causing the actual lift in conversions? Do one thing at a time, test, analyze the results, and then move on to the next thing.
Tip #4: Blindly Copying Someone Else
The other thing that you may do is decide to change all the forms on your site to match with how your competitor did it. Or updating the colour on your CTAs since that’s what Amazon did.
This isn’t necessarily going to result in improved conversions to you. You can try these changes but make sure to measure results, as you need to test what’s right for YOU! Just because an orange button worked for them doesn’t mean the same will in your case!
Tip #5: Not AA Testing or Checking Statistical Significance
Finally, before you even go about testing at all, you should ensure that whatever tools you are using for your A/B testing are actually working properly. Do an AA test first – this is basically done to compare the conversion rate of two website versions in order to ensure that the software is tracking properly.
If you’re getting a glaringly different conversion rate for the same thing, with definite statistical significance, there is likely something wrong with the setup that needs to be investigated and fixed before you go further with your real A/B tests.
Summary:
To summarize, Common Mistakes in Conversion Rate Optimization include:
- Not Strategizing Your Testing Efforts
- Not Waiting Long Enough to Make Conclusions
- Making Too Many Changes at Once
- Blindly Copying Someone Else
- Not AA Testing or Checking Statistical Significance
Now that you understand more about what common mistakes to avoid with conversion rate optimization make sure to check out our recent blog posts covering more useful lead-related tips.
