Every business owner and marketer in the Digital Marketing domain wants to drive maximum traffic to their website – the more, the better. However, that’s rarely the case. To drive the web traffic to your site takes a lot of planning, strategizing, and taking the right actions. What’s scary is that even if you are able to drive traffic to your website, there’s no guarantee they’ll convert. In simple words, all your efforts will amount to nothing.
Crafting a well-structured CRO strategy is nothing short of a challenge, especially if you are new to the concept. The tools, strategies, and techniques you adopt for CRO can make or break the bigger picture – your website optimization strategy. While planning the CRO strategy, often, marketers make some common CRO mistakes. In this post, we’ll highlight some of the common CRO mistakes and also provide you with helpful CRO tips!
Ten common CRO mistakes and CRO tips to fix them!
Longer loading time
We said this before, and we’ll repeat it now – if your pages are taking too long to load, your visitors will not stay around. They’ll leave your website even before they get a chance to explore it, leading to higher bounce rates. Naturally, conversions will drop drastically.
CRO tip: Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to perform a speed test of your web pages and compare the results with the average time a user spends on a page.
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Planting too much information at once
It’s a fact that the human brain is designed to retain only three or four pieces of new information at a time. Any more than this, and you will not be able to remember the details!
Many marketers try to provide a bulk of information to their target audience at once with hopes to address their pain points. This is where they go wrong since people will not be able to take away much from what marketers have to offer.
CRO tip: Try to segment your content into smaller chunks and make sure it’s easy to follow. Remember, three is the magic number. Also, try to introduce the most crucial point up front, and end with the second most important information you want your audience to remember.
Messy layouts and congested designs
Web design is a pivotal factor for website optimization. If you have haphazard layouts featuring a congested design, there are high chances that your site will not appeal to most users. When a website layout isn’t well-structured, navigating across the website becomes a pain.
CRO tip: Use single-column layouts on all your web pages for creating a more responsive design. The trick is to keep the navigation breezy and easy-to-use.
The use of single-step forms
Collecting customer data is a vital aspect of marketing since it allows marketers to plan and design their marketing campaigns and strategies according to user behavior and needs. However, marketers often rely on short, single-step forms for this purpose, only to find out later that these don’t bring in as many conversions as they had hoped.
CRO tip: The secret to collecting relevant user data and drive conversions simultaneously is through the usage of multi-step forms. These forms allow you to ask a wide range of relevant questions by using conditional logic, thereby enabling you to send more specific follow-up messages. Leadformly is a great form builder tool that you can use.
Including navigation in landing pages
Landing pages aim to drive specific conversion goals. Many marketers include navigation buttons on the landing pages to help users explore the site, and that’s where things go wrong. This is because a navigation menu on the landing page tempts visitors to get derailed off your conversion goals.
CRO tip: If you have too many navigation buttons on your landing pages, get rid of them. Maybe you can keep a subtle navigation option in the footer (that’s only if you really need it).
Placing CTA buttons at the wrong place
In the hope of encouraging visitors to take the desired action, marketers want to place the CTA buttons at the star spot – the slot above the fold of the landing page. But the real question is, will users immediately convert after seeing your CTA on the hero section without needing any convincing or assurance? Unfortunately, conversions do not occur like that in real life.
CRO tip: Place your CTA button/s at the bottom section of your pages. This will allows your landing page message to shine brighter and make an impact on the target audience.
Not referring to the calendar while launching A/B tests
While running A/B tests, some marketers tend to consider an important factor – seasonality. Seasons have a strong influence in the decision making process, right from the preliminary research stage to the A/B testing stage. Thus, if you don’t consider seasonality while performing your tests, you will obtain invalid or inaccurate results. For instance, if you perform A/B test during a low point in your sales cycle or at the end of December, you will not get the results you desire.
CRO tip: Plan your tests according to the different seasons that affect your marketing campaigns, sales, and ROI. Conduct tests when you get the most qualified and relevant traffic during peak seasons in the year. Also, to get accurate results for weekly tests, make sure that you start and end the test on the same day of the week.
Not setting up tracking correctly
Website tracking is everything. It allows marketers to study user behavior, determine the traffic volume, monitor user sessions on your site, measure the site performance, and much more. Naturally, if your website tracking isn’t set up accurately in place, you will never get useful insights on your website’s performance and marketing efforts.
CRO tip: You must include heatmaps and user session tracking on all the pages you want to analyze and optimize. Also, it is equally important to set up micro-conversion tracking using Google Tag Manager. This tool allows you to track clicks and user engagement (scroll depth and element visibility), thereby offering valuable data on how users are interacting with your CTAs and other elements on your pages.
Lack of context for conversion rates
Yes, CRO aims to drive and boost conversions. Most marketers fail to understand that the term “conversion” could have multiple meanings. It could mean leads, purchases, prospects, users, and subscribers. Essentially, the meaning of conversion for you will explicitly depend on your unique goals at a given point and phase in your marketing cycle.
CRO tip: Do not get carried away in the phrase “huge increase in conversions.” Rather, try to figure out what goals you want to achieve through CRO now and attach that goal as a context for your conversion. You will see that your CRO strategy has become much more streamlined and focused than before.
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Having insufficient knowledge of statistics
This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes that marketers make while planning their CRO strategies. They dive in with CRO tactics and strategies even when they have insufficient statistics at hand. Since statistics makes the foundation of CRO, if you get straight to planning CRO without clearly understanding the connotations of the statistics, your tests will not run optimally, producing incorrect results. This would eventually lead to serious marketing failures and bad decision making.
CRO tip: When it comes to statistics, try to educate yourself on it first. Only when you have a comprehensive understanding of the data at hand, start devising your CRO strategy. If you wish to avoid reporting bad and erroneous data, you must read Craig Bradford’s CRO Statistics primer.
As you can see, crafting the perfect CRO strategy isn’t about always looking at the more prominent components, instead, it is mostly about paying attention to the smaller and minor details of website optimization. By making these small changes in your CRO efforts, you can create a positive impact on CRO, which, in turn, will produce better outcomes.
