CRO
Top 12 Common CRO Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Ankur Goyal
Introduction
Taking conversions through the roof is the dream of every marketer. However, if you’re committing these CRO mistakes, you might be unable to maintain your current conversion rate, let alone improve it.
What mistakes are we talking about?
This article shares the top 12 conversion rate optimization mistakes marketers commonly commit that stop them from driving the results they desire.
By diving deep into these mistakes, you can learn about their impact and how you can avoid them and ensure your CRO efforts always bear fruits.
1. Inadequate data collection
Data is the heart of CRO. Only if you collect the right data can you draw the right conclusions and make informed decisions. Otherwise, you might end up producing counterproductive results.
Here’s an example:
Imagine you have an eCommerce store, and you notice the cart abandonment rate is poor.
You declare high shipping costs (without diving deeper) as the culprit just because you think that might be the issue, based on pure guesswork. You make the optimizations and run the experiment again. Result?
A slight increase in conversions, but the cart abandonment rates continue to drop.
Why did that happen? Because you did not have the right data (or in-depth data), you were unable to identify the issue.
You could have dived deeper by analyzing heat maps and screen recordings. This could have helped you find out the WHY behind high cart abandonment rates.
Long story short, with the right data and analysis, you can make decisions that are backed by data and not guesswork.
How to avoid this mistake:
Implement advanced analytics: Leverage tools like Google Analytics to understand user behavior and gather quantitative data.
Use heatmaps and session recordings: By using tools like Hotjar, you can analyze heat maps and screen recordings to dive deeper into visitor behavior. This can help you understand user behavior better and potentially identify the reason behind visitor drop-off, allowing you to make informed decisions.
Conduct user surveys: What’s better than asking the visitors the reason behind their behavior? You can conduct surveys to gather visitor feedback and take the necessary action based on their response.
2. Poor hypothesis development
A hypothesis is a data-backed (ideally) theory that outlines something that will happen (increased conversions) because of an intentional change or tweak (CTA placement).
However, formulating a poor or superficial hypothesis and conducting A/B tests based on that is a huge mistake. Why, you may ask?
Here’s an example:
Heads up. Page loading speed is the culprit here.
Imagine you hypothesize that a change in the color of the CTA would help improve the conversion rate of your landing page. You make the change and run experiments, only to find out that there is no change.
Because you made variations in the wrong elements, your results were inconclusive. Also, you ended up wasting resources.
In addition to not backing the hypothesis with data, marketers remain unclear about what will happen. They might say what will happen because of a particular change but fail to state its extent (by how much).
How to avoid this mistake:
Data-backed hypothesis: Use the right tools as mentioned in the above pointer, thoroughly analyze the data on user behavior, and try to identify the potential areas that might need improvement. And create a hypothesis based on this analysis.
Define expected outcomes: Try to set clear and quantifiable objectives and mention a timeline.
Example: Say you wish to modify the CTA’s color, text, and position and improve the CTR by 10% within four weeks.
Ensuring testability: make sure the hypotheses can be tested and measured. This is essential to help you determine if your hypothesis was right or not.
3. Testing with a smaller sample size
If you run A/B tests on landing pages that barely meet the minimum traffic requirements set by the A/B testing tools, you’ll likely get unreliable results. This happens because:
The data is not enough for the A/B testing tool to achieve a satisfactory confidence score.
As a result:
You might have to stop the test
Or wait for too long so the A/B tool reaches statistical significance.
How to avoid this mistake:
Focus on high-traffic pages: Prioritize testing on the pages with numerous visitors. This will help you gather meaningful data and reduce the chances of fault results.
Extend the test duration: if you don’t have pages with the expected traffic, you can extend the test duration. This will give enough time to accumulate the data necessary for statistical significance.
4. Failure to segment audiences
Another common mistake marketers commit when analyzing reports is not segmenting their audience and making hasty decisions. Without segmenting your audience, you miss out on granular and more actionable insights, leading to failed or inconclusive tests.
Here’s an Example:
Say your report shows no significant improvement in the primary metric you’re tracking. For most, this is a failed or inconclusive test.
However, upon segmenting, you learn that your variations led to a noticeable increase in conversions for young individuals.
Now, you know what works for which type of audience. This way, you can create personalized landing pages for different audience types and make the most out of your visitors.
According to WebFX 67% of users are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly company. If you segment users based on the device they use, you’d be able to get way more conversions. And not segmenting would lead to lost conversions.
This will help you make data-driven decisions and maximize your results.
Note. Here’s a reliable tool to help you personalize experiences for your audience.
How to avoid this mistake:
When analyzing reports, make sure you segment your audience based on multiple factors, including:
Demographics: age, gender, socio-economic status and more.
Devices: mobile or desktop.
Geographic: region, country, and city.
Behavioral segmentation: cart abandonment, returning customers, new customers, etc.
5. Over reliance on best practices
Marketers often rely overly on CRO best practices and expect breathtaking results. While there’s nothing wrong with following industry best practices, overreliance can limit your ability to drive results.
Why?
Because best practices are generic. And as you know, every business and website has unique requirements, implementing best practices would only help you on a higher level.
Here’s an example:
Imagine there’s a business that wishes to boost its checkout conversion rate. Instead of digging deeper to identify the root cause, they follow industry best practices i.e. improving the checkout process.
And the result? Frustrated customers and a drop in conversion rate.
What should have been done differently?
The business should have gone a step further to understand the user behavior and pinpoint the issue. This would have helped them identify the actual cause (like limited payment options or a high shipping fee) and deal with the issue.
How to avoid this mistake
Always remember no two businesses are alike. To make the most out of your CRO efforts:
Understand your audience: conduct user research to identify specific needs and pain points of your audience.
Customize best practices: tweak industry best practices to make sure they’re aligned to meet your unique business needs.
Test and optimize: Continuously test your customized approaches and optimize based on the performance.
6. Ignoring micro-conversions
It’s normal for marketers to focus on macro conversions like boosting revenue, trial sign-ups, bookings, etc.
However, the attention to macro conversions sometimes outshines the importance and relevance of micro conversions - which is a huge mistake.
While micro conversions like form fill, CTA clicks, and scroll depth don’t directly drive results, they do help visitors move a step closer. By analyzing micro conversions, you can gain valuable insights into customer behavior in their journey on your site.
How to avoid this mistake
Track micro conversions that are relevant to your primary metric or macro conversion.
Here are some examples of important micro conversions that you can track:
Account creation: While account creation does not indicate a purchase, it definitely shows that visitors are interested. You can nurture these visitors and transform them into customers.
Browsing multiple pages: if you see visitors viewing multiple pages on your site without buying anything, it is not necessarily bad. Yes, you need conversions. But the fact that visitors are looking at your pages means they’re interested. They aren’t just getting what they need.
Adding products to the cart: By tracking visitors who click the “Add to cart” button, you can identify which users did not end up making a purchase. It shows visitors are interested, but something is stopping them.
Page loading speed: You might think page loading speed is not related to your end goal. But if the page takes too much time to load, it’s going to negatively impact the user experience. And when has a bad UX led to more conversions?
On the other hand, improving UX design can potentially increase conversion rates by up to 400%, says Forrester.
Bounce rate: Bounce rate is yet another important micrometric that you can track. It tells you the percentage of users who leave your website after visiting your landing page. This could indicate an audience mismatch, unrelated content, etc, eventually impacting conversions.
7. Neglecting qualitative feedback
Marketers often focus only on quantitative data (conversion rate, bounce rate, average order value, etc), i.e., numbers. Why? They’re easy to track and analyze, which further makes the optimization easy.
On the other hand, qualitative data (customer feedback, user surveys, heatmaps, session recordings, etc) is tough to track and quantify. Also, it is more subjective, which is why marketers neglect qualitative data.
And that’s a mistake. Why?
While the quantitative data tells you the WHAT, it’s the qualitative data that helps you understand user behavior and tells you the WHY, enabling you to make informed decisions.
Here’s an example
Imagine you run tests and discover that your bounce rate (quantitative data) is exceptionally high. Now, you know what’s wrong. But why is the bounce rate low? As long as you don’t know the WHY behind the issue, everything is guesswork.
By using feedback tools, you can determine why users are bouncing off of your landing page. With this information, you can optimize the exact element that needs to be worked on. And this results in actual improvement.
How to avoid this mistake
Heatmaps and session recordings: use session recordings and heatmaps to gather qualitative data and understand more about user behavior.
Conduct user surveys: conducting user surveys can help you understand the user experience and the reason for leaving your website.
Utilize feedback tools: you can implement on-site feedback widgets to get user opinions.
Make sure you track relevant qualitative data (heatmaps, session recordings, feedback) to understand the user behavior and the reason behind the poor performance of your primary KPIs. This will help you dive deeper into the issues and make data-driven optimizations.
8. Lack of continuous optimization
Many marketers think of conversion rate optimization as a one-off process. However, this is a mistake as CRO is a continuous process similar to SEO. If you do it once and forget, you’ll have to face several disadvantages, such as:
Inability to identify issues: If you’re not continuously optimizing, you’d never know what is wrong with your website, should any issues arise. This will eventually impact your conversions and revenue.
Stagnation: If you think you have achieved the best results and now you can stop optimization, you’re mistaken. After all, there’s always some potential to improve. You’ve not just identified that element yet.
Competitive disadvantage: If you’re not optimizing regularly, you’ll definitely fall behind, as your competitors never stopped optimizations. They’ll eventually get better, negatively impacting your growth and revenue.
How to avoid this mistake
Create an ongoing CRO strategy: Create a culture of ongoing CRO within your organization. This will help you adapt to the ever-evolving user behaviors and marketing needs.
Continuously review performance metrics: Regularly monitor important KPIs to identify new issues or pain points as they appear.
9. Misinterpreting test results
CRO will only make sense if you know how to analyze the data and interpret the reports. Sadly, most marketers, especially the ones new to CRO, often misread test results.
Ideally, a report must closely monitor three primary goals. However, as soon as one of those goals is met, they consider it a win, without:
Paying enough attention to the other goals.
Understanding the impact of those goals on the overall experiments.
And this often motivates marketers to stop the test and make half-baked decisions that are not reliable.
How to avoid this mistake
Ask for help: Ask the CRO agency to help you interpret or understand a few reports and learn how to calculate statistical significance. Also, learn about each element of the report.
Let the test run: Do not stop the test before it reaches statistical significance or the desired confidence level. Otherwise, you might get the wrong results, and the chances of misinterpreting will increase.
Document and review tests: make sure to keep a record of the test steps, analysis, results, and reports. This will help you learn from your mistakes and perform better progressibley.
Wrapping up
Now that you know what common CRO mistakes marketers make and how to avoid them, you can create conversion rate marketing strategies that actually drive results. Here’s a quick overview of the mistakes to avoid, in case you didn’t read:
Inadequate data collection
Poor hypothesis development
Testing with a smaller sample size
Failure to segment audiences during
Overreliance on best practices
Ignoring micro-conversions
Neglecting qualitative feedback
Lack of continuous optimization
Misinterpreting test results
Overcomplicating the user journey
Not setting well-defined goals and KPIs
Not learning from failed tests
However, if you’re not a CRO expert, it’s recommended you hire a CRO agency like Fibr AI. Fibr AI is a value-driven conversion rate optimization agency with years of hands-on experience that can help you substantially improve conversions.
Experts at Fibr AI follow a 4 step process to help you drive conversions:
Analyze: capture and analyze every visitor interaction on your website to identify the potential issues behind poor conversions.
Anticipate: anticipate the next steps for visitors using our AI-powered models.
Optimize: continuous testing, optimization, and improvement with AI.
Deliver: delivering a personalized experience to visitors, ensuring more conversions.
You get end-to-end CRO services, including:
Landing page creation
Website personalization
A/B testing
Data Analytics
Conversion funnel analysis
Fibr AI has helped ACT boost the conversion rate by 12% and the customer acquisitions by 25% with our proven CRO strategies. Check out the complete case study here.
If you want results like these or even better, get started with Fibr AI for free now!
FAQs
1. How do I determine if my CRO efforts are successful?
By analyzing your report and comparing it with your website’s data before optimization. This will help you determine if your CRO efforts improved the KPIs or made them worse.
2. Why is segmenting users necessary for CRO?
Different groups of visitors/users respond differently to the same landing pages or web pages. By segmenting your audience during testing, you can get more accurate insights into how each segment reacts to the same page. Based on these insights, you can offer a personalized experience for each segment and maximize your conversions.
3. Should I hire a CRO agency?
Conversion rate optimization is undoubtedly an effective process that can help you boost conversions on your website. However, it is as complicated as it is beneficial. And you need experienced professionals on your side if you want to make the most of this process.
Therefore, if you’re new to CRO, hiring a CRO agency like Fibr AI makes perfect sense.
