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Conversion rate is the rate at which the visitors to your website take a specific action like buying something or making an enquiry. So if you’ve got a ton of traffic coming to your site from your marketing and advertising activity, the conversion rate can make the difference between a great ROI or a poor one.

When conversion rates are poor, businesses often embark upon Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO). But there’s a lot of misinformation and bad content about this practice online. So if you’re thinking about optimizing your conversion and going it alone, here are some CRO myths you definitely need to know.

If my conversion rate is low, there must be something wrong with my website

This isn’t always the case. Sometimes it’s the quality of the traffic that’s wrong or maybe you’re driving an audience that just isn’t in a buying mindset.

And sometimes the product is what’s wrong. If your product is overpriced compared to other products or it’s just a product that people don’t want, then CRO might not be the solution to your problem.

Do that research into your product and your audience first.

CRO is a one time thing

CRO is a process. Like your marketing, optimizing your website’s conversion rate is often something that needs to be a process with improvements and changes over time as opposed to being a single task you can tick off in one go

All the data you need for CRO is in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an amazing tool with a lot of data. Google Analytics will tell you what your conversion rate is and might be to even give you some hints about why some people aren’t converting. But when it comes to understanding conversion rate, our experience is that you need more than the data in there.

Video playback, even sometimes interviews with people in your target audience. There is more than just numbers at play when it comes to optimizing conversion rate.

Only make one change per test

When we start to roll changes out to improve conversion rate, we often split test. And sometimes it’s tempting to just change one thing at a time so we can measure perfectly what has worked and what hasn’t. But sometimes there’s a compelling reason to make a few changes per test. The amount of traffic you have, how significant the changes are and over what timeframe you’re testing them all come into play when deciding how many changes to make in a single test.

You should imitate your best performing competitors

While the temptation is there to imitate high performing competitors, don’t just do this. Without access to their data you don’t really know their audience inside out, what is working for them and what isn’t.

Focus on you, not on your competitors.

All in all, CRO isn’t one size fits all. It needs a process tailoring to each business and it needs time, data and thought.

But if you get it right you’ll reap the rewards.