Does it seem that your website’s conversion rate is a bit lacking? Perhaps you have an e-commerce site and want to be sure that you are optimizing your sales.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is defined by vwo.com as the process of optimizing your guest’s experience on your website or landing pages to boost the probability of your guests taking the desired result- converting from someone perusing what you have to offer to someone who makes a purchase.

In order to achieve the desired CRO, you must do all that you can to encourage guests to not only make the first purchase but to come back again. As a result, it is important to avoid as many of the common mistakes in conversion rate optimization as possible.

Common Conversion Rate Mistakes to Avoid

If your goal is to jump ahead of your competition, then you need to do things the right way as well as the most efficient. To do that, you must minimize doing things that are ineffective or self-destructive. Here are common CROs you want to avoid.

1) Letting your emotions and opinions indicate how your page looks. Just because a website design looks cleaner, more modern, or more attractive than the competition doesn’t mean that it will have a better CRO. While appearance is important and having a new site is great, be sure that you don’t replace or update your site or landing page(s) without first testing to see how well or not. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that a slightly outdated design may have an impressive CRO. Be sure there is data to support making the changes.

2) Failing to test. Want to know how a site or page is performing? Then A/B testing is the answer. You might be surprised and discover that the very feature you thought to antiquated might instead be the perfect thing. Not sure you are how to go about A/B testing? No worries -we have a team who can do it for you.

3) Having copy that doesn’t correlate with your landing page. If you are running an ad campaign then it is important that the message in those ads and the content on your landing page match up. Chances are, you have several variations of your ads and they are each designed to reach a specific target group. Consequently, with so many moving parts the message and consistent verbiage between ads and landing pages get lost. This can cause potential clients to get confused or frustrated. The simple solution to this is to build unique landing pages for your ads. As you do so, be sure that headlines and keywords match between your landing page and your ad.

4) Over testing and excessive pop-up ads at the same time on a single page. While testing is important to conversion rate, running too many tests simultaneously actually affects the accuracy of the results. In addition, too pop-up boxes, bars, etc. will interrupt the user experience and cause your site guests to get annoyed and confused about who you are and what you have to offer thus affecting their perception and trust in your brand.

5) Not tracking micro-conversions. Micro conversions are elements such as free trial sign-ups, forms filled out, scroll depth, CTA clicks, or any other elements that affect site performance and user experience. It is important to keep up with these “smaller” actions as they lead to the bigger ones.

Some actions you can take to help track micro conversions include tracking clicks on ‘add to cart’, browsing high volume of pages but not converting, and paying attention to the number of visitors who create an account. Two actions you can take to improve your CRO are to run tests on high traffic pages and letting your tests run until there is a statistically significant result.

6) Stopping your testing without having results. Sometimes companies will stop testing too early because they want to pause things to preserve A/B test results on high volume pages. The second reason they may stop testing too early is impatience- they want to see results sooner versus later and then conclude success-or a lack thereof- based on premature information. The solution: use a tool that helps determine a results sample by testing a percentage of your traffic or run more tests with less visitor consumption.

7) Making your conversion funnels too complicated. Your conversion funnel is a group of pages that results in your site guests making a purchase. In many cases, guests leave a page at step 2 of the conversion funnel due to an unnecessarily difficult process. To keep this from happening there are some actions you can take to simplify your conversion funnel and thus improve your conversion rate optimization.

• Get rid of any unrelated links on the pages included in the conversion funnel.
• Delete any unneeded steps from the conversion funnel.
• As part of the buying/shipping process, be clear in stating cost, tax, shipping and handling charges, and your return policy.
• Be sure your clients can tell how much is in their cart by having a link back to the cart.
• Don’t put excessive focus on up-selling additional offers.
• Only ask for information absolutely needed for the conversion process.

8) Not establishing your trustworthiness immediately. It doesn’t matter how great the site content, how many videos, pictures, or links you have, or how useful your product is if your website doesn’t give an air of trustworthiness. You must let your site guests know they can depend on you. A few ways you can do this include:

• Add a HackerSafe badge that lets guests know you take website security seriously.
• Add client testimonials.
• Post your privacy policy whenever you ask guests to share personal information.

These are but a few actions you can take to boost conversion rate optimization. There are others that can also make a difference, and bring you better results.

We know you want your website to be everything you need it to be. And, that means ensuring you set up the best parameters for it. If you are unsure if your website is maximized for Conversion Rate Optimization or want to be certain you aren’t making any of these, or other, mistakes then the Page Progressive team is here to help – be sure to reach out to use!