Avoid 4 Conversion Optimization Mistakes That Could Sink Your Website

Conversion optimization — finding out how to keep website visitors at your website longer and encouraging them to return to it to increase the likelihood of a sale — is more complicated than many website owners may think, although it’s almost always worth the effort if done well. However, if you don’t recognize how to avoid some fairly common conversion optimization mistakes, it won’t prove worth the time and money you’ve sunk into it. Whether you’ve attempted conversion optimization in the past or are just about to start the task, re-think your approach — it’s not as simple as changing the colors of your website buttons like some people believe.

Setting the Wrong Goals

Not every business goal is just to make money. Even a non-profit organization likely wants to encourage donations, but maybe they want to encourage volunteering, too. Perhaps you don’t need or want to make money, but you want your blog to become well-read. All of these goals boil down to encouraging more visitors to come to your website.

However, you can’t make the mistake of trying to get your website to fit your big business goals. Instead, you have to set individual, smaller goals for your website. For example, get 100 more unique visitors per day within half a year. Or decrease the number of crashes your website experiences. These smaller marketing goals are better for optimization. Research great conversion optimization goals and meeting your overall business goals will follow.

Assuming a New Website Means an Optimized Website

You just paid for a brand new website, and it’s easily the most stunning website your business has ever had. You paid professionals to create it, so surely they knew what they were doing. The website couldn’t possibly be better optimized, so now it’s time to relax and wait for the business to start rolling in.

Unfortunately, conversion optimization isn’t as simple as paying for a new website. Professional Web designers focus on meeting their client’s vision for a website, but they don’t often worry about conversion optimization. If you’re going to outsource optimization, you should bring in a firm of marketers or analysts. An integral part of optimization is collecting data about a website, seeing what works and what doesn’t and then tweaking it appropriately. You can’t know before your website has launched, and what may have been the case for someone else’s site won’t necessarily apply to your site.

Relying Too Heavily on One Form of Data

Even if you understand that optimization relies heavily on data analysis, it’s easy to get too narrowly focused. If you’re tracking the number of page views alone, you’re ignoring how visitors get to your website in the first place. If you consider only the fact that one page often leads visitors to another, you might mistakenly think it’s related to the size of your link, when in fact it’s something about the content on that page that’s redirecting visitors.

Incorporate as much data as possible into your conversion efforts to get a better overall picture of process. Tackle data in cycles if it gets too overwhelming. For example, focus on data that will help you meet your goal of bringing 100 more visitors per day to your website for a week. The following week, study page results revealing how often visitors click on one page from another. Don’t get sucked into one small goal and one set of data.

Giving Up Too Soon

http://foter.com/photo/group-of-young-people-in-training-course/

Optimization isn’t an easy process. There’s so much data to collect and analyze if you really want to achieve optimal results, and there are many small goals to meet along the way to your larger ones. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and give up, but you can’t waste the time and resources you’ve devoted thus far. An optimized website may just be one part of your overall business plan, or it may be the entire focus of your enterprise, but regardless, optimization is key to driving traffic.

KISSMetrics claims 96 percent of store website visitors don’t intend to buy when they first visit. The whole point of conversion optimization is to get these first time visitors to come back and shop and to recommend the site to their friends and family. Conversion optimization is worth the effort you put into it, but it’s best to make the most effective use of your time and budget by avoiding the most common mistakes.

Computer data image by SalFalko on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Office group image by SalFalko on Flickr’s Creative Commons.