Why You Might Not Want To Increase Your Total Conversion Rate

Conversion rate optimisation is the quest to improve your conversion rate to generate higher returns from your website’s traffic. However, it is not always beneficial to increase your total conversion rate. That may sound like a strange thing to say, but the real goal should always be to move the needle on your return on investment, and the two don’t always go hand in hand.

If you take conversion rate as a whole, you are missing many of the nuances of what makes up that precious percentage. Whilst a single digit rise can mean massive differences in terms of revenue, you need to consider the whole picture to truly optimise your conversion rate for the benefit of your return on investment.

There are two key elements to consider here, firstly marketing channels, and secondly goal definition. We will discuss each in turn to show how to truly optimise for lasting benefit.

Marketing channels are a key consideration in this context. Before you start a conversion rate optimisation campaign, you need to ensure that you will be measuring the impact of your studies across all of the traffic generating channels in order to take decisions that are fully data led.

Next, you need to ensure that you understand your true cost of traffic from each channel – even organic traffic comes at some cost, albeit generally very small, due to your agency fees or content creation costs for example. Knowing all of these details will mean you can do full ROI calculations during your CRO work so that you can make the right decision.

As you run your conversion rate optimisation tests you need to measure the impact on conversion rate by traffic channel. There are occasions where an overall conversion increase may not be as beneficial as a smaller or even flat conversion rate change if your conversion rate from your cheaper marketing channels is positively affected enouch.

For example, depending on your strategy, your paid traffic and your organic traffic may perform very differently in terms of conversion rate. If your conversion rate study leaves your overall conversion rate flat, but you’ve massively increased your organic traffic conversion rate at the cost of your paid traffic’s, that may be a very positive result in terms of your revenue per visitor and return on investment figures.

Similarly, if you generate a total conversion rate increase based on more expensive traffic mediums improving at the cost of cheaper traffic sources, you may actually be in a worse position ROI wise than when you started.

An example may make this clearer:

As you can see in the above example, tests ‘version 1’ beat the overall conversion rate of the control set, whilst ‘version 2’ matched the total conversion rate, although there was a shift in the balance of organic and paid. Assuming a fixed conversion value which is the same across both mediums, the below is the return on investment result:

In this scenario, ‘version 2’ is by far the better result. Whilst that version lost money on it’s PPC campaign, the return on investment was the same, but mainly coming from the cheaper organic traffic. In this scenario the sensible approach would be to implement the ‘version 2 ’changes, and stop PPC, or at least heavily change the campaign, leading to a much higher return on investment overall.

The second key consideration is around what exactly you’re classing as a conversion. Ensure that the conversion rate you are tracking is based on the goals you truly count as a conversion. It’s natural to set up many goals in Google Analytics to record all kinds of micro-conversions that you place value in on your site. For example an eCommerce store might have a goal as a checkout completion, but also as an email subscription. Clearly these two actions don’t hold quite the same value.

Ensure you track your true conversion rate when doing a conversion rate optimisation study, by going over all of your goals in advance and clarifying what you’re happy to class as a conversion. Without this step, you may find your overall conversion rate has risen due to your tests, but that you’ve actually been increasing less valuable goal conversions that aren’t directly affecting your bottom line.

In conclusion, you should never take pure conversion rate changes as a singular deciding factor when making changes to your site. Pull in revenue metrics, traffic cost metrics and analyse your conversion rate in context to truly improve your sites profitability.