He was very restless. Hopping on his seat. Did I notice a sweat drop on his head? What was going on? 

The conversion rate had dropped. I saw the pain of the decrease in the conversion rate in his eyes. What to do now? 

The marketer showed me his conversion rate. What should we do? This is a dramatic drop, the marketeer said.  

I looked at the conversion rate and dropped a short silence, just for the dramatic effect to be honest. ‘If I were you, I would not start my search there. Conversion rates do not mean much without context’ I replied to him. ‘But this is my main KPI’ the marketer responded with a desperate look. “What should we do now?” 

Sometimes I get asked if I can get the conversion rate up. I jokingly tell them to quickly turn off their Google ads campaign.  You get a guaranteed higher conversion rate, but your revenue will drop.  

If you buy a lot of Google ads, you will often see a decrease in the conversion percentage, but an increase in turnover. By using a lot of those campaigns, the number of your visitors increases but the quality of that same visitor decreases.  

Influencing your conversion is therefore a game between buying the right traffic and optimizing your landing pages. It is all about finding the right alignment between the message in the campaign and the attraction of your landing page. It is very odd that SEO/SEA and CRO (Conversion Optimization) are often such separate worlds. One cannot do without the other.  

Back to our desperate marketer. Together we looked at his metrics.  

Traffic had indeed increased. But we also discovered several issues in the checkout. We were quite sure, a collaboration between Traffic and Optimization was required. 

In the next period, we started cooperating with each other. The marketer was focused on increasing traffic and we as optimizers tried to reduce friction on the checkout pages.  

Our main KPI (key performance indicators) became revenue in combination with Average order value. A more sustainable goal to work on. 

Summary: 

• Just measuring your Conversion percentage and acting on this number is a very fragile way of managing your goals 
• Your conversion rate is often strongly influenced by all kinds of traffic on your website. When you compare your conversion rate from April to May, all kinds of external factors can influence your conversion rate 
• It is better to manage your webshop results on revenue and AOV (Average Order Value) 
• Of course, when running A/B tests Conversion Rate is the right metric to work on. But an A/B test is a controlled experiment, where all external factors affect both variants