The Most Common Conversion Mistakes – Part 2

Wondering why your website isn’t getting the results you want? It could be that you’re making one or more of the most common conversion mistakes.

“Conversion” refers to the percentage of your website visitors who take a desired action, such as clicking, buying or downloading. In a previous post we talked about some of the common conversion mistakes that we frequently see. Here we present more conversion blunders to avoid:

Poorly designed call to action

You want the desired action to stand out without being obnoxious. Common mistakes include:

• Design that blends in so well with the page that your eye goes right past it.
• Use of modalities, such as banner ads, that most people have learned to ignore.
• Poor color contrast, such as light blue text on a white background.
• Color blindness issues, such as the use of red and green. Many men cannot see the difference between red and green; to them your button will just look like a grey blob.
• No consideration of the audience, such as using a very small font on a site aimed at senior citizens.

Not following convention

To maximize conversion you want to make it as easy as possible for people to navigate your website. You want them to quickly find the information they need to get to the point where they’re ready to take the desired action. This generally means following conventions.

People expect your menu to work in a certain way, your footer to have useful links, your “about the company” information to be on the “about” page and so forth. If you’ve decided to “be original” and do something else, your website visitors are more likely to get frustrated than be motivated to take action.

If you feel you absolutely must break convention, it should be in the service of your product – not to revolutionize the web!

Only using one modality

Different people learn in different ways. Some people respond well to text, some to graphics, some to audio, etc. This means that not everyone will respond to your primary call to action. To address this, use a few different modalities. While you don’t want to overdo it, you may want to use a button in one place, an image link in another and a text link further down the page.

Not tracking anything

If you set up your calls to action and then fail to get tracking in place, you have no way of knowing what’s working and what isn’t. If you want to maximize conversion, this is a huge mistake!

The bottom line is, your website can be a money-making machine…or not. If you’re making any of the common conversion mistakes outlined here or in our previous post, the sooner you fix them, the sooner you can start reaping the benefits of better results.