Understand Conversion Rate Optimisation through cooking soup.
Just like making soup, Conversion Rate Optimisation is not as effective if you follow a step-by-step guide or recipe. A recipe is brilliant if the only thing you want to know is what flavours complement each other. But let’s be honest, the best homemade soup dishes are those bespoke to you and your tastes. Just like the best CRO tests, are the ones bespoke to your website.
You can’t always follow a guide
A step-by-step recipe promises tasty, perfect soup, provided you followed the recipe EXACTLY. It says it is imperative to “use carrots”, but you have no carrots, what do you do? What do you do if the CRO step-by-step guide says: “before you continue change your top banner to a picture of your team”, but you don’t have a top banner?
You might decide you want a cold gazpacho soup or maybe a hearty wintery soup. A recipe will never know what kind of soup experience you’re after. In terms of CRO, a step-by-step guide wouldn’t understand the exact page you wanted to optimise, therefore, the guide would not be personalised towards you.
In order to improve, you need to test
If you decide to make your soup without the aid of step-by-step guides; understand your first attempt probably won’t be the tastiest. The first attempt could have too much pepper, resulting in a soup too spicy to eat. When you test this soup again, you know to add less pepper. Perhaps on the second test, the amount of pepper is fine, but this time you didn’t add enough tomato. Testing the soup again would ensure you added the right amount of pepper and more tomato. With this method, you test and test until you are completely happy with the soup you have produced. It is the same for CRO, even if you decide to use a guide, not everything will work, and you need to conduct tests to improve it.
What works for one, might not work for another
Finally, suppose you planned to have a dinner party and decided soup was the best dish to serve. You’ve been cooking soup for a while now and you’re pleased with the progress. Whilst you may have perfected your soup for yourself, it might not be good for your guests. Everyone has different needs and your soup needs to cater for that. Just like with your website. You might have a guide that works well for one of your webpages, but this doesn’t mean it’s going to work well for all the webpages. You might have a landing page whose sole purpose is there to get people to sign up to the newsletter. The method of optimising this web page would be different to your landing page where you wanted to get people to pay a large sum of money to pay for your product.
Soup recipes, and how-to guides are good fun if you have no idea where to begin with your soup, or CRO but once you actually get started, you’re going to want to deviate away from the recipe to make sure it is completely tailored to you.
Image courtesy of: Jing
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(311)
