Too Many Conversion Points Will Confuse Your Users

Too Many Conversion Points Will Confuse Your Users

Posted on July 29, 2019 Mary Merritt

In the world of digital marketing and conversion rate optimization, it's not uncommon to find that someone has let their conversion points get out of control. Just FYI, a conversion point is a meaningful action that someone can take on your website or in your social properties. It can be a form, a premium content download, a newsletter sign-up...or all of the above.

A common misconception: By adding more conversion points, you will get more conversions...right? WRONG! By adding more and more conversion points to the website, you could be diluting the power of the ones that make sense to your customer base. And as Donald Miller from StoryBrand tells us: "If you CONFUSE, you LOSE."

We have a client who has a small set of conversion points - 1 for each step of the decision-making process:

  1. Download an Informational Guide (research phase)
  2. Request Product/Program Information (consideration phase)
  3. Schedule a Tour (consideration phase)
  4. Apply (decision-making time)

We believe the stack of conversion points listed above is a clean set-up for this client. We have different people at different stages of the decision-making funnel visiting the website, and we have found a way to acknowledge all of them. We think that's pretty cool! What was even cooler was what we learned about these different conversion points on the business side...

We are constantly asking our clients for any additional data that they can give us, and this client in particular told us that the "Schedule a Tour" conversions turn into paying customers at a higher rate than the "Apply Now" conversions. That's crazy to us! Why do we think it's crazy?

Well, when someone APPLIES for a program/product, we figured that is the last conversion action someone would take before they are qualified and then turned into a paying customer. We were wrong. The "Schedule a Tour" conversion point performs better, and we were able to discuss changes that we should make on the website to facilitate more tours being scheduled. The application process still flips converters into paying customers very well, but we were surprised to see that "Schedule a Tour" was the clear winner as far as bottom line company performance goes.

So not only should you have a nice, clean stack of conversion actions on your website (actions that make sense with a strong user-centric design around them), but you should NEVER make assumptions about which ones will affect your overall bottom line more. Watch it closely - you might find data that inspires fruitful changes.