Some visitors will convert no matter what
August 2019
Even the brokenest, ugliest site on the internet will have some visitors who convert. Who are they?
You can see them in session recordings, where they navigate tirelessly from page to page using your confusing navigation and ambiguously-labeled CTAs, until they finally find what they’re looking for.
You’ll find them in the handful of conversions that came in last Thursday from 2-3:30pm EST, when a site update caused all the buttons on the site to be transparent. 🤦♂️
I was once tasked with optimizing a page where the form input text was white on a white background. You couldn’t see what you were typing, in any of the 9 form fields. People still submitted that form.
Why do they do it?
Some have done business with you before, and they’re loyal. Or they’ve simply done their research.
Either way, their minds were made up when they landed on the site. To change course now would be more of a pain than dealing with a bad user experience.
Or they’re doing this on someone else’s behalf. (If your boss tells you to go sign up for a free trial of Activityly, you do it. Doesn’t matter if their form validation sucks.)
Or they’re stuck at a desk with hours to kill. They’ve got 12 tabs open. The fact that your registration process takes 10 minutes instead of 2 doesn’t have much impact on their day.
Whoever these internet heroes are, your CRO efforts won’t change their behavior.
You can make their lives a little bit easier, and you should. And you should feel good about it.
But they’ll never be part of the lift you get from an experiment. They’re your baseline.
Tomorrow and Friday we’ll look at the two other types of website visitors, and where they fit into your optimization efforts.