Why Your E-Commerce Conversion Rate Doesn’t Matter

Hey there! Justin Christianson here, the co-founder and president of Conversion Fanatics. And today I want to talk about conversion rates.

Conversion rate optimization is vital to the success of your ecommerce business, especially if you want to scale rising ad costs, your cost per acquisition is going up, or your traffic is becoming less effective.

But what if I told you the actual conversion rate doesn’t matter?

Conversion rate is a relative number. And, of course, it would be great if you could see your conversion rate rise from 1% to 2% to 3%…and so on.

But eventually, you’ll hit a ceiling and a law of diminishing returns.

When you’re doing conversion rate optimization effectively and correctly, however, everything else becomes easier. Your cost per acquisition goes down. Your average order values go up. And you’re able to scale your traffic more effectively.

If you know your numbers and you have them dialed in, your conversion rates will fall in line with the rest of your metrics.

Too many people focus on their conversion rate alone instead of also taking into account their business’ other metrics. You need to go and find your business’ bottlenecks, do your analysis, and understand where your visitors are falling off, what they’re paying attention to, and what they’re ignoring.

This way, you can better connect with your visitors through your marketing message and position yourself to evolve as the markets change, as the traffic mediums change, as the buying habits change, and as distractions become more prevalent in the marketplace (we live in a noisy digital world, after all). Everything else becomes more effective.

It’s possible that you could raise your conversion rate from 1% to 2% but actually make less money because your average order value and your revenue per visitor value go down.

So you need to look at your metrics holistically and then go back and massage your conversion rates during each step of the process as opposed to using your conversion rate as the sole metric to drive your business. There are so many other elements besides conversion rate that come into play.

Also, stop focusing on what other stores are doing just because you think they might be doing better than you. Because, frankly, most storesand we review a lot of them here at Conversion Fanaticsaren’t testing or optimizing. They’re just grinding it out in the hopes of improving.

But if you do conversion rate optimization effectively, your cost per acquisition goes down, your average order values go up, your traffic becomes more effective, and you’re able to scale, just like one of our clients…

Not too long ago, we took a client’s conversion rate from 2% to 3% and they turned on 70% more traffic. But then, their conversion rate dipped back down, but they had 70% more eyeballs on their offer, and they were able to scale about 300% in the last 12 months.

You need to focus on what’s right for your business, and you need to better connect with your visitors. And if you’re doing optimization correctly, your conversion rate may not go up a ton, but your other metrics will follow.
You’ll be more effective as you play the long game and you’ll experience the exponential growth that you’ve been looking for in your business.

I hope you got something from this content, with the main takeaway being to not focus solely on your conversion rates. Focus on your other metrics too and then massage your conversion rate.

In doing so, your marketing message will evolve, your traffic will become more effective, your business will grow, and you’ll see that long-term sustainable growth that you’ve been looking for.

Be sure to like, share, and comment on this post and let us know what you think! And if you have other questions, feel free to reach out.

Also, be sure to request your free in-depth conversion analysis if you want to find out where you’re falling short.
That’s all I have for you today. Hopefully, you enjoyed the information. We’ll talk to you again soon.