Increasing Conversion is NOT Reducing Bounces

Conversion Rate Matters More Than How Many Bounces You Get

Frequently, I read blog postings by people that take the tone of Google Optimizer – Have You Tried It? This post raises several causes for concern in my mind. Now, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to pick on this posting — what I am doing is using it as an example for what I see as a perception that seems to be widely shared.

Why does it cause concern? I’ll give you three reasons:

• With tools like Autonomy (a.k.a. Optimost, Omniture, Adobe), Vertster, and Hiconversion leading the way in conversion rate optimization (CRO) on websites, Google Website Optimizer seems to fall into the category of “free is not cheap enough.” Of course, since Google is pervasive, it gets used by lots of websites, but considering that most only use it for A/B testing (as the above post mentions, not to pick on it but it was a post yesterday that came to my attention) and the traffic level required is extremely high, this makes it difficult to use for most websites doing business on the web today.




• Google Website Optimizer is not necessarily going to help educate the market. Take, again, yesterday’s post as a common example – the focus seems to be on traffic, and bounce rates. That feels like the tip of a very large iceberg. One might be tempted to say, “Good start.” But what is the site’s conversion rate? There’s no evidence that anyone has worked out that, for every 100 site visitors that come to the shopping cart, 3 click “purchase.” The field “Est. Conv. Rate” on the Google Website Optimizer screen in the blog post has nothing to do with that, as far as I can tell. The only evidence frequently offered has to do with reducing bounce rates. Websites are not billboards, they’re stores. The name of the game is to make money.




• Analysis is good, but it’s expensive and requires specialists. Again, if you’re not a statistician, do you really understand how multi-variate testing delivers much more impact than A/B testing? or how you have to set up the test to ensure the variations will produce reliable results? or what you’d have to be looking for in your analytics reports (and how to set those up…)? Again, Google Website Optimizer can be quite misleading when it’s in the wrong hands.

What do you think? Is “free” cheap enough? Do business think conversion rate is about how many people buy, or reducing your bounce rate? Comments welcome.