Sidewalk Theory

Theories are great when there exists an actual way to prove them. The we can determine if the theory was true or not.

Take for example when someone builds a website. In most cases the website owner wants to get the people on the site to take a certain action. A common goal is to obtain user’s email so that a relationship can be created between the website owner and the email subscriber. Using a sales funnel the ultimate goal of this partnership is usually to sell the subscriber something of value, and in most cases sell repeatedly throughout the life of their connection.

In such an example the website owner will have a conversion rate target. The conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that convert into email subscribers. The higher this ratio the more subscribers the website owner will gain from the same amount of website visitors. So obviously they want the value of this ratio to be as large as possible.

Now when the website is first being built we have no way of knowing what the actual conversion rate of a website will be. We can guess and predict what the value may be, however all of these assumptions will simply be a guess. Taking into consideration the vast amount of case studies and data that has been collected and shared by others around the world on conversion rate optimisation, an educated guess may be achieved. However a guess none the less.

Only when the site is ready and made live can a real world test be put in place to test the theory. Will the educated guess match the real world data? It will most likely be close if it came from an experienced internet marketer.

At this moment we enter another opportunity for a theory to enter the plan ahead. As we mentioned the website owner wants his conversion rate to be as high as possible to gain more email subscribers. So he sets out on a mission to increase his websites conversion rate.

To achieve such an increase he must seek our a conversion rate optimisation service provider to help him achieve his goals. Through extensive research and experience on the subject an expert team will put their theories to the test, ideally one at a time.

A conversion optimisation expert can quickly scan a webpage and can not only identify chances to the page that will improve conversions, they will also know which changes will have the greatest impact. Of course even the most experienced on this subject still holds theories in their mind. Using past experiences they can improve the closeness of their theories to reality, however even they will not know the true outcome until after a test has been completed.

By only testing one change at a time they test their theory that their proposed change did in fact improve conversions. Of course if it did not then it is just a simple case of reverting that change back to the original state and trialing another change. While this seems harmless if you were making many wrong assumptions then you are not improving your conversion rate at all and are making very expensive errors. This is why you should always employ the services of an experienced conversion rate optimiser to gain the best outcomes for your goals.