This is an article I wrote for Website Magazine. I recommend that you pick up their latest issue to read many more articles. The American magazine “reaches 142,709 qualified website owners and Internet professionals and the largest audience of website owners and managers in the field.”

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There are many reasons why your attempts at conversion optimization could fail. If you avoid the mistakes listed in this article, then you will be more likely to succeed — it’s as simple as that. To achieve success in conversion optimization, here are the five biggest mistakes to avoid.

1. Getting blinded by your own knowledge and preferences
If your conversion optimization efforts are largely based on what you like and how you behave, then you are more likely to fail. Not everyone is like you; there are at least three other temperaments to consider.

According to renowned psychologist David Keirsey, everyone falls into one of sixteen temperaments. The temperament of the buyer influences what will convince them to buy a specific product, and what will make them buy it specifically from your company or website.

Which temperament are you trying to sell to? To learn about how to sell to people who may be different from you, read the work about temperaments done by Keirsey and the interpretations made by firms like Future Now, Inc.

My own consultancy firm, inUse Insights, has also done similar work, grouping visitors into four types that are illustrated by different birds: owl, penguin, swallow and peacock. The lesson here is that you should learn as much as possible about your audience, and don’t fall into the trap that they are just like you. Besides that, you know a lot more about your company, product or service than your visitors, and you may therefore make the mistake of assuming that your visitors know more than they do. Don’t get blinded by best practices, either; they are not always silver bullets. Your audience and context may differ.

2. Optimizing for the wrong visitors
The assumption that all visitors to your website are there to convert is wrong. When analyzing why visitors are dropping out without converting, you need to know what they came there to do in the first place.

Some visitors end up on your website by chance, some because you cater to their interests or needs, and others because of a mistake. You will rarely convert those who came to visit your site by accident. If you combine a survey (attitudinal data) with your Web analytics tool (behavioral data), you’ll be able to ask for the intention of your visits upon entry and analyze their success rate.

It’s not unusual to find out that the group you have a reasonable chance at converting constitutes 10 percent or less of your visitors. With that new knowledge, you can focus your conversion analysis on the segment that came to your website to convert but never did. Work hard to make that group convert, and forget about the rest — for now.

3. Focusing on only one metric or goal
Testing and conversion optimization is often based around the idea of increasing the rate for a specific metric, a specific goal. Nothing wrong with that, but you may forget to check how your efforts are impacting other goals and metrics.

Maybe you are increasing one goal at the expense of others? Maybe your conversion rate has gone up, but your average order value, margin or return on ad spend has decreased? Always make sure to look at the big picture. If you’re just looking at — and optimizing for — one metric, there’s a risk that you’re fooling yourself.

4. Making testing a goal in itself
I’ve come across organizations that have set goals on how many A/B or multivariate tests they should run in a set period of time. That’s a bad idea.

Think about what incentives do to people, particularly if there is a reward involved. If the goal entitling an employee to a bonus is the number of tests executed, be prepared for lowperforming tests and maybe even ones that decrease rather than increase your conversion rate.

A good goal is not addressed as the number of tests run. Instead, focus on the monetary goal you want to reach, or actions that you want your visitors to take, and run as many tests as you can based on hypotheses and traffic volume. Your goal should be to increase something (purchases, downloads, etc.) or decrease something (visits to the contact page from visitors who have read the FAQ, etc.), not to run a certain number of tests. If you focus on the number of tests, chances are that you will be too eager to test that you forget about building a solid hypothesis, and run tests that don’t have enough traffic to complete within a reasonable amount of time.

5. Coming to the conclusion that nothing works
Have you run tests and not seen any improvement? Rather than conceding that there is no way to make a difference and simply giving up, it is more likely that you overlooked something. There may be something further you could do to collect more relevant data.

Has your Web analytics tool been implemented properly? Have you integrated attitudinal and behavioral data in your analysis? Have you done usability testing? Have you used a tool such as ClickTale that shows behaviors that are not necessarily linked to what you can actually do on the website? One way to quickly get new ideas is to ask your non-tech Web-savvy friends to perform a task on your website without your guidance.

Conversion optimization is for everyone
Keep in mind that conversion optimization is not just for e-commerce. It’s for everyone. It does not matter whether you’re selling a product, a service, information or an idea. We all have specific actions in mind that we want website visitors to take. Conversion optimization is about making a larger share of visitors do those actions. It could be about making a donation, becoming a member, changing an opinion about something, or many other actions.

As long as it’s measurable, it’s a candidate for conversion optimization.

I’ve asked my employee, and colleague, Antoaneta Nikolaeva a few questions about her presentation at the upcoming eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Stockholm.

What are you going to talk about?

I will share techniques and insider tips on how to work with web analytics to understand your audience better. It will help you increase your conversion rate.

I will show you how several non-profit organizations do it, for example Operation Smile and Doctors Without Borders.

Is your presentation only for non-profits, or who should listen to it?

Any organization wanting to boost online efforts can learn something from the presentation. Non-profits are under a continuous pressure to increase online conversion with limited resources, so I believe they make a perfect example of how you can be smart without using expensive technology. It’s all about people and process.

This will be your second time speaking at eMetrics Stockholm, what do you like best about the conference?

The engaged and enthusiastic people that I meet there. The attendees at the conference come from different industries, so I find it really inspiring to mingle and discuss web analytics with them.

What’s the first thing anyone new to web analytics (non-profit or not) should do?

Define your business objectives, goals and needs. Then look at how they can be applied to your website.

Start analyzing and optimizing!

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Tip from Lars! If you buy tickets through the eMetrics website and use the code INUSEINSIGHTS011 you’ll get a 15% discount. Other speakers at eMetrics Stockholm include Bryan Eisenberg, Stéphane Hamel, Jim Sterne, Brian Clifton, and Steve Jackson.

I decided to catch up with one of my favourite entrepreneurs, Dennis Mortensen. Dennis is an author on the subject of web analytics, an associate instructor at the University of British Columbia, a board member of Web Analytics Association, former COO of IndexTools, and Director of Data Insights at Yahoo! He has made a couple of exits, and is now founder and CEO of Visual Revenue, Inc.

Dennis is the guy in the white shirt, Don Draper style.

In 2007, you were one of the key people interviewed about web analytics in Europe for a long podcast, and in 2010 you were asked some follow-up questions. How does 2011 compare to 2007 and 2010 so far?

In retrospect, I believe it would be fair to say that the technological focus back in 2007 was on custom reporting and segmentation on large volumes of data, and the organizational insights that could be derived from it.

By 2010 it became clear that insights without action was of little meaning and focus shifted slightly towards the hiring of Analysts and forcing action any way possible. However, I think it would be fair to say that most organizations are moving towards this goal, but some are yet to execute in full on this promise.

In 2011 the current buzzword in analytics seems to be real time. I certainly agree that data needs to be current and as up to the minute as the organization need it, but I am not sure this is truly the next step in analytics. If you ask me, I would suggest that we are moving in the directions of proper decision support systems that provide truly actionable recommendations on what to do right now—accompanied by the future value of such actions.

You were the head of IndexTools in 2007, and later a Director at Yahoo!, who acquired IndexTools and renamed in Yahoo! Web Analytics. This year, however, you are doing something new. Please tell us more about your new venture, and why it seemed like a logical step for you to take.

Given my attitude from above about the future value of data being in actionable recommendations towards the point of automation, it seemed very natural for me to seek out the media industry with an offering of proper decision support systems.
The team spent the last good year on our data modeling efforts and our predictive analytics systems and launched our initial product, Front Page Content Recommendation Platform, early 2011.

We created a model where we can predict the future performance of any given piece of content on the front page, and taking advantage of that information, we provide direct recommendations on what content to push on the front page, exactly where it is supposed to be, and for how long it is expected to stay put.

This is a decision process already in place and editors are taking hundreds, if not thousands, of front page content placement decisions everyday already—we simply want them to be empowered. Think about it, how do you actually decide if the “News of the World” story goes into the hero position? And if not in the hero position, where? And finally, for how long does it stay there?

What we provide is by any definition a revolutionary decision support system for editors. It is unmatched by any solution in the market.

You’ve worked for organizations of various sizes, and you’ve done more than one exit. What’s the most exciting aspect about business for you? Do you prefer coming “out of nowhere”, being bootstrapped and having to prove something, over working for a large organization that has much stronger financial muscles?

Personally, I love the pure joy of our team having produced a product that our customers want and actively use every day, and potentially a product they truly cannot live without! There is certainly “entrepreneurial bliss” in seeing a company being created from nothing but an idea enabled by science and raw engineering.

We are well capitalized this time around from both our previous successes, but also from our recent financial backers. Pairing that with our historical data and analytics credentials, I think we have all the muscles we need!

When you left Yahoo! I couldn’t help but think about the moment when the leaders in hit TV series Mad Men left to start Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. It felt refreshing when they left the big, fancy, office and started working out of a small hotel room. How did you feel when you got the first office, and your first core team, for Visual Revenue?

I like that picture Lars. Thanks! I truly admire anybody who is willing to leave the safety of a corporate job and become part of a founding team. In the case of Visual Revenue it was not an office out of a hotel room, but out of a shared room in my Manhattan apartment building. That first period is romantic, and a difficult emotion to capture in any other way than describing it as jumping into the deep end of the pool!

Visual Revenue’s current view is not too shabby.