Cause and effect

Cause and effect is important to understand

A big advantage of doing business online is that the accessibility of statistics is very high. Are you running your company with a base online then you know much more about your customers than in a traditional business. However, you have to translate the statistics with caution and not least to reflect on cause and effect. It is easy to draw conclusions based on false causality.

A common cause and effect relationship I face is that companies believe that their site is way too bad in the case of conversion. Their hypothesis is based on the number of visitors the site has so they should get more leads / customers / purchases. Quite often they say: “We should sell more, given the traffic we have. There must be something wrong with the site. ”

I am the first to admit that many sites have major lack of conversion. But over I have seen many examples where companies, large and small, put a lot of energy and money to increase their conversion by rebuilding their site. They have used the services of talented conversion experts, making smart changes on their site, but without significant results.

It turns out in these cases that causation has been wrong. It’s not a bad site, from a conversion perspective, that leads to the company is not selling as much as they wish. The cause has been been that the quality of traffic to the site is too bad. No matter how good your site is, it will not convert well if you do not appeal to the right audience.

My experience is that it is worthwhile to reconsider both one and two times th different possible reasons why the statistics look like it does. It is not always that the simple and most obvious answer is the cause.

Read more about conversion optimization in our 3-step guide in how to convert visitors into customers.