Do you want a higher conversion rate? What if I gave you a conversion rate of 100%?
Sure, I can do that. I just filter out everyone who isn't 100% certain to buy. The result will be a perfect conversion rate, and bitterly little sales.
That sounds absurd. But it's precisely the logic behind how conversion rate is so often looked at. You see a number, compare it to a benchmark, conclude it needs to improve and get to work. Without asking what that number actually tells you, and what it doesn't.
This article is about that pitfall. And about why conversion rate is one of the most misused metrics in digital marketing.
The calculation that always comes back
The scenario is always the same. A business owner or CMO sets a marketing budget and the reasoning goes like this: if we spend x euros more and maintain the conversion rate, we'll bring in proportionally more revenue. Or: if we do CRO and raise the conversion rate and then scale the traffic, we'll earn proportionally more.
On paper that's correct. In practice it isn't.
The problem is the assumption that conversion rate is a stable variable. It isn't. Conversion rate is the result of an interplay of factors that have nothing to do with your website: the maturity of your brand, your price positioning, your channel mix, the season, the intent of the traffic that comes in. If you attract more traffic with lower intent, your conversion rate drops. No amount of CRO can fully solve that. There are solutions of course, like providing a better landing page. But the result stays the same: the higher up the marketing funnel you aim with your marketing mix, the greater the chance your conversion rate drops.
"Conversion rate optimisers forget one thing: you can't optimise away the quality of your traffic."
What actually influences conversion rate
Before you pass judgement on your conversion rate, there are a number of things you need to understand.
Your value proposition has a direct impact. Every business positions itself in a sector with its own unique characteristics. Those characteristics can strengthen your proposition but they can also cause people to think longer, hesitate or discuss the decision with someone else. A purchase that requires multiple decision-makers, a high-priced product, a service where trust is central: all these factors consistently produce a lower conversion rate than the benchmark you're comparing against.
That doesn't necessarily mean something is going wrong — only that what makes you unique compared to other players in your sector causes potential customers to think differently about buying from you. That's exactly what you want, isn't it?
There are of course also seasonal factors. In sectors with a clear peak period, the conversion rate in the low season is always lower. People are orienting themselves, saving pages, coming back later. A benchmark that doesn't account for that says nothing.
And then there's the channel mix. This is where it gets really interesting.
The channel mix problem
When you invest more in awareness, you attract more traffic that isn't ready to convert yet. People who see your brand for the first time, spot an ad, click through out of curiosity. At that moment they're coming to look out of curiosity, but they can still become customers. Not always of course, so your conversion rate drops. But if you don't target this segment, you also miss the curious visitors who would have become your customers.
At a client with a product with a long lead time I saw this very concretely. More awareness investment brought more traffic to the top of the funnel. People came to look, left, came back later via branded search.
The assumption had been that everything coming in organically was only returning customers. Because they already knew the brand. That's obviously not the case when you see the bigger picture of this story.
What happened later is that the conversion rate of the organic traffic started to drop. I describe the cause of this in detail in another article, but it had mainly to do with good SEO work on non-brand keywords.
The wrong conclusion that gets drawn: the CRO on the website isn't working well anymore. While you're actually doing exactly the right thing. You're filling the funnel at the top. You're building volume. And yes, your conversion rate drops. That's precisely what should happen.
"More visitors, lower rate, more customers. Whoever sees that as a problem is reading the wrong metric."
| Conversion only | Full funnel | |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors | 1,000 | 5,000 |
| Conversion rate | 4.5% | 1.8% |
| Conversions | 45 | 90 |
CRO does have value, but in the right context
This is not a case against CRO. Conversion optimisation is a serious discipline with real impact. Tools like Hotjar for heatmaps and session analysis or VWO for A/B testing help you understand where visitors drop off and what you can do about it. That work is valuable and belongs in every serious marketing approach.
But CRO only solves problems that exist on the website. If the cause of a low conversion rate lies outside the website — in your channel mix, your seasonality or your value proposition — CRO won't change that. You're optimising for a symptom rather than a cause.
Conversion rate is one element in a bigger dashboard. It says something about the quality of your traffic and the effectiveness of your pages. But it says nothing about the size of your market, the strength of your brand or the funnel stage where the traffic is coming from. Whoever steers on that one number alone misses the bigger story. And when someone uses it to diagnose a problem that doesn't exist, it's useful to understand how agencies make metrics work in their favour.
To close
At the start of this article I offered to give you a 100% conversion rate. You just had to limit visitors to people who were already going to buy anyway. It's an absurd thought. But it's less far from reality than it seems. Whoever optimises their marketing entirely for conversion rate does exactly that: they strip out everything that adds volume but lowers the ratio. They squeeze more from less. And they stop growing.
The best marketing decisions aren't made by staring at one metric. They're made by understanding what all the metrics together tell you about the reality of your business.