Organic traffic is drying up. Paid traffic is more expensive than ever. The old playbook - optimising for Google, running predictable ad campaigns - isn’t working like it used to. Why are fewer people making it to your site in the first place?
Google, social platforms and AI-driven assistants keep users inside their ecosystems - featured snippets, product listings, AI-generated answers, algorithm-boosted content - all leading to fewer visits.
Spending more to acquire visitors only to lose them after a single session is a downward spiral. Optimising landing pages based on best practices and “CRO hacks” is an expensive and dangerous game, played by inexperienced CRO bro’s who don’t know any better. Unfortunately, this is common in South Africa.
I call this approach to CRO “moving Sh!# around the page”. When you hear well-meaning tropes like “x should be above the fold” or “product description must be bullet points” or anything else that is obsessed with surface level tweaks based on some superior knowledge, run. You’re about to waste money.
Rearranging elements on a page won’t grow your business in this environment. CRO is about understanding why people buy, why they don’t, and what actually changes behaviour.
Winning brands aren’t debating button colours or the position of an element below or above the fold. They’re speaking to real customers. Often. They’re observing them using your site and the site of competitors.
Soon, they have a clear picture of:
- What customers are trying to get done
- Their purchase triggers
- Where things break down in the journey.
Conversion rate is a reflection of human behaviour. People either bought, or they didn’t.Therefore, if you want to change conversion rate, the lever to pull is
human behaviour. And to do that, you first have to understand it.
Many businesses won’t make this shift. They’ll keep throwing money at traffic, tweaking page layouts, and blindly trusting in “hacks”.
That is your opportunity.
The winning brands I work with - both in South Africa and globally - have one thing in common. They’re optimising the sales conversation with customers, not moving stuff around the page.
In practice:
Optimise the entire user journey, not isolated pages. A conversion doesn’t happen in isolation. What happens on a single page in one session is a tiny moment in a complex decision-making system.
For example, we regularly see that checkout funnel dropoff is caused by issues higher up in the funnel. No amount of fine-tuning the checkout will change that.
Optimise for decision-making, not decoration. You’ll get lucky with some layout tweaks, but that’s not a strategy. Why are they on this page? Why now? What did they click on to get here? These questions are far more impactful than obsessing over what to put where on the page.
Optimise for retention, not just acquisition. Higher conversion rate doesn’t always mean more revenue. The best CRO teams test the impact of changes beyond the initial sale.
You don’t grow by moving things around on a page. You grow by understanding - and optimising - what happens in the mind of your customer. In a zero-click world, don’t fall in the expensive trap of tactical CRO.