How to get your horse to drink: conversion rate optimisation

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t get it to drink. Thanks for that cliche, what has it got to do with anything? A lot, says digital marketing expert Tom Valcanis, especially when it comes to conversion rate optimisation.

Picture this: What if, when the horse got to the river, it discovered it was actually Luxury Water™? Luxury Water enriched with minerals they could sip now for a limited time only. While he’s guzzling away, the horse could get a free eBook on Seven Awesome Tips to Stay Hydrated in Summer in exchange for his email address?

That’s the art and science of conversion rate optimisation. (CRO). If search engine optimisation (SEO) or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising led the horse to the water, CRO entices more horses to drink more water, more often.

A 2023 survey by Ruler Analytics showed an average conversion rate of 2.9% over fourteen different industries. If your business has the #1 spot on Google for 24/7 broken tap repair and can’t convert most of the time, there’s definitely something amiss.

A good conversion rate isn’t uniform, however. Different industries have different sales cycles and immediacy of demand. Real estate sites converted 1.5% from paid search according to the survey, while professional services commanded a 7% rate. People just don’t buy houses on a whim.

If you’re focusing on getting horses to your water station and not making it drink, then you are losing the battle for leads or sales.

This message will bore the reader In three seconds

According to Dejan Marketing in a survey of 1,500 Australian Google users, 53% of respondents said they took up to five seconds to click on a search engine page result (SERP) with 25% clicking something within six to ten seconds. The average time spent on a website ranges between 45 to 54 seconds, according to data from Marketing Scoop. If your website loads slowly, has a bad user experience, doesn’t present benefits over features, lacks calls to action, or hectors you with pop-ups, people will click off and look elsewhere.

Irwin Hau, Director of Melbourne digital agency Chromatix Web Design and conversion optimisation app ConversionCow says that businesses are spending too much time and money on “marketing” and not enough making the sale.

“Given the economic climate at the moment everyone is looking for ways to save money,” he says. “It’s insane how much people are spending on marketing not realising that marketing is not the issue. Marketing is another word for traffic. Something every business should be tracking is traffic times conversion rate equals customers. Businesses, small businesses in particular, should be spending time and money on ensuring every dollar they spend on attracting traffic goes further.”

CRO can be a time consuming and iterative process. It may involve A/B testing (serving two or more variations of a web page design or copy to see which one converts more often), analysing where users drop off advancing through a sales funnel, using Call to Action (CTA) buttons, establishing landing pages, and inserting forms to capture user data for remarketing through email newsletters, for example.

Cutting to the chase

As much as I hate to say this as a copywriter, it’s that (most) people don’t want to read. They hate reading endless tracts about how great a product or service is (hence why tl;dr is ubiquitous online) – which is what led Irwin and his team to help small business beef up their marketing efforts with an app called ConversionCow (couldn’t resist the pun). ConversionCow is a plugin that showcases products or services in a little tab that sits to the left or right of the screen. When a user hovers over the tab, it encourages users to take action by cutting to the heart of why they clicked on your site in the first place.

“As website designers and marketers, getting bang for marketing bucks led us to develop ConversionCow,” Irwin says. “It’s simpler and cheaper than doing big website design or copy amendments which might be a waste of time. In the words of our project managers at Chromatix, our clients don’t want prettier websites or clever copy, all they want is browsers to act – they want to turn visitors into paying customers.”

How to think about CRO

CRO is just like SEO – it’s an ongoing process that requires rethinking, reimplementing, and constant analysis. What worked in 2019 before a cost-of-living crisis and Generative AI boom certainly won’t work as well in 2025. But here’s a few takeaways to chew on when looking at boosting your conversion rates:

–        Optimise where most of your customers are drawn to first. Home pages, landing pages, and pricing pages.

–     What counts as a conversion? A sale? A booking? A download? Make sure you set an expectation and assign a dollar value to the action so you can track your progress. You can track all sorts of conversions using Google Analytics.

–        Get a professional to cast their eye over your copy or design. A simple change can go a long way. Which button would you rather press – “Submit” or “Join 10,000 Satisfied Horses By Clicking Here”?

–        Test, test, and test again. Use A/B testing on your website, email marketing, or dedicated CRO app. Eke out as many positive percentage points as possible by testing and retesting.

–        Make sure your site doesn’t suck. If it’s slow, hard to navigate, or isn’t on message, people will move on. Ask people two or three industries removed from your own to give their unvarnished opinion.

With all that in mind, it could inspire a line of horses forming at your waterhole

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