Finding the cartoon below in my reader this morning, along with the insightful comment by Ben at Church of The Customer, and I immediately thought of a host of recent conversations regarding conversion rate improvement.

Neither clear proof (low revenues) nor documented causation (fall-out reports) seems able to push the site managers (or their CEO’s) to make a priority of the kind of action required to fix the problem.

There is one important difference: it’s not denial, competitive interests, or selfishness that is stopping them. It’s some combination of not wanting to touch the website because modifications often have such technical complexity, not having any staff or budget allocated to modifying the site (because you only do that during redevelopment projects, right?), and the complete lack of a ‘measure-test-improve’ attitude towards the site and its architecture or content.

Interestingly some of these same organizations do have that attitude towards their traffic acquisition activities. But even in the face of huge potential revenue improvements, the idea of testing changes to the site (and certainly the shopping cart) is met with reluctance and resistance if not outright dismissal.

Conversion rate improvements are the next great land rush for online marketers. They should start setting expectations within their organizations that web development isn’t an occasional project it’s an ongoing process. This means that ecommerce platform vendors and IT depts. need to figure out how to assist rather than prevent. And budgets and headcount expectations need to reflect the required planning, implementation, measurement, and analysis.

It’s not going to be economically feasible to do business online with bounce rates in the 50%-60% range, and shopping cart abandonment rates above 25% for very much longer because those with higher conversion rates will continue to drive up the price of paid search terms and other traffic sources. Pretending the change isn’t coming is not a recommended strategy.