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If you read this blog regularly, you probably don’t need an introduction to CRO or A/B testing. You know the major players, best practices, and you’ve likely tested your fair share of ideas.
But, as an expert, you likely know some of the persistent frustrations with current approaches. To name just a pair:
The best UX is the one you’re not aware of, the one you don’t even notice. That’s what makes a site truly intuitive.
Each time UX falls short of intuitive, cognitive load increases. As cognitive load increases, your conversion rate begins to suffer.
![UX Benchmarking: What Good Is It for Conversion Optimization? [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Screen-Shot-2016-11-16-at-10.39.16-AM-320x160.png)
Competitive analysis is an important element of business strategy.
Knowing where you stand in relation to competitors helps define product positioning, channel acquisition, messaging, and more.
But what good is it looking at your competitors specifically in regards to testing and optimization?
No one ever said optimizing any website is easy. But at least if you’re working on an eCommerce site, you have clear metrics to hit. You have goals on which (probably) everyone agrees.
But what if you’re an analyst, optimizer, or digital marketer and working on a site without a clear conversion?
You’re likely familiar with the finding that over half of communication is non-verbal.
So perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that your copy is “saying” a lot more than you think it is. That’s because tone of voice is at play, influencing how visitors read your copy and relate to your company.
Fortunately, tone of voice can be deliberately created, managed and optimized.
When we talk about conversion optimization, much of the strategies remain the same across industries. After all, the goal is to systematically improve the success of a business, whatever that means metric-wise.
That said, there are some key differences in how experts approach SaaS conversion optimization.
![How Do Famous Founder Photos Affect Website Credibility? [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Screen-Shot-2016-07-15-at-12.26.55-PM-1-320x160.jpg)
In this CXL Institute study, we explore how general perceptions of a website are affected by the use of a “human authority image” (a picture of a company’s founder, or maybe just a photo of a person presumably representing the company) on an agency website homepage.
As marketers, we spend countless hours acquiring traffic and crafting persuasive content, but too often we drop the ball at the final stage of the lead gen funnel—form design.
We’ve all heard stories about the impact that forms have on conversion rates, like how Expedia made an extra $1 million per year by removing one field on their form or how Marketo received 34% more leads by experimenting with their form length.
Despite the impact a well-optimized form can have on the bottom line, most marketers still use “paper forms on the web” (web forms that look like forms you’d fill out on paper).
![We Quantified the UX of 5 Bike Websites. Here's What We Learned. [Original Research]](https://cxl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/photo-1470299067034-07c696e9ef07-1-320x160.jpg)
Your design team likely thinks your website is number one compared to your competitors, but a quantified UX benchmark might tell you differently.
We all have our opinions on what good design looks like, but quantifying that and comparing it to competitors, really shows where you stand. Once you know that, you can take action based upon the insights.
This article outlines a UX benchmark study we conducted in partnership with Jeff Sauro and his team over at MeasuringU. We studied five road bike websites. We learned a lot in doing so, and you’ll certainly find some instant takeaways from our insights.