I genuinely think the world of CRO has been tarnished by the words “conversion rate.” And honestly? Fuck your conversion rate. It means almost nothing. Yet entire businesses… entire agencies… entire dashboards… are built around obsessing over it. “Your conversion rate is up.” “Your conversion rate is down.” “We increased conversion rate by 18%.” Cool. But are you actually making more money? Because that’s the only thing that matters. Here’s the problem: Conversion rate is one of the most contextless metrics in ecommerce. It can be manipulated. It can fluctuate. It can lie to you. Anyone can improve conversion rate in minutes. Half your prices tomorrow. Your conversion rate will probably shoot up. Send an email with a promo, same thing.. Does that mean your business is healthier? No. You just destroyed your margin. Your best-selling product goes out of stock? Conversion rate drops. A competitor launches a huge sale? Conversion rate drops. You’re seasonal and heading into Q4? Conversion rate rises. Your paid traffic gets broader because Meta is scaling spend? Conversion rate drops. Does any of that mean your CRO agency suddenly became bad overnight? No. And this is where the industry gets it completely wrong. Brands give agencies credit for things they didn’t influence. Agencies take victory laps over seasonal lifts. Then the opposite happens. Brands blame agencies for external factors completely outside of their control. And the dashboard becomes the judge. Not actual business impact. This is also why Shopify dashboards confuse the hell out of people. Because most people are staring at isolated metrics instead of understanding the relationship between them. You can increase conversion rate and lose profit. You can decrease conversion rate and make significantly more money. You can increase AOV, reduce conversion rate slightly, and massively improve contribution margin. You can increase revenue per visitor while conversion rate falls. This is why I’ve started moving away from the term CRO entirely. Not because optimization is dead. But because “conversion rate optimization” became too narrow. The future is post-click growth. Post-click optimization. What happens AFTER the click. Because most brands are obsessed with two things: Traffic. Conversion rate. But the real question is: “How much value are we generating from every visitor we already paid for?” That’s the game. Not vanity metrics. Not isolated percentages. Not screenshots of Shopify dashboards with green arrows. The metric we obsess over internally is revenue per session / revenue per visitor. Effectively: “How much money does the average visitor generate?” Because that metric naturally accounts for: Conversion rate. Average order value. Upsells. Cross-sells. Offer structure. Product mix. Retention mechanics. Landing page performance. Bundle performance. Cart optimization. Everything. It’s a much closer reflection of actual business impact. Simple example: Store A 2% conversion rate £100 AOV Revenue per visitor = £2 Store B 4% conversion rate £30 AOV Revenue per visitor = £1.20 Which store would you rather own? Exactly. And this is why low-level CRO conversations online drive me insane. People celebrating tiny conversion lifts without understanding economics. Without understanding margin. Without understanding CAC. Without understanding contribution profit. Without understanding inventory constraints. Without understanding customer quality. Without understanding lifetime value. A 5% conversion rate means absolutely nothing in isolation. Nothing. The industry needs to mature. Because optimization should never have been about chasing a higher conversion rate. It should’ve always been about maximizing the value of the traffic you already have. STOP obsessing over your traffic and start turning more of it into profit! That’s post-click growth. And honestly, I think that narrative shift is long overdue.