Every company starts with PPC well before CRO is even a glint in the eyes of C Level Executives.
CRO means stagnation / reduction of ad spend, which means reduction of revenues / budget of PPC agencies / CMO. Ergo PPC practioners have a vested interest in dunking on CRO. Since PPC begins earlier than CRO, PPC practitioners have the ears of the C Suite. Combined with the fact that PPC providers are generally much larger companies than CRO providers, they’re usually successful in their endeavor to project CRO in a negative light.
This was merely a conspiracy theory in my mind about why CRO holds less value to executives as PPC. I started believing it after (1) I read articles by leading PPC agencies debunking CRO publicly, and (2) The VP Marketing of a leading company told me that, as long as he gets his benchmark revenue $ for every $ of ad spend – aka ROMI – he doesn’t care about Conversion Rate aka CRO.
CRO also suffers from the lack of an adjective to describe its raison d’être: Yes, CRO will make a website frictionless, but what is the basic problem with the website that CRO solves? “Frictional” – Nah, that means something else. Frictionful? Nah, there’s no such word. I’ve even consulted an MFA in Creative Writing, some of the alternatives that emerged were “difficult”, “inconvenient”, but none of them is a single word adjective form for “friction”.
Plus many CRO practitioners are extremely pedantic. No customer has pristine data. Their executives still make big decisions on the available data e.g. Decisions worth $300B in TV advertising in USA are made on the basis of Nielsen Rating, which uses a sample size of merely 20,000 to arrive at ratings of TV shows watched by 330M Americans. C’est la vie. Against that backdrop, when CRO professionals give a lot gyan about data quality for merely 100s of thousands of dollars worth of work, that’s bound to piss off C Level Executives. 100 years ago, Wanamaker cast aspersion on half of his ad spend but ad industry has still managed to grow by leaps and bounds. If bad quality throws a spanner in CRO outcomes, CRO professionals should learn how to grow their field despite that setback.