You’ve probably heard the argument — that you’re better off increasing your conversion rate than increasing the level of traffic to your website.

It makes a lot of sense — all things being equal, you’ll achieve more sales and profits by increasing your conversion rate by, say, 1% than by increasing your traffic by 1%.

But you’ll notice that I said “all things being equal” and, in many if not most, cases all things are NOT equal.

You also need to consider the cost (time, money, resources and missed opportunities) involved in increasing your traffic versus increasing your conversion rate.

Now we often assume that it’s more costly to generate more traffic than to increase the conversion rate (through better copy, web layout, the offer being made and a slew of other factors).

But it’s always dangerous to “assume” anything. There is a cost involved in tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking your website, just as there’s a cost involved in paying for pay-per-click advertising, writing articles, distributing press releases, paying for search engine optimization consulting, and so on.

And there may come a point at which the cost/benefit of further website modifications is actually worse than the cost/benefit involved in generating more traffic.

Bottom line — assume nothing, track and test everything, and think in terms of cost vs benefit.