In 2015, Damilola Aransiola was pushing a mobile app the hard way. He talked to people one on one, helped them download it and even gave them internet data so they could. After all that work he had 100 to 200 downloads.
Then one of his investors told him to try Facebook ads. Within 24 hours the app had 1,000 downloads. “What is going on here?” was his reaction. The startup later failed, but that one day turned him into a marketer. Ten years on, he is Chief Growth Officer at WhoGoHost and one of Africa’s leading voices in performance marketing.
That story is a good way into conversion rate optimization, because it carries the first lesson of our conversation: you can only improve what people are already doing. Here is what I took from Damilola, and what I would do with it.
CRO is how you respond to what customers do
Damilola’s definition is simple. Conversion rate optimization is “understanding how to improve the customer journey at each step.” He was careful to separate the two ideas. The journey is the path a customer takes from first hearing about you to buying from you. CRO is “what you do in reaction to what customer does to you.”
He compares it to courtship. You don’t propose on the first date. There are dates, meeting the family and a lot of steps before anyone says yes.
In B2B, those steps take longer. Sales cycles stretch, more people sign off, and the buyer needs a logical case as well as an emotional one. Damilola’s view is that B2C leans on emotion, while B2B “is also a bit emotional, but it’s more logical.” That changes what you optimize. A faster checkout matters less than whether the buyer has what they need to make the case internally.
Traffic comes before testing
I asked Damilola a direct question: if you could only fix one, would you work on the traffic source or the website?
His answer depends on the business. If a site already gets plenty of visitors, he focuses on the experience. He adds Hotjar so he can watch what visitors do, then tests changes on a segment of them. If the site gets few visitors, he works on traffic first.
“If you don’t have traffic, what are you measuring?”
That line stuck with me. A test on 40 visitors tells you very little, and B2B sites rarely get the thousands of visits a consumer brand can test with. What B2B sites can get is better quality leads. So for a smaller B2B site, I would put the first months into getting the right people to the page. Once there is enough data to see a pattern, I would start testing the experience.
When I asked what passes for CRO but isn’t, Damilola didn’t hesitate. The worst habit he sees is changing button colours. “Nobody cares about that,” he said.
Real testing, in his view, means changing the experience. Build two versions of a signup page that differ in meaningful ways, send the same kind of visitor to each and compare what happens. Test the copy. Test the offer. Test the structure of the page. Small cosmetic changes only start to mean something once a page gets thousands of visits.
I have seen the extreme version of this myself. On an ad tech product I worked on, a developer told me research says red buttons convert better. We were building one landing page per client. If a client’s brand guide has no red in it, what then? The answer is that the colour was never the problem worth solving.
Free still has to be excellent
Lead magnets get a lot of criticism right now. Some people say stop using them. As I pointed out to Damilola, many of those people still use lead magnets on their own sites.
His view is that lead magnets work, as long as they are good. “Even though you are giving it out for free, it needs to be insanely good.” He pointed to Alex Hormozi giving away serious value, and to Neil Patel growing traffic with free tools. Building a tool takes money and technical work. Giving it away is a real investment, and that is why the leads pour in.
His method for designing one is worth copying. He writes down every problem a customer faces before they buy, while they buy and after they buy. Then he creates something that solves one of those problems as well as he can. It doesn’t have to be a PDF. It can be a video, a tool or any format the customer will use. Gate it behind an email and phone number.
B2B buyers need many touch points before they buy, and one customer can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. A useful lead magnet is a cheap touch point.
That ties into the other idea Damilola leans on: Robert Cialdini’s book Influence and the principle of reciprocity. When you give, people feel they should repay you. He believes your customer lifetime value can double because of it.
His favourite example: he was reading the comments on Alex Hormozi’s content and saw people begging, “Alex, please sell us something.” Hormozi gave so much for free that his audience wanted to pay him. And he stays clear about who his paid offer is for, which keeps the free content generous without turning it into a sales pitch.
No tracking, no performance marketing
Our last topic was tracking, and Damilola was blunt about the client side of it. Most businesses don’t care how you track. They paid for results. If they don’t see new users or revenue, nothing else matters to them.
That is exactly why the marketer has to care. Most campaigns don’t work the moment they launch. Tracking shows you where they break. Sometimes the problem has nothing to do with targeting at all. “It might be as simple as users not being able to sign up and you wouldn’t know.” Without data, you blame your marketing for a broken form.
His stack includes Hotjar, Google Analytics and Segment. He has recently started using GoHighLevel for B2B because it ties calls, chats, SMS and landing pages back to one customer record, so you can move a lead through stages based on what they did. His summary: “Without tracking it’s not even called performance marketing.”
Where to start this week
Check your traffic first. If the page you want to improve gets too few visits to learn from, put your effort into bringing the right people to it. If it gets enough, install session recording, watch 20 visits and write down where people stall. Then test one meaningful change to the page, not the button colour. Check your tracking end to end before you judge the result.
Want the full conversation? Watch my episode with Damilola Aransiola, Chief Growth Officer at WhoGoHost, where we cover traffic, testing, lead magnets, reciprocity and the tools he uses to track every step.
