What is the conversion rate on your web site? One percent? Three percent? Don’t know? If you don’t, you’re not alone…. Even though most site owners agree that “converting more visitors” is their most important web site objective more than 60 percent of them don’t know their conversion rates.
But what is a conversion ?Your conversion rate is the single most powerful indicator of your ability to persuade your visitors to take the action you want them to take (or convert). As a metric, it is defined as the percentage of visitors who accomplish a specific objective (take action) on your site. Think of each of your site objectives as a conversion process. A typical conversion process consists of a series of steps. At each step your visitors have a choice to either convert to the next step or to abandon your action. How well you satisfy their needs and motivate them to take the next step will dictate how well you succeed at converting more visitors into customers. How to Calculate Your Conversion Rateyour conversion rate for any action on your web site is the percentage of total visits that result in the desired action. This is simply measured by dividing the total desired actions by total visits. Example: 3,000 total orders; 100,000 visits. |
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Conversion Analysis ?The starting point for conversion analysis is to determine what a constitues a “conversion” for your website. Different sites will use a different measure. For your site, a conversion may be represented by one or more of the following (or one of any other activity you would like your users to undertake) :
All the above suggestions are “online” conversion activities which are relatively easy to monitor and measure. There are other activities – such as a giving you a call , or buying your product at a retail outlet – that are harder (but not impossible) to track, you will just need toi be a bit nore creative about how you measure these types of “offline” activities. But Conversion Analysis covers a lot more than simply measuring your conversion activities and calculating your conversion rate. The specific areas to be examinedas a par of the conversion analysis will largely be influenced by the type of conversion you are interested in, but could include one or more of the following :
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But How Can my Conversion be Optimised ?
The main aim of conversion analysis outlined above is to identify trends, and highlight discrepancies or unexpected visitor behaviours – in short, you are trying to get a clearer understanding of your users motivation for coming to your site, and their behaviour once they arrive.
Through careful analysis of the data, you should be able to build up a profile of the type of users that are converting well on your site – and more importantly – what differentiates them from those that aren’t converting.
Some of the more common reasons why visitors may not be converting on you site are outlined below. One or more of these reasons may be applicable to your site, and each has some fairly specific activities than can be undertaken to improve conversion.
Incorrect targeting – you may be getting lots of visitors to you site, but are they the right visitors? Are your current marketing strategies funnelling potential customers to your site, or is it just traffic? Are your visitors being targeted correctly ? If you are selling widgets, all those visitors looking for wodgets wll be disappointed. There may even be opportunities here for you to branch out into the wodget business.
Poor navigation – If you visitors have difficulty finding your conversion page/s or are frustrated by the navigation on your site, they will probably not stay long, and are unlikely to convert.
Low trust – for online sales and lead generation, trust is critical. Security and Privacy are extremely important to your visitors. If your site is not credible, or doesn’t inspire trust, then your visitors will simply not convert. Broken links, out of date information, and poor spelling and grammar can also have a significant negative impact on conversion rate.
Poor Site design – your site doesn’t have to be flash or fancy, but if it is unprofessional – with low quality images, poor spelling, or poor content, your visitors will be unlikely to convert.
Poor Form design – It is important that you make it as easy as possible for your users – any hurdles you put in their way will reduce your conversion rate. When asking for information via a form it is important that you only ask for the information that you absolutely need to take them to the next stage in the purchasing process. The more complex the form – the less likely your visitors will be to fill it in.
WebConsulting provides Conversion Analysis and Conversion Optimisation as part of our Consutation Services, please feel free to Contact Us if you would like to discuss how Conversion Optimisation can increase sales, and improve the effectiveness of your website.
