Converting Traffic

There is little point marketing and advertising your website unless you understand how to convert that traffic when it finally does arrive at your web site.

We will look at this in some detail. Firstly to avoid any confusion we will define a conversion and your conversion rate.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion is when a visitor completes an action that you want them to take.

What is the Conversion Rate?

The conversion rate is the number of conversions in a fixed time period divided by the total number of unique visitors during that time period. This is expressed as a percentage.

Identify your desired actions

These might be simple, such as buy a product, or complex such as provide information for a quotation, sign up for an email, take part in a survey. You must know what you want your visitors to do, and concentrate on achieving those desired outcomes. Don't skimp on this part, write down the desired outcomes for your website.

Measure your benchmarks

For a period of time you must measure and monitor the conversion rates for your website. If you are serious about improving your conversion rates then you must find out and know how your site currently performs. Otherwise how can you measure any improvements. Needless to say, until you actually have customers or conversions on your site, you won't have anything to measure.

Set your objectives

It is not good enough to say that all your conversion rates need to improve. You must be specific and your targets should be reallistic and achievable. You may want to increase quote requests from 0.3% to 1%. You may want to increase online purchases from 0.2% to 0.6%. Alternatively you may want to reduce shopping cart abandoment from 30% down to 20%. Whatever your objectives are, make sure they are real targets, achievable and that your targets are written down clearly. A half hearted attempt at this will not work.

Measuring Conversions

There are many powerful web statistic packages but not many enable you to measure your conversions against various metrics. Ideally you want to be able to measure conversions with a range of metrics such as by country, by date, by search phrase and by referring URL. Once you have set your objectives you can pick the best tools for measuring the conversions you have decided are important for your website.