Introduction to conversion rates

Not too long ago a website that had a high volume of daily visitors was seen as King on the internet, but today having a large daily flow of visitors without making any sales, generating new leads or other ecommerce “actions” really means your website is just treading water in the internet marketing pool!

A conversion rate (also known as a metric) is a measurement of actions that a Webmaster wants from a visitor; some examples would be making a sale, generating a sales lead, joining an online community, or other ecommerce website functions.

Your sites conversion rate is the amount of actions from visitors divided by the total amount of visitors. This rate can be calculated from your web stats on weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis.

The typical conversion rate is around .5-8%, and highly successful ecommerce sites can be higher. The most successful websites have their “action” content wrapped around the site in an effort to help induce their visitors into completing the desired actions. Many Webmaster will deploy multiple landing pages optimized for specific keywords or phrases with the action content placed to easily gain a visitors attention.

Knowing how your visitors find your website is valuable information that can be used to fine tune or edit your content to increase your visitors user experience. Everything you need to know can be found in your sites webstats. The most useful information will be found in your keywords, referrers, entry and exit pages. Other useful data is geographical location and time of day.  Once you have a clear picture of how your visitors find your site you will want to examine the amount of time a visitor spent on your site before an action was completed versus the time spent by a visitors who left without completing an action.

Examining your keywords will show you which ones are the most successful, or most commonly used. Referrers are the sites, such as search engines or directory’s that a visitor used to initiate a search using a keyword or phrase. If you find that many visitors left your site from the same exit page without completing an action, you may want to review that particular page for missing or incomplete content or anything that may disrupted the user from completing a desired action.

In the constant quest for higher conversion rates and ROI in general, knowing what your visitors want and delivering that content in a package that is easy to understand and navigate is just a matter of researching and developing your pages to highlight your visitors needs with information that is friendly and trusting. Many successful websites employ surveys or user polls on their site to gather input from visitors on what they are looking for in a product or service, and these techniques when presented in a relaxed and friendly manner help build customer confidence and trust.

Once a successful content formula has been developed, it should be used to create additional keyword dense landing pages optimized for specific search engines and directories that will aid in attracting more visitors to the site.