Conversion Rate… What's the Big Deal?

Conversion rate can be defined as the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, with the desired action taking many forms. These actions can include sales of products, membership registrations, newsletter subscriptions, software downloads, or just about any action that your business decides is the ultimate goal (Marketing Terms, 2015). The outcomes of conversions depend on the type of site you have. If you are an e-commerce site, the number of sales or leads is how you define successful conversion. For non e-commerce sites, the number of people who completed a specific task (downloaded a document or sign up for a newsletter) will help define the same metric (Kaushik, 2006).

So how does one increase your conversion rate? What are some best practices that can be done to your site to help increase the conversion you desire?

Let’s check out this case study to see a real-world example of conversion metrics and improvement at work.

At the start of 2009, Voices.com, one of the leading marketplaces for voice-over-talent, had a conversion rate less than 5%. They hired Conversion Rate Experts to help increase their conversion rate and were able to do so, by over 400%! (Conversion Rate Experts, 2009).

What were some of the tips and lessons they learned from this process?

• Find out why customers aren’t converting; don’t just guess. If you don’t know what your customers don’t like than your chances of making them happier is very slim.

• Segment your visitors. You can segment by visitor type or visitor intention but either way, by segmenting and focusing on messaging towards each segment, you can create separate conversion funnels that will make customers happy.

• Create demonstration videos. As stated by Conversion Rate Experts, “Often, the biggest obstacle facing prospects is that they don’t understand what they are about to sign up for.” So they helped Voices.com overcome this by adding clearly communicated videos to their site. If you don’t add something like videos, at least clearly explain your service to prospects.

You can read the full case study to get a more thorough idea of how conversion metrics were used and analyzed to help better improve the ability of the business to improve their conversion rate. In the end, you have to study your conversion rate and look at why it is lacking in order to improve your conversion rate.

Analyzing conversion metrics can help your company or business figure out how best to optimize their site to greatly increase the desired outcome or conversion. Using metrics tools, such as Google Analytics, will help you look at the bigger picture surrounding your website, and will help you make informed decisions to better optimize your content and site layout. By tracking progress overtime you can see where you have been and can influence changes that need to be made to change the future of your site. Tracking conversion metrics can also help to inform your content marketing and website design. All metrics can be used to inform other metrics.

Do you have any good examples of real world uses of conversion metrics?

Source:

Conversion Rate Experts. (2009). How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%. Retrieved from http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/voices-case-study/

Kaushik, A. (2006, July 31). Excellent Analytics Tip #5: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices. Occam’s Razor. Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip5-conversion-rate-basics-best-practices/

Marketing Terms. (2015). Conversion Rate—Marketing Terms. Retrieved from http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/conversion_rate/

Mehta, S. (2009, October 27). Google’s favored rocket scientist? Fortune Magazine. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2009/10/27/googles-favored-rocket-scientist/