Ask me what the most important aspect of a website is and I’m likely to reply ‘Conversion Rate’. I believe it’s even more important than visitor numbers and I would rather have a high Conversion Rate than a high visitor count (of course, having both would be best of all!)
Of course, you need to have a certain number of visitors to begin with, but even 100 visits is enough for you to start to see which aspects of your site are working.
What Is a Conversion Rate
Basically, it’s a number – usually expressed as a percentage – that tells you how many people are doing what you want them to do when they land on your site.
Everyone who has a website wants the people visiting it to do something on it – even if that’s just reading some content. Most actions that users take on your website can be measured (although there is one key thing that can never be measured by Analytics – we’ll come back to that later) and anything that can be measured can have a goal assigned to it.
Your Conversion Rate tells you how successful you are at achieving your goals. The most obvious goals are for eCommerce sites – making sales.
An Example
Bill and Steve both have online shops selling Flaming Death Skull t-shirts. The black shirts, adorned with a fetching bloody skull on fire motif, retail at $30 each. Bill is receiving about 200 visits a month and has a Conversion Rate of 1%. Steve is receiving about 50 visits a month, but has a Conversion Rate of 10%. Who’s doing better?
In terms of traffic, Bill. No question. But basic math shows us that, financially, Steve is doing much, much better, earning $150 a month against Bill’s $60 despite Bill have four times the traffic.
Although I’ve used a financial example here, the priciples can be applied to almost anything. Here are a few other things that could work as goals:
- Number of comments
- Number of pages visited
- Time spent on your site
- Mailing list sign ups
- Number of repeat visits
- Brouchure requests
- Number of visits from a particular keyword
- Downloads
- Uploads
- Number of phone enquiries (a little harder to track, but still very possible – for example, by using a website specific phone number)
This Sounds Great – So How Do I Work It Out?
Of course, in order to know if you’re reaching your goals you need a way to measure all of this stuff. Thankfully, the benevolent Google (All Hail!) has bestowed on us humble netizens an incredibly powerful (yet totally free) tool to help us – Google Analytics.
Installing Analytics is straightforward – you need a Google account and, once you’ve signed up, you just drop a small chunk of JavaScript at the foot of every page you want to track (that’s all of them) and then you sit back and let it collect the data. It’s very easy and there are plenty of tutorials out there, but if you need a hand setting it up, feel free to get in touch and we’ll work something.
Now you have your goal and your data, working out your Conversion Rate is simple mathematics. Analytics actually includes quite comprehensive support for goals that works out your Conversion Rate automatically within the program itself, but since that’s a fairly advanced topic we’ll start by working it out for ourselves.
Note: I’ll be writing more in-depth articles about using Google Analytics in future, so sign up to my RSS feed or email mailing list to make sure that you don’t miss them.
Let’s suppose that your goal is to get comments. You can work out your overall Conversion Rate by simply dividing the number of comments (spam comments don’t count!) by the number of visits and multiplying it by a hundred. If you had 4,000 visits in one week (hurrah!) and 200 comments, then your Conversion Rate for comments is ( 200 / 4000 ) * 100 = 5%.
That’s actually a really great rate – figure on 1% being an average rate. Of course, this varies wildly depending on what you’re doing, but as an extremely rough starting point it’s not too bad.
Note that we have barely even scratched the surface of what Analytics is capable of in the right hands. It can tell you where people are coming from, how long they’re staying, what they’re looking at and even what they’re clicking on. You can also have it work out all of your Conversion Rates automatically for up to 20 different goals. The trick, however, is not to focus on the numbers (or metrics) but on what the data tells you (it’s all too easy to get hung up on visitor numbers when, as we’ve seen, that’s not really what counts).
OK, I Know My Conversion Rate – Now What
If it’s a good rate then now is the time to start increasing traffic! Use the methods you’ve been using but increase their effectiveness. For example, if Twitter is getting you good traffic that converts, then increase your Twitter activity. If commenting on other blogs is helping, do that more. If certain keywords are bringing you traffic, schedule a few more posts around those words.
If it’s a poor Conversion Rate, then you need to fix it first! Throwing traffic at a bad (or non-existent) rate is a waste of your time and your bandwidth because no one is engaging with what you’re doing. There are potentially many reasons for this.
We’ll assume that you’ve taken care of the basics – you have a great looking site that functions well and is full of top quality content – but, even still, users aren’t engaging. Unfortunately, we rarely know through Analytics the most important reason why users aren’t getting involved but this doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything about it.
That Important Reason
So what is this mysterious thing that all of this data cannot tell us?
User Intention.
We rarely know why a user is visiting a website. You can guess and conjecture all that you want but the fact is that, until you ask them, you’ll never be totally sure. Even if you ask them, they may not tell you the full story (‘I was on that porn site for research purposes! Honest!’).
There are ways to ask users why they visited your site, such as surveys, but even these won’t often give you the full picture because (apart from the innocent mistruths), the people that generally respond to surveys will be at the emotional extremes – incredibly happy or incredibly annoyed, for example – and may not be representitive of the majority.
So what can you do?
Test. Testing is the best way to find out what is engaging your users. Using your Conversion Rate as your baseline figure for measuring how successful your tests are, you can tweak and change to see what things will help you engage your users more.
For example, if you change the headline on your main sales page, does your Conversion Rate increase or decrease? How about if you change the main picture? What about floating it to the left or the right? Of course, the naysayers will say that they ‘know their users’ and that their users aren’t dumb enough to be swayed to change by the simple placement of a picture.
The savvy, however, will never be arrogant enough to assume and will test to find out for sure (and then they will, very often, be surprised at the results).
Obviously, this is a very brief introduction into the deep and wide world of Analytics and conversion. I’ll be exploring various topics in more detail in future posts, so sign up to my RSS feed or email mailing list to make sure that you don’t miss them!
