We’ve already discussed how bounce rate can adversely affect your bottom line (it probably is right now!), and as we move down the old “sales funnel” we come to conversion rate. You probably want the people still browsing your site to do something, whether that’s contact you for a consultation (my goal with this site), sign up for your e-mail list or buy a product through your website. The percentage of visitors that take whatever action you want them to take is your conversion rate.
Conversion rate isn’t relevant to every website, but it applies (or should apply) to most. The notable exception are purely informative sites but even those sometimes include some kind of call to action (Donate! Sign Up!). Wikipedia doesn’t usually have a clear sales funnel but they’re currently asking for donations on every page and they’re certainly tracking the conversion rate of each ad. The creepy ones with its founder Jimbo Wales probably weren’t doing so well and now they have different ads with programmers and contributors.
Conversion is a vague term and you can apply it to pretty much any metric you want to track. For example, on my site I can track how many people land on my home page and how many move on to my contact page. I also know how many have contacted me (obviously!) so it’s easy to see if there’s a bottleneck in that funnel. If I have 500 visits to my home page and 200 on the contact page page but only 1 person actually contacted me, it’s pretty obvious that it’s the contact page itself that is scaring people off somehow.
Conversion is something you should always track and tweak. Split Testing (also known as A/B testing) is an excellent way to optimize your conversion, and the flexibility of the online medium allows us to do that much more easily than other methods of advertising. It’s possible to randomly split visitors into groups as they hit your site and show them different versions of your webpages. That can be something as simple as changing the text on a button (which can have a surprisingly large impact) or showing them a completely different page design. It’s best to test small changes incrementally though – if your test pages are completely different you have almost no way of knowing which specific changes are affecting your conversion.
This may all seem like a tedious process (and in many ways it is) but it’s well worth it. There’s a fair bit of planning and analysis involved but making just a few small changes, whether it’s changing a button’s label from “Call Us” to “Contact Us”, or moving a search box from the right to the left side, can double the leads you receive from your website – and who wouldn’t want to double their amount of incoming customers?