What Can You Learn By Measuring Website Conversions?

Your site has good visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS). Traffic is growing.  But what do viewers do when they get to your website? Do they spend time on any of the individual pages? Do they scroll down “below the fold?” Most importantly, do they call or click for additional information?  Do they actually buy anything? Do they like a blog post or fill out a thank-you form? Each of these actions is called a conversion, and knowing your conversion rates can help you the overall success tied to your website.

Determining Your Website’s Success

To measure your website’s success, you need to know your conversion rate. This rate is the total number of website visitors divided by the number of viewers who took a desired action, such as making a purchase or requesting more information. Your conversion rate is one of the best ways to determine whether the effort spent on your website is paying off.

Tracking Conversion Rates

You can easily track your conversion rate through Google Analytics or some other website analytics program. Setting up your analytics program is not difficult. First, you need to identify exactly what you want your website visitors to do.  Do you want them to request more information? Call you? Send an email? Add items to a shopping cart and check out?

Let’s walk through one example. Say you want to know the percentage of website visitors who are converted to customers. A simple way to track this is to identify how many people complete your online order form. By properly setting up a comprehensive analytics program, you can measure how many people click on the “submit” or “order” button on your online order form. The program will report this as a percentage of the total number of visitors to your site.

Using Conversion Rate Information

Once you have identified your rates, what do you do with the information? At the most basic level, you can see whether your website performance is improving by tracking percentage increases week-to-week or month-to-month.

Other ways you can use conversion rate information include:

• Tracking performance after you make a change in design, content or navigation. Once you have a baseline number, you can determine whether changes improve or reduce conversion.
• Determining whether customers take advantage of a special offer such as a sale or promotion. If they do not, you need to ask yourself whether the problem lies in the item itself or how it is described.
• Identifying which of your website pages perform best at converting visitors into customers by identifying the pages that most often send visitors to the order form.

One important thing to remember is that a website needs ongoing TLC to succeed. You should always be testing, making improvements and reviewing your efforts to reach optimal conversion rates.

Determining Your Prime Conversion Rate

Choosing which conversions matter to you, and what rate is success, is not simple. Rather, these choices depend on many factors, such as what you are selling or advertising, where you are located, the season of the year, your prices and services compared to your competition, and more.

If you are unsure where to start, or if you need help tracking your defined conversion goals, reach out to an experienced online marketing company such as Legit Click Media in Delafield, Wisconsin.