How Well Do You Know Your Conversion Rate?

If you ask website owners about what they want to achieve in their website, more often than not, they will mention about getting higher conversion rate. They all want conversion rate but not all of them understands what conversion rate is, what to measure and how to do it.

Conversion rate is a common topic among internet marketing resources and blogs. Everyone is talking about ways to increase conversion rate yet not all of site owners actually know about it. What is conversion rate? What do you measure in conversion? How do you measure conversion rate? These are basic questions that most site owners fail to answer because they get so overwhelmed with all the conversion rate boosting resources.

Conversion rate refers to the percentage by which a site visitor becomes a customer. When a site visitor performs a desired action, he is said to have been “converted”. Websites need higher conversion rate to get more sales. The more site visitors are converted, the more customers and sales.

Measuring Conversion Rate

Measuring conversion rate follows a simple formula. You need the number of site visitors and converts to get the conversion rate. How will you know if a site visitor is converted? It depends on the objectives of the website. For some website, conversion refers to purchase. This means a site visitor is said to have been converted if he purchases the website’s products.

Other websites simply need sign ups or registrations. So when a site visitor signs up, he is considered a conversion. The idea is that anything that a website wants the site visitors to do is a measure of conversion. No matter what the site’s objectives are, if the site visitors do what the website wants them to do, it is conversion.

How do you measure conversion rate? The formula is simple. Get the number of your completed “desired” action and divide it by the number of site visitors. So if you get 20 customers out of the 100 site visitors, then your conversion rate is 0.2 or 20%.

Website Conversion Funnels

Measuring conversion rate isn’t limited to the main goals of the website which is oftentimes purchase or sign up. You can actually measure conversion by funnels. What does a site visitor do in the website before they complete the desired action? Along the way, you can also measure the conversion.

Measuring the conversion funnels will help you point out the weakness of your website. If there are 5 steps to your website conversion for instance, and the site visitor reaches until the 3rd step but stopped there, you should do something about that step. You have to improve it to allow smooth completion of the desired action.

Measuring and analysing website conversion give the site owners relevant information as how to further improve sales. Wouldn’t it be great to work on increasing your website conversion rate and knowing what you are actually doing and how to do it?