How to Measure Your Site’s Conversion Rate

Posted on | October 8, 2007 | Comments Off

Part 1 of 2, this article talks about how to measure your conversion rate. Next we will talk about how to improve your site’s conversion rate.

Every web site needs a clear-cut purpose whether it be selling a product or service, lead generation, informative/customer support or advertising purposes. The ultimate goal of each of these sites is the same, however – having a good conversion rate.

A conversion happens when a visitor takes an action that you want them to take, such as signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a book or clicking on an ad. The basic conversion rate formula is: Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions) divided by (Number of Visitors).

An average conversion rate ranges depending on many variables. While knowing an “average” rate may sound nice, your focus should actually be on what conversion rate your company needs to achieve internal business goals. Setting a conversion rate goal based on your objectives rather than an anonymous benchmark is a better way to go.

There are a few ways that you can determine your web site’s conversion rate, but they all involve looking at you web usage statistics. If you host weblogs you can use this to find out how many visitors come to your site. However, this method isn’t preferred to others as you have to filter out quite a bit of data – even the visits made by robots. It you forget to do this, you may think your conversion rate is smaller than it actually is.

There are quite a few software options available to help you measure your conversion rate. Google Analytics in one that allows you to do so for free by setting up Goals for your web site’s account. In reality you don’t need to set up the goals, you simply need a way of tracking how many unique visitors came to your site and then how many of those visitors took a desired action.

Frequently web sites aren’t created with conversion in mind. They lack calls to action, good persuasive copy and marketing focus. By seeing how well you are converting visitors with your current site you can make changes and test them for effectiveness before spending more money on traffic that may not convert into a return on your investment.

In the next article we will focus on improving your conversion rate once you have measured it.

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