It's all about those conversions baby!

 

When starting a business, it is the two terms you are most worried about. It is how you measure your business success, and how you keep it going. But is it really the most important? 

Conversions are what happens when someone who visits your website makes a purchase or completes a desired action such as filling out a contact form. (the Hotjar team, 2020) Conversions are your end goal, what is this person coming to your website for? Are they there to buy a new shirt, sign up for a webinar, or subscribe to your email list? Whatever it is, you want people to make that conversion. 

The best way to measure conversions is by looking at your conversion rate. Most metrics show your conversion rate as a percentage (%) already but if not it is really simple to calculate. To get your conversion rate all you have to do is take the number of conversions and divide that by the total number of visitors, multiply that number by 100 and you have your percentage (%).  

So for example, you own an e-commerce website, each time a purchase is made, that is a conversion. So say this month you had 5 orders, however, you had 78 people visit your website this month. 5 (number of conversions/orders) ÷ 78 (total number of visitors) = 0.064 x 100 = 6.4% (conversion rate). 

You may be thinking that 6.4% of website visitors make a purchase doesn't equal a lot of actual conversions, however, if you take a look at this chart by WordStream, you will see the average conversion rate depends on the industry. (Bond, 2020) In general, a good conversion rate would be anything over 10% (Berry, 2021) but anything over average is something to be happy about. 

Does conversion rate even matter? Sometimes. Yes, you want brand exposure, and the more people on your site the more purchases, right? 10% of 10,000 is a lot more purchases than 10% of 100, but what if your goal is lead generation? How many of that 10% are serious, qualified leads? Chances are, not many. "You want to increase the conversion rate of qualified leads versus any lead." (Berry, 2021) Or back to the e-commerce, having 1 conversion that totaled $800 is better than 100 conversions that maxed out at $5 each. Having good quality conversions means a lot more than the number of conversions. The key to creating quality conversions is to focus on your audience and who your leads are (their interests, spending habits, online activity, etc.), analyze your site and test out what works best for you and your site visitors. 

Before testing and really diving deep into your consumer's mindsets, here are some simple tips you can do to fix up your website and help ensure those visiting your site, turn into quick conversions:

How do you improve your conversions?

Leave a comment below!

Resources:

Berry, S. (2021, May 19). What is a good conversion rate? (and how does yours compare?). WebFX Blog. https://www.webfx.com/blog/marketing/what-is-a-good-conversion-rate/.

Bond, C. (2020). Google-ads-conversion-rate-benchmarks_0.png. Wordstream. https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/08/19/conversion-rate-benchmarks.

the Hotjar team. (2020). What is website conversion? [and how to improve it]. Hotjar. https://www.hotjar.com/blog/website-conversion/.