November 12, 2007
Conversion Rate-Is Your Website Effective In Converting Visitors
For your business to succeed you must make more of customers out of your visitors. If your website turns the visitors into customers, you have a good business foundation. However, if people visit your website and leave without the expected response, you need to make modifications in your business style.
Before you label your website as good or bad, you must be aware of the average values.
Conversion is the entity that measures the percentage of visitors who take or complete a desired action. This desired action or desired response is different for different websites.
First you need to be aware of the conversion rates prevalent over the web for different business approaches. Then you need to get your own data and calculate conversion rate for your website. Comparison would tell you whether you need to work upon your site or not.
This is probably the most important and effective entity you can measure to check your website performance.
What follows is a rough guide to calculate conversion rate for different types of business models.
E-commerce websites:These are the retail sites that sell the products. This may include shopping cart or single product direct response website. In this case conversion rate is calculated by number of visitors who buy from the site divided by total number. Multiply this by 100 and this would give you percentage of people buying. The conversion measurement should be the number of visitors who make a purchase directly from the as a percentage of total visitors. A successful convert is the visitor who is guided by your website to buy one of your products.
Lead-Generation Sites: In this case the conversion would be measured aspercentage of visitors who sign up for the newsletter and allow you to contact them again. Because of spam complaints and double opt in, a successful convert would be the one who opts in and confirm his registration.
Content Rich web sites:Objective would be to sign up the visitor for receiving more information. Calculation is similar to lead generation sites.
Once we calculate conversion rates at our website, we need to evaluate them and measure them against industry norms.
Direct Sales: The typical value is 0.5%-8% depending upon the sement and target market
Here is a good data from Fireclick Index
- Catalog-6.1%
- Specialty stores-3.9%
- Fashion/apparel-2.2%
- Travel -2.1%
- Home and furnishing -2.0%
- Sport/outdoors -1.4%
- Electronics -1.1%
- All verticals -2.3%
Lead Generation and Content Sites: 2-3% of visitors would sign up for a free registration. Approximately 1-7% of free subscribers would turn into paid ones. I think same value would apply to content sites.
Conversion is measurement of your site’s efficiency. It would point that something is wrong and should be improved. But it cannot point as to what is wrong. That you would have to find separately.
A poor conversion means that your visitor are not satisfied enough to become customers.
You need to work on what is wrong and rectify that. 
Popularity: 3% [?]
Got A Tip, Idea or Suggestion. Share It Here