Your web conversion rate is an important statistic to know because it will allow you to know the health and effectiveness of your website. Most business owners don’t really focus on the web conversion of their website because they are more focused on getting traffic to their website. This is only 1/2 of the 1-2 punch that you need to have a successful online presence.
To determine your web conversion rate is theoretically simple. It is the number of people who take your desired action on your website divided by the number of people coming to your website. So for an example if you have 100 people that come to your website and 2 of them purchase your product or service, and that is the action you want them to take, then you would have a 2% conversion rate.
So while it is technically easy to determine your rate, the more difficult part is to determine the correct number of visitors to your website. Some of the less expensive statistical programs don’t filter out spam traffic. There is a lot of automated traffic out there that is used for spamming websites, and writing automated comments to blogs. This traffic isn’t real and therefore shouldn’t be counted as it can give you an incorrect conversion rate.
The traffic that you want to count is the number of visitors to your site. Page views, and hits don’t give you an accurate result either. Make sure you look at the visitor statistic as most programs will give you page views and hits as well.
Google analytics gives a more accurate visitor rate and it seems to filter out some of the spam traffic. Some other things you can do that require more work are to actually filter out the IP addresses of known spammers. This requires a bit more work to collect the IP addresses and install them in a filtering program. When traffic from this IP address comes to your website, it is “stopped at the door” and the spam traffic gets shown an access denied message.
Once you know how to calculate your website conversion rate, you will be able to determine the effectiveness of your website. A healthy converting website as a 5% conversion rate. If your conversion rate is 1% or less, you will need to go through the process of split testing or add live chat to increase your conversion rate.
When you have a website for a good conversion rate, you can get more out of your advertising dollars that you use to send traffic to your website. Remember, the higher your conversion rate, the more you are making per 100 visitors to your website.
Contact me to schedule a time for a web conversion analysis on your web site.
720-432-0621
B – Excellent summary, I agree the tricky bit is determining the ‘true’ number of visitors. Do you think that Google analytics may be a little too aggressive in filtering?
Nice post!
Jim
Excellent post – thanks for sharing that. I agree with Jim, I think google’s filters are too aggressive, especially when reporting visitors from twitter. Your thoughts?