Improve Conversion

What exactly is conversion?

The concept is fairly straight forward. Wikipedia defines the conversion rate as …

“… the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting the website. The desired action may be submitting a sales lead, making a purchase, viewing a key page of the site, downloading a whitepaper, or some other measurable action.”

Other writers on this subject have developed definitions that are broader

Rok Hrastnik in Mastering Online Conversion defines the conversion rate as a

‘percentage of unique actions that result from unique exposures’.

Whatever definition you prefer the backbone of all conversion measurements must be to ‘measure some meaningful action’. In this respect it is worth identifying two approaches here:

• General (website) conversion relates to the overall conversion rates resulting from visitors to your site. For example if you make 5,000 sales in a time period when 100,000 unique visitors come to your site then your general website conversion rate will be 5%.
• Specific conversion rates can be attributed to individual measures. For example, if your overall Facebook conversion rate is 1% this means that of the people that came to your site from Facebook went on to take the action you were measuring.

Here are some more examples of specific conversion rates. Note that the ‘end goal’ can be as specific as you require and is not just restricted to sales.

• The percentage of unique visitors from an email shot that went on to buy…
• The percentage of unique visitors from Google Pay Per Click Adverts that went on to request a quote…
• The percentage of unique visitors from Google Natural Rankings who went on to request a brochure…