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What is a conversion rate?
By dividing conversions by visitors, you can calculate the conversion rate. A conversion rate of 25% would be 100 divided by 400 if an eCommerce site receives 400 visitors in a month and 100 sales.
A conversion pertains to the type of action that should be taken by the user. Clicking on a button to become a customer is one example. Conversion rates vary by website and app since each has one or more conversion goals.
Why your conversion rate is important
Your web pages and apps can be measured by tracking conversion rates. You can measure the success of your site or app by knowing what percentage of users complete the goals that drive your business.
With the same amount of traffic, you can get more sales by improving your conversion rate. In the example above, if you spend $1,000 a month on advertising to attract 500 visitors to your website, doubling your conversion rate effectively doubles the value of your advertisement.
The extra revenue can then be invested into new ad programs, or the ad budget can be reduced and the same benefit can be obtained as before.
What you can do to increase conversion rates
A conversion rate optimization strategy focuses on identifying conversion goals, calculating conversion rates, and optimizing your website or app to boost conversion rates.
A/B testing involves testing two versions of a page against each other to determine which one performs better in order to improve conversions. The idea is to develop hypotheses as to why visitors aren’t converting and come up with ideas for how to improve them.
In order to continuously improve the performance of your website or app, you must identify new conversion goals, identify areas where you can improve conversion rates, and implement tests of new features.
Conversion rate optimization in action
The case study below illustrates how CRO can be implemented in the real world through ComScore’s web analytics system.
To determine the conversion rate for the page, the company set a goal (leads generated), determined the conversion rate, and then performed experiments with different ideas to improve the conversion rate.
It was hypothesized that testimonials would lead to an increase in conversions and visitor trust. They also ran tests of the page displaying the testimonials as well as the logos of the companies contributing the testimonials.
During the A/B/n test, the page with testimonials was 69% more successful than the original page without testimonials and logos. It is an excellent example of how a company was able to have a measurable impact on its business by improving its conversion rate through testing.
About the Author
My name’s Semil Shah, and I pride myself on being the last digital marketer that you’ll ever need. Having worked internationally across agile and disruptive teams from San Fransico to London, I can help you take what you are doing in digital to a whole next level.