A conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors who complete a desired action upon visiting your website. Mathematically conversion rate is expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the total number of visitors that completed your goal by the total number of people that started your goal and multiplying by 100.

The total number of visitors that started your goal is also the total number of visitors that entered your conversion funnel. A visitor who enters your conversion funnel has taken the first step toward completing their goal. Depending on how your conversion path and web site are set up you can have several funnels, each probably coming from a different channel. For example the top of one funnel could be your home page or a dedicated key word landing page or a product category page. It is important to measure each individual funnel independently to gain an understanding of the why behind your site visitors’ actions. This is also the first step towards optimizing your conversion rates and higher profits.

The desired action for reaching your goal is always dependant on your business goals, it could include buying something, subscribing you your site to become a member, submitting a sales lead, downloading a free article, white paper, viewing a key page on your website, or some other measurable activity.

The key factor to remember is to start small, measure and continue to optimize and improve your returns. During these difficult economic times optimizing your website for greater returns should be on the top of everyone’s priority list.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Conversion Rate, Marketing, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.