Conversion Rates - What They Are and Why They Matter

While attracting visitors to your site is important, your ultimate goal is to convert those visitors into customers. When marketing a website, it is crucial to track and analyze results so that you can see what’s working well, what could be improved, and what isn’t working at all. One of the most important areas for analysis is web conversion rate (i.e., the percentage of visitors who “convert” into leads or sales). Knowing which traffic sources, what types of content, and which offers convert best is key to increasing your overall web conversion rate.

SEO, social networking, search engine marketing, email and other tactics can all be used to draw targeted visitors to your website. However, the more important performance indicator from a business standpoint it how many visitors actually convert into leads or sales. Metrics like total visits, web traffic sources and conversions by source can be tracked using Google Analytics or another web analytics application.

Converting visitors into leads requires a compelling call to action and a lead capture form. Ideally, you should have software that enables you to quickly and easily create and test different versions of landing pages. (Better yet is web marketing software that enables you not only to capture lead contact information but also track and manage the sales process all the way through to the sale.)

The web conversion rate is simply the number of leads generated divided by the number of visitors in a given time period. For example, if you have 50 visitors in a day and you generated 1 lead, that’s a 2% conversion rate. If you have 800 visitors in a week, and 10 leads, that’s a conversion rate of 1.25%. These numbers may sound rather low, but surprisingly the average conversion rate for a b2b website is around 2.5%, or 25 buyers for every 1000 customers. However, websites with an effective lead generation strategy have known to yield 6% or more.

Drilling into your web conversion rate metrics reveals opportunities to improve your web marketing tactics. To be strategic about converting visitors to leads, you need to know specifically who your target market is, their buying motives, their challenges and needs, and how they buy. This information enables you to focus your search engine marketing, SEO and other efforts to effectively reach your buyers and attract them to your website for additional specific information.

By taking a more strategic approach to selling, your focus will not only be on web marketing, but on how you can market and sell in the most efficient way so you can decrease your cost per lead and cost per sale. When you know your web conversion rate and the data behind it, you can work to continually improve your web marketing productivity.