Conversion Rate: The fundamental KPI of your website

In an increasingly competitive online environment one metric all digital marketers should be focusing their attention on is the conversion rate of their own website. By conversion rate we mean the number of visitors who complete a desired action vs. the total number of visitors.

E.g. If your site sells CDs, and you get 100 visitors, of which 2 buy CDs, then your website conversion rate is 2%.

What we’re talking about is “how many of your visitors do what you want them to do?"

It’s important to decide on a purpose for each piece of marketing collateral you produce, from a button to an entire website. All of your efforts should be focused towards making as many people as possible who view that piece of collateral fulfill its purpose. Everything has a conversion rate, and not only can you measure it, you can give it a pounds and pence value as well.

In order to increase your conversion rates, you need to work towards what we call a “conversion culture”. In a conversion culture:

• You are committed to using analytics, testing and customer feedback to inform decisions about your website’s content, and not the opinions / assumptions of internal staff.

• You accept that a website is never finished and can be constantly improved via tweaking.

Why should I bother focusing on Conversion Rate?

Mainly because it allows you to generate more customers without any extra advertising spend. You should make the most of the content and visitors you already have, rather than spending more or diversifying in order to boost revenue. Even if you do this you aren’t improving profitability.

Increasing conversion rate rather than marketing spend means revenue from new sales goes straight into your bottom line. Think about it; you haven’t spent anything more on advertising, the cost of sales or overheads… you’ve just made more revenue from what you already had.

The profit generated by increased conversion rate may allow you to open up new advertising channels not currently feasible. More channels means a more stable business. This is especially true if you are currently reliant on search engine traffic alone.

Selling online is a ‘winner takes all’ environment. Customers may spend a long time choosing where to buy, but very small things are going to make them choose one site over another – and it’s only the winning site that gets the cash. This is known as the ‘slight edge’ and it’s usually got more to do with the buying experience than an item’s price. Increasing conversion rate = gaining the ‘slight edge’ over your competitors.

How can Chameleon Net help me improve my Conversion Rate?

We suggest allowing us to perform a conversion rate audit on one of your key customer journeys, from a landing page to completion of the desired action. Using your analytics tools and other tracking software we can provide a report which will list out where your UI could be improved to make the buying experience easier, and also highlight which pages in your customer journey need the most urgent attention.

Why Chameleon Net?

Although focusing on conversion rate is a relatively new online trend, usability and improving customer experiences have been right at the heart of our offering since we were founded 10 years ago as a bridge between high-minded website designers and technical back-end systems developers.