What is Website Conversion and Should You Care?

For years now experts in Internet marketing have been talking about Website conversion, but the message does not seem to be getting through many marketers. Any marketing manager or director I’ve talked to is very familiar with offline marketing conversion. They seem to fully understand conversion when it comes to their print, radio, TV advertising but they somehow miss the connection when it comes to the Internet.

Website conversion means measuring, monitoring and converting site visitors into leads, customers or clients. You want to convert people on your site from just visiting to take the desired action. For example, if you have 5000 visitors to your site in one month and 5 visitors complete your inquiry form you have a conversion of .1%. Divide your number of results, in this case completing a form, by the number of unique visitors.

Why should you care about this? Why not just get more traffic? Maybe the other 4995 people in the above scenario just weren’t interested.

Well, perhaps the other 4995 unique visitors somehow came on your site and found it wasn’t what they wanted and left. Perhaps the visitors are interested in your product or service but didn’t want to complete your form, couldn’t find the form or got lost, frustrated, or confused on your site.

Do you really want to spend more money to get more people to your site until you first find out if your conversion ratio is at its optimal level? If people are leaving your site because they are confused, or lost wouldn't you want to correct those issues? What if site visitors start to complete your form or buy your product and then stopped? Wouldn’t it be better if you first corrected that before you spent more money to have more people fall through the holes? Would you want to at least find out if you have that problem?

Tomorrow we’ll address what your current conversion rate is costing you.