One of the main factors that signals the effectiveness of your website is how many visitors it converts. While other website metrics are important, your conversion rate is directly tied to how well your website and, therefore, your business is performing.
For example, if you measure conversion rate by how many customers are purchasing one of your products and you can raise your conversion rate from 1%-2%, your sales and profits for that product will double.
If you're not attracting enough traffic to your site, you should consider hiring a professional Digital Marketing Agency or a professional SEO service to improve the general health of your site and improve its rankings. Once your website starts attracting the right amount and relevant traffic, you're far more likely to start seeing the conversion rates you desire.
With all this in mind, let's explore exactly what conversion rates are, how you can measure your site's conversion rates and a couple of tips on how you can improve it.
What are conversion rates?
Conversion rates can be defined as the percentage of your visitors to your website or landing page that carry out the action you want. Depending on your business and what you measure on your website, a "conversion" can mean almost anything. Some of the most common types of conversion include:
- a completed purchase
- an email sign up
- a web visitor starting an online chat
- the download of content from your site
- a visitor booking a demo or starting a free trial
- a customer creating an account or upgrading their service
How do I calculate conversion rate?
While there are many different ways to measure conversion rate on your website, calculating this metric is pretty simple. Simply divide your conversions by the number of total visitors to your website or page on your site and multiply it by 100.
Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%
So, if your website is getting 15,000 visitors a month, you're looking to get visitors to sign up to your email list, and 2,467 of these visitors sign up to your email list, your conversion rate is 16.44%.
Conversion rates are useful because you can be as specific or broad as you like. For example, you can track:
- Overall conversion rate - how well does your website convert from any traffic source?
- A conversion rate from a specific marketing channel. For example, are your Facebook ads converting better than your Google ad traffic?
- Page-level conversion rate - what rate is a specific page on your website converting at?
- Individual ad conversion rate - what rate is a specific ad converting at?
What's a good conversion rate? Improving your conversion rate
There are a number of different factors that can affect your website's conversion rate, including:
- your website traffic
- the quality of this traffic
- the niche/industry your business is in
- your website's UX/UI design
- the copy you use on your site
On average most website conversion rates sit somewhere between 1-3%.
While 1-3% may not seem like a lot, even a slight increase in your conversion rate can have a profound effect. This conversion rate industry breakdown by Geckoboard is a great resource if you want to find out what the average website conversion rate is in your industry.
There are many websites out there with a conversion rate of only 0.1 to 0.2%, meaning that it takes 1,000 site visitors to get one customer. If your website's conversion rate isn't where you want it to be, there are ways you can improve it without breaking the bank.
1. Add social proof to your site
Whenever users visit a new website to purchase a product or simply to browse, testimonials and reviews help them feel more at ease with, and more confident in that brand.
With this in mind, make sure you're adding testimonials, case studies, reviews and company logos to your site. For example, on your homepage, adding logos of companies you currently work or have worked with will help to give a visitor to your website a positive first impression.
According to OptinMonster social proof can help to boost conversions by up to 15%.
Social proof helps to:
- build customer trust
- adds credibility to your business.
- positions your business as a leader in your industry.
2. Work on your CTAs
Most websites are full of generic call to actions (CTAs) such as "sign up", "start trial", but if you spend some time improving your CTA's, you can help your website stand out and become more engaging.
Try starting your CTA's with the word "Yes"'. For example, "Yes, I want my discount", or "Yes, I want make make more money" engage us at an instinctual level far more than "sign up" or "start trial".
Try and align your CTA with the benefit that the person clicking it will get. Doing so will engage visitors to your site and inspire them to take action.
Wrapping it up
Your website's conversion rate is a measurement of how well it's working to engage your visitors and get them to take the action you want them to. If you're not getting the number of conversions from your website that you want, then start taking steps to improve things.
Copyright 2021. Sponsored post made possible by Tom Welbourne of The Good Marketer, a marketing agency in London that drives more traffic, generates conversions and increases sales for small- to medium-sized businesses.