6 Things You Need to Know About Conversion Rates

There are many ways to track your website’s effectiveness, including monitoring the activity on your website through a heatmap and using that data to optimize your website and your landing pages. Digital marketers can track many metrics from your analytics tools to measure that same success. Website conversion has an enormous impact on the success of your website — and online business.

When we think of conversion, this is the process of changing (or causing) something to change from one form to another. Methods of tracking conversion could be monitoring your website statistics or watching your website traffic as they proceed through the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel. This article helps understand website conversion rate, how to calculate it, and the starting point for website conversation rate optimization.

What Does Website Conversion Mean?

Website conversion is the process that happens when a website visitor accomplishes a goal (set by the website owner) by converting it into a measurable action. This achievement could be various things, depending on the set conversion goal. While a high conversion is a sign of accomplishment, a low conversion could indicate room for improvement.

What Are Examples of Website Conversions?

Conversions don’t need to be huge objectives. In fact, for digital marketers, these actions don’t need to be directly tied to a purchase or sale from the website, though the intent is always to have the visitor work through the sales funnel! Conversions refer to any measurable actions visitors take on your website, including:

• Any eBook downloads
• Signing up for web events or webinars
• Blog subscriptions
• Banner clicks or click-throughs on call-to-action (CTA) buttons
• Downloads of whitepapers or infographics
• Any contact form submissions

What Is Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the measurable metric that calculates the effectiveness of your web pages and posts when your visitors act (a conversion) versus the number of visitors your web pages have.

Analytic tools, such as Google Analytics, can be fundamental in determining the effectiveness of your website, such as a contact form, as seen in the screenshot below from an appointment booking page, by providing the data for CRO.

Learn about the conversion rate and their source within Google Analytics by working with your standard reports. To find your conversion rates, navigate to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. Once here, click the pencil icon at the top-right corner to customize your report. By adjusting the metrics and adding in “Session Conversion Rate” and “User Conversion Rate,” you can apply the changes to view the updates. The most recognizable website traffic sources are:

• Direct,
• Referral,
• Organic Search,
• and Organic Social.

Google Analytics sessions can also be filtered by each event, such as the form submission from the appointment booking example.

How Do You Calculate The Conversion Rate?

If you divide the number of conversions of an event by the total number of visitors and multiply the result by 100, you can learn your conversion rate. Luckily, if you use analytics tools like Google Analytics, you don’t need to figure out the math yourself!

For example, if your website had 480 visitors and of those visitors, there were 20 eBook downloads, you would calculate your conversion rate of 20 divided by 480 (0.058), multiplied by 100 = 5.8%. Before learning about increasing the conversion rate, let’s review the baseline average next.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

Now that you know how to calculate your conversion rate, let’s talk numbers. What is the optimum conversion rate? According to a report from Statista, it’s a little over 2%.

“During the second quarter of 2022, 2.3 percent of visits to e-commerce websites in the United States converted to purchases.”

Does that number seem low to you? Well, know that it’s not a static number, but a range of ‘good’ conversion rates are between 1 and 4%. The conversion rates differ on all sorts of things, including:

• Conversion goals (ad click, CTA click, contact form, eBook download, web even sign up, etc.)
• Website traffic,
• Industry,
• Audience,
• Your website,
• And many more.

Much like most of your website metrics and statistics that we all use for gauging our website successes, if the number looks too low, it could indicate that things need to change. Low website traffic and low conversion rates go hand-in-hand, which leads us to our next section.

What Are The First Steps To Conversion Rate Optimization?

As for the optimization part of this acronym, optimizing your conversion rate is taking the data from your visitors, analyzing it, and implementing and testing content enhancements on your website. Using techniques such as A/B testing (split testing), you would monitor for an increase in the percentage of users or visitors who complete specific actions — increasing your leads and thus increasing your conversion rate! We’ll cover some great suggestions in a future article.

As we discussed in our article on heatmaps, you can better understand user intent by watching and understanding your visitors. Next, you can review the data and begin optimizing. Starting with a single conversion goal, like a CTA, can improve user experience and content. These adjustments help visitors make the most guided decisions.

Some priority areas of your website that should be the focus point for optimization are:

• Landing pages
• Home pages
• Pricing pages
• Converting blog posts

Conversion Rate Optimization Is A Process

If you know what conversion rate is, how to calculate it, understand the values of the metrics, and how the optimization works, it’s all part of conversion rate optimization (CRO). We hope this article was a great starting point for understanding more about this process.

So, what’s next? Now that you have a basic knowledge of what CRO is, in a future article, we’ll talk about the CRO strategy and the different approaches that others have implemented. We’ll also cover how making those changes can improve their conversion rates — increasing their conversions by converting those visitors into clients. When you need help understanding the next steps in your online strategies, contact the experts at Alley Kat Web Consulting for your needs assessment!