You have established
objectives for your website. These may include getting an order,
a sales lead, a phone call, a sign-up for your newsletter, or a
click-through to your self-help support section. Regardless of the
objectives you've established for your website it's critically important
to measure how well your website achieves the objectives. "Conversion
rate" is the term commonly used to describe the ratio between
the number of unique visitors to the website and the number of those
visitors who have taken the action that achieves one or more of
the objectives of the website.
Visitors can enter your website on different pages and can take
different paths to reach an objective. To make the changes necessary
to improve the overall conversion rate we need to understand the
paths visitors take through your website. Each page in the path
has its own conversion rate and successful conversions occur when
the visitor clicks from one page to the next page in the path. By
measuring the conversion rate at each page in the path we can find
out the pages where visitors leave the site. Improving the conversion
rate at each step along the path keeps the visitor on the path to
achieving the overall objective.
To improve the conversion rate it is sometimes appropriate to change
the navigation of the site. If the path to the objective is too
long and requires too many click-throughs some visitors will simply
leave the website before completing the process. Other times the
improvement is to change the "call to action" to make
the next required click-through more compelling. Sometimes the solution
is simply to make a button bigger, or a different color, or revise
the text on the page, or put the link in a different place on the
page. Regardless of the change, the crux to improving the overall
conversion rate is to measure the visitor's actions and improve
the conversion rate at each page in the path.
Because your website visitor's behavior is measurable, it's also
manageable and we can manage it to improve your conversion rate.
