The ROI Revolution BlogContinual Conversion Rate Improvement Part OneApril 26, 2006As you may know, conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a certain action on your site like making a purchase or submitting a form. The conversion rate is one of the ways to accurately measure just how well your site is performing its job. Improving conversion rate has a huge impact: raising the conversion rate from 1% to 2% would represent a 100% increase in goal completion. For an e-commerce site, that would mean double the revenue! When you increase your conversion rate, you get more sales from your existing traffic which saves on marketing expenses, customer acquisition cost goes down, and the customer retention rate goes up. With that in mind, it's easy to see why improving the conversion rate of a website is worth some effort, but the question of how to get more people to do what you want them to do is a sticky problem. Jack Aaronson recently wrote an article on this very subject called "Creating Value". We're working with a client right now to help them increase conversion rates on their site. We've spent the last few weeks running A/B tests with about six different homepages, each leading to special micro-sites we've created. Each of these changes has increased conversions (we're using the poorly converting homepage as a control). Some of the test homepages show a 100 percent increase, some up to a 300 percent increase. The next article, 'Continual Conversion Rate Improvement Part II' will discuss a case study where efforts were made to improve a website's conversion rate and the results of those efforts, so stay tuned! Need more help? Learn more about ROI Revolution's paid search management services. Permalink | Comments ( 4 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 ) Filed under: Online Advertising Posted by Kathy Scott, Marketing Manager at 2:41 AM CommentsRobbin Steif said: It is amazing how hard it is to increase conversion when you don't have free reign to make and test lots of changes. Owners of websites that are "doing ok" feel like it's not broke so they only want to fix it slightly. Moving from 1 to 1.1 is a 10% increase and is a major victory with a site like the one I just described. Even when you can test lots of changes, they don't necessarily pull for you, as Matt Roche wrote in a recent post at the OfferMatica blog. Meredith Smith said: Just as you point out, it can be daunting to find a change that really has a solid impact on the overall numbers. Most changes have such a small impact that it can be easy to get discouraged. Every little improvement helps, though, and the only way to get those big results is to keep slogging away at it. Thanks for the reference to the great article! Blake Kritzberg said: This is a great blog. I wonder, though, if you could address how to best use Analytics when you have an affiliate site and can't track all the way through the checkout process. I think monitoring conversion is important for affiliates, too, but it's darn hard. Meredith Smith said: Thanks! Glad you like the blog. It is possible for affiliates to track all the way through the checkout process *providing* affiliates have the ability to add the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code to the entire process (i.e. as in a micro-site of the main merchant's site) or if the merchant has some mechanism in place to pass the successful transaction data to the affiliate (i.e. a redirect back to the affiliate site). Hope that helps! Post Your Comments |
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