The trouble with this is that when you sit down and try to hammer out a marketing strategy, that approach doesn't really leap to mind. The approach that does occur to most people is the numbers game - try to get as many people as absolutely possible to arrive at your site, and eventually, somehow, at least SOME of them will do what you want! ...right?

Well, that approach works alright as long as you have access to a cheap way to drive vast amounts of traffic to your site. But that's ok, because we have PPC advertising! The problem is that marketers have realized that PPC advertising costs are quickly rising. Competition is stiffer, and more popular, broad keyword terms are financially out of reach.

Bryan Eisenberg recently wrote a fantastic article, "Make ROI Your New Year's Resolution" that talks about this trend.

"According to a recent Marketwatch story, a growing number of advertisers are cutting their spending on search campaigns. The reason? Keyword inflation and low conversion rates.

So let's get this straight -- instead of taking the abundant traffic from search engines and working on ways to better convert that traffic, many advertisers are abandoning search in whole or in part, looking for a cheaper way to drive traffic. What do they expect will happen with the new traffic once it gets to their non-converting sites?

If people kept walking into your brick and mortar store, and over 80 percent left after their second step, you would probably do something to entice them to come further into your store. However, this happens every day on virtually every Web site out there, and marketers often do nothing about it."

Brilliant again, Bryan! I couldn't agree more. Traffic comes and goes, but a high conversion rate is a lasting improvement. I'm a big subscriber to the belief that your website is just like any other employee - it has to pull its weight. If a sales person just sat around all day and stared out the window, you wouldn't keep paying this sales person's salary, would you? Of course not! You'd insist they speak to customers and benefit your business in a solid way. Your website is no different.

Continual testing and improvement of your conversion rate and ROI is kind of like the equivalent of sending your sales person to an educational sales course. If you had the chance to send your sales person to a course that stood a good chance of making them 100% more efficient, you'd do it, right? It is normally quite possible to drastically improve your conversion rate by as much as 100% or more.

I'd like to add my encouragement to Bryan's - improving your conversion rate is hard work, but in the end it is very worthwhile. Now go out there and make me proud!