Different Website Conversion Rates You Need to Be Aware Of

Most website owners focus on getting traffic to their websites however very few focus on conversion rates. Even if you get a ton of visitors to your site if they don’t purchase your product or service you’ll soon be out of business. Attracting traffic is only the first stage of building a profitable website. The second stage is traffic conversion.

Definition of website conversion rates

This refers to the measurement of visitors who go to a website then proceed to carry out a specific action. This gives you a better idea of how well your website is performing. The main purpose of a visitor is to take action.

Different Website Conversion Rates You Need to Be Aware Of

To determine your conversion rates you need to be aware of all your traffic sources. One way to track visitors to your web pages is to install Google Analytics code on every page. Alternatively use the statistics package that’s included with your web hosting service.

Let’s look at some of the different types of traffic sources that affect conversion rates

Unique visitors
These are the number of visitors that visited your site once. Most usually come from the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. It doesn’t refer to visitors that have clicked around your site.

Returning visitors
These are people who keep returning to your site. Perhaps they have bought from you before and are returning to make another purchase.

Referrals
These are visitors who have clicked on a link to your website from another site (external links). The more external links that point to your own site shows that your site is gaining popularity and will raise it’s rankings.

Keywords
The more keywords you rank for the more visitors you’ll receive from the search engines. Look at the keywords people used to find your site in your statistics then work on getting good rankings for more keyword optimized pages.

Email newsletter
Track the number of people that open and read your email newsletter. Use an email list provider that includes autoresponders to monitor your open rates. People on your newsletter list are often the ones that continuously return to your site because you remind them of new content and products every time your newsletter gets send to them.

Google Adwords
If you’re using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site, Google Analytics will track how many people are actually clicking on your ads. For instance a visitor has clicked on one of your commercial links at the top of the Google result’s pages for a specific keyword related to the product or service you’re offering.

Google Adsense
If you’ve added Google Adsense to your content pages you can track the number of page impressions, clicks and click through rate (CTR) of the ads as well as how much you’ve earned each day. You can also set up channels to track different websites. Google Analytics can be integrated with your AdSense account.

Affiliates
Creating an team of affiliates to promote your product will boost traffic to your site. Most affiliate programs such as Clickbank, Commission Junction track the number of clicks your affiliate link is receives and how much money you’re generating from your affiliates.

Social Interaction
With the proliferation of social sites such as Facebook and Twitter you can track the social sharing buttons on your website using Google Analytics. Read here for more information

Conversion Tips

• Recognize that not all traffic has equal conversion rates. Some will naturally convert better than others. Analyze where most of your traffic is coming from. You should be able to identify each type of traffic source.
• After identifying your best and worse traffic converting sources work on improving the ones that not performing well. Alternatively terminate your low converting sources and concentrate on boosting your best traffic sources.

• Continually test different ways to improve your website conversion rates. Sometimes one small change (ie rewriting a headline) can result in higher conversions.

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