There has been a lot of hype lately about Click Through Rate … how effective is your banner or text link. How many clicks does your website get daily? Who is spending more on their advertisement budget? How high can I got on the Google search lists? How much traffic can I buy? … these all boil down to … How much money can I really waste?!!

I think what really matters is your Click Conversion Rate (CCR). How many people who come to your website end up reaching for their valet. How many of them are willing to buy your product during their first visit to your website? Depending on what you sell, how many people are willing to give out their hard earned dollars on something they may never have seen in person. Your site must be able to accomplish this at a high rate or else it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get, you will never make much money.

Today, the sky is the limit as far as advertising costs go. You can spend as much as you like on pay per click, banner ads, or social media campaigns. Each visitor can cost you anywhere form a few cents to over a dollar. What good will all this traffic do if the majority of them bounce, meaning they click once to your website and leave right a way, or click around a few times, get bored, then leave. On average, if a new browser comes to your site, you will only have a few seconds to capture their attention and convince them that your company’s product is exactly what they need.

To get your click conversion rate for the month, you just divide the monthly amount of visitors you have with the number of sales you get. These numbers are easy to get if you use some sort of tracking software on your site. There are several free services you can use that help you track your progress and measure all kids of useful metrics.

A well optimized website should be able to get their clicks to convert at a rate of 1-4% depending on what they sell. Niche websites will get even better. If the site is very well optimized for a very specific niche, you can get 10% or better. Just think of what this will do to your advertising budget! You can get the same amount of sales on the fraction you are spending now. Lets just take a look at the math quick.

If you spend $5000 a month and get 100,000 clicks where 100 people buy, meaning 0.1% of your visitors actually buy something. A 0.1% CCR is considered very poor so if you are willing to invest just one months worth of advertising expenses and raise your rate to just 0.2%, you just doubled your sales. These optimizations can be done piece by piece so next month you decide to do some more optimization and now you are up to 0.3% and so on.

As you can see, lots of traffic won’t do you any good if your site is not converting well. Optimizing your click conversion rate offers a huge payoff by exponentially boosting your sales, reducing your advertisement needs and can be done incrementally.

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