Conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take. It’s a reflection of your effectiveness and customer satisfaction. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs. There are several ways you can use this metric to improve your performance. For example you can monitor the path visitors take when navigating your website and see which paths lead to sales and find out why. One of our key strengths here at SoliTech is to help our customers really make sense out of this and other metrics and convert this data into measurable performance gains.

To truly measure a gain in performance, first we need to determine where your website stands now and then set realistic goals to where it can go. The table below shows the conversion rates broken out by industry and gives a fairly good indicator of where your conversion rate should be at.

Now that you know where your website should rank, it is time to take action! Stop wasting the traffic you worked so hard to get in the first place and start giving your customers what they are looking for and start increasing your online success.

A good example would be bands and their use of MySpace profile pages. An up and coming band is looking to do two main things, get their music out there and grow their fan base. MySpace does an excellent job of this by offering an easy to use interface to edit your profile page and upload songs. The main draw is that bands will be instantly part of a community of millions and can have an attractive looking “website” in just a few short hours. MySpace also offers custom URLs so it is easy to remember and easy to distribute to your fans.

There are a number of other reasons why bands choose this route so you ask why don’t I just create a page for my business? Because of the crowd using MySpace. Although the millions of high school students and younger are exactly what a growing band needs, they may not be interested in your company and you may not want your company associated with them either. For a more sophisticated crowd you can try Facebook, but then again, it all depends on what you are looking to do online and who you are looking to engage.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. will tell the same story, they have a great set of tools for doing a certain activity online, you just have to decide if it is what will grow your brand best. Keep in mind that unattended Facebook pages will cause you more harm then good in the long run. So in short, yes, you can be very successful just using the social tools mentioned above as long as you use them the right way.

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.