Most businesses have websites for two main reasons: to generate leads and sales. So how do you know if your website is serving its purpose? Web marketers use conversion rate to get insight into how well websites perform as business assets. Website conversion rate is a percentage of visits to your website that result into desired action. This action can be a phone call, an email, a form submission, or a purchase.
One person can visit the same website several times, so should you count each visit? It depends on the nature of your business and specific objectives, but no matter how you chose to count, be consistent!
Knowing the exact conversion rate is an important starting point. Before you take any measures to improve it, you need to know the current state of affairs, especially if you are planning to utilize a pay-per-click strategy. Assuming your goal is to generate sales, conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of transactions by the number of total website visits, and then multiplying the outcome by 100. So with 55 sales from 500 visits, you will get a conversion rate of 11%.
What is a good rate? We use 7 – 12% percent for service business and 1 – 4% percent for e-commerce as an average metric for success. These numbers reflect percentage of conversions per 100 clicks on your website link. The reason there is such a gap between service businesses and e-commerce is because people look at goods without buying more often than they do at services. If you locked yourself out, you can’t spend a month searching for the locksmith, right? Conversion rates vary depending on the goal, the method of conversion, industry, product or service price, website layout, and many other factors. You can take a look at the conversion rate statistics by industry here.
In order to calculate your website’s conversion rate, you need data. TRACKING, TRACKING, TRACKING and reporting: that’s how you gather your data. Although there are great tracking tools like Google Analytics, you might want to take it a step further depending on your goals. Analytic tools won’t keep track of customer calls and emails for you.
We have helped many local businesses maximize the number of leads they are getting from the web, which has been crucial in the current economic environment. Let us know if you need any help, and stay tuned for more information!
