This is probably the most important aspect involved in your website, and is defined as the total amount of people who delivered you the desired outcome. For example, the number of people who completed a purchase from your online store or subscribed to your newsletter. Basically, whatever the ultimate reason for your website, whether it’s to make sales, lead generation, get more followers etc, whenever a visitor to your site completes this desired action, then that’s a conversion.
Using Google Analytics, there’s an easy way to calculate this: Total number of conversions / number of visitors to the site = conversion rate. For example: a web page that has had a total of 10,000 visitors, along with 100 conversions, will have a conversion rate of 1%.
A low conversion rate highlights that your website and/or marketing isn’t working for you and needs further investigation and action.
Conversion Optimisation – Understanding the metrics.
While your conversion rate is critical for determining the success of your current website’s strategy, there are other metrics worth considering. How long are people willing to spend on your site? What pages are they paying more attention to?
Each of these figures and details can deliver you hypotheses to test and experiment with.
Bounce rate: the number of people who abandon the site after viewing one page (the page they first arrived at the site on). A higher bounce rate is a negative thing and should be closely looked at to determine the reason behind it. Most commonly, people just aren’t finding what they’re looking for but poor content, slow page speed, bad user experience are also reasons for a high bounce rate and should be addressed immediately.
Exit rate: this is the percentage of people that leave your website on an individual page. Each URL has one of these, and it’s a good insight into seeing what page was viewed before the user decided to leave. If a certain page has a significant exit rate, business owners or marketing experts should be exploring why that is. If they’re exiting after making a ‘conversion’, like filling out a contact form or making a purchase from your online store, then that’s good. However, taking into account the other metrics, if a certain page has a high exit rate without any conversions or much engagement on your website overall, then you need to review the content, performance and function of that page. What’s making the audience drop out at this point?
Average time spent on site: this one is an engagement method and gives you an idea of how much time people are willing to stick around on your site overall. A high bounce rate means they are spending minimal time on the site, and they’re not completing the desired action by the end of their session. Obviously, less than a minute shows that your user experience or content isn’t working. The longer a person spends on your website, the more engaged they are with it.
Average page views: another engagement metric, this one tells you exactly how many pages the user visited before they decided to leave. The more views of pages, the more engagement, but it doesn’t always mean a higher conversion rate.
Conversion optimisation and the above metrics are just a few examples of what’s required to get your website working for you.
If you need help or advice with your website or digital marketing, get in touch for a free consultation.
