Your conversion ratio is the percentage of people who visit your website and perform an action that your company sets as a goal.  (This is known as converting, or responding to your call-to-action.)

For a lead generation site, it’s the percentage of visitors who make inquiries.  For an e-commerce site, the conversion ratio measures the percentage of folks who make a purchase.

Conversion Ratios Represent Your Success

The conversion ratios are important because they measure how successful your website has been in generating business or leads.  High conversion ratios mean that visitors know what you want them to do on the site and your offer, combined with the site’s marketing copy, entice them to do so.  Low conversion ratios are a sign that your calls-to-action need improvement.

Knowing your conversion ratio also helps in planning and budgeting for your website.  If you know the percentage of people you can rely on to act on your website’s offer, you can accurately estimate the return on investment on traffic generating activities such as online advertising.

Getting Your Conversion Ratio

Establish your goals. The first step in getting your conversion ratio is to figure out what you want your website visitors to do.  You get a conversion every time a visitor performs the action in your goal.

Setup web analytics software. Once you have your goals in mind, you need to install analytics software on your website.  Among other things, this software will count the number of unique visitors to your site.

If you have a static website, you need to set this up on every page of your site.  If your site is backed by a content management system, you’ll usually be able to change the master template once, and your entire site will be tracked.

Enable goal tracking. Many analytics packages allow you to setup goals that are tracked automatically.  If your analytics software doesn’t allow this, you’ll need to keep track of your conversions another way.

Do the calculation. Divide the number of conversions you have by the number of visitors you get.  This is your conversion ratio.  Most site owners want to improve their conversion ratio.  You can do this by improving your calls-to-action.

Websites fail to generate business because not enough people are visiting your website, and when they do, your visitors don’t take action.

You can improve how much business your website generates by improving your call-to-action.  A call-to-action is a task that you ask your website visitors to perform that benefits both your visitors and your company.

Specific Calls-to-Action

Your call-to-action could request visitors to call you for more information, fill out a registration form, buy something, or refer you to their friends and colleagues using a link.  Calls-to-action need to be specific and measurable, otherwise you won’t be able to improve them.

Your calls-to-action might not work for several reasons:

• Not there. You don’t make a call-to-action (i.e. your website leaves visitors to figure out what to do next).
• Vagueness. Visitors don’t understand what you’re offering or why they benefit.
• Laziness. They don’t think the offer is worth taking action.
• Confusion. They don’t understand what they need to do.
• Mistrust. They don’t trust that you will or can fulfill your offer.
• Problems. They can’t take you up on your offer because they get lost, have technical difficulties or can’t find your contact information.

Determining What the Issues Are

Surveys. The most straightforward way to find out if you have one (or more than one) of the issues above is to survey your visitors.  Ask them why they chose to do what they did.  These surveys can be automated so you don’t have to put a lot of resources into running them.

Behavioral Testing. In-person testing is also useful.  We’ve screen captured entire sessions so you can see everything from where they clicked to where they got confused.

Automated Testing. Calls-to-action can also be improved using A-B or multivariate testing.  This type of testing compares different pages against each other.  The pages may have different calls-to-action, phrasing or offers.  The pages with the higher conversion ratios win and the wording on winning pages is used as the standard for the website.

One benefit of automated testing is that it’s unobtrusive, your visitors aren’t interrupted and the information is collected automatically.

Using What You’ve Learned

What you learn from testing your calls-to-action and marketing messages on your website can be re-used in your other marketing and promotional materials, as well as your sales presentations.  This re-use is one of the cornerstones of integrated marketing.

By running the surveys and testing above, you’ll improve your calls-to-action and marketing messages.  Your marketing will be more agile than your competition and your conversion ratios will improve as well, generating more business for your company.