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.
