Understanding Conversion Rates

Let’s talk conversion rates. We’re talking about the marketing metric that identifies whether your marketing efforts actually stick. It’s fundamentally the analytic that proves whether users are transitioning to the next stage of the sales funnel.

Metrics are somewhat somewhat relative depending on what you are trying to accomplish. The measure of a conversion rate differentiates across industries and also depends on your business purpose. When measuring conversion rates, you need to figure out what’s your most important metric for growth and make it your focus.

To see conversions, you need to work out what’s appealing to people viewing your website and content. If you’re in a customer-facing industry, are visually appealing photos and videos going to appeal to your market and sell your product? You may consider a conversion as someone clicking on a link or a submitted enquiry form. If you’re marketing to businesses, perhaps it’s a downloadable guide or a free consultation booking. Whatever the industry, the main thing you need to consider is value to the customer.

Disregard the Vanity Metrics

Page views are great and prove that you have people viewing your site, but this can be considered as a vanity metric. What you need to be taking into account and what’s far more important are things like:

Traffic Sources:

Where is your online traffic coming from? This is an invaluable metric as you ultimately see which online channels are most effective. With this metric, you can start to take into consideration the gaps in your current marketing strategy.

Bounce Rates:

How many people are clicking off your page as soon as they click onto it? If you’re experiencing a high bounce rate, there may be a reason. Perhaps your website isn’t visually appealing or it’s outdated. Perhaps it doesn’t have a responsive layout or the website isn’t easy to navigate, so doesn’t work well with their device. Maybe your content isn’t aligning to their needs (work on your content and your SEO strategy!).

Session Duration:

How much time are people spending on your website? How much value is your content giving them? The longer someone stays on your website, the longer they’re interested. Essentially, the more resources you have, the more value you’re going to provide you customer.

Interactions/Engagement:

How many opportunities are there for the customer to engage? How many valuable resources are there for the customer to download? Consider giving the customer a reason to connect with you. Think about the resources and value you can provide them which your competitors currently aren’t.

If you’re using paid search as a traffic source (PPC advertising), it’s likely you’ll also want to measure things such as cost per acquisition (CPC) and click-through rates (CTR). You can measure all of these metrics through Google Analytics, or through a CRM such as Marketo or Hubspot (both of these are also great for tracking the sales funnel).

Pay Attention To Churn Rate

It’s all well and good creating conversions, no matter what metrics you consider these to be, but let’s think about churn rates. Churn rates consider the rate at which customers stop subscribing to your product or service. Yes, you may be increasing conversions, but you need to be thinking about retaining those customers too. Are you really making your marketing a success if you’re not retaining customers? Are you still providing value to the clients who’ve been there from the start? If this is the case, perhaps it’s time to consider cross-sell techniques, or focusing on nurturing your client base.

All in all, the main thing to focus on when considering conversion rates is how much value you’re providing the customer. Take your website as an example. Map out the customer journey and the way your customer may perceive value when browsing your website. Do you have useful content to guide and educate them? Is it easy for them to get in contact with you and do they feel like they’ll be valued as a customer? These are all things to be considered.

If you’d like help with increasing your conversion rates or improving your metrics, please do not hesitate to contact us.