The hard part for any business owner is tracking the effectiveness of their team and ongoing marketing campaigns. So, every year we re-evaluate our internal business KPI’s [Key Performance Indicators]. One of the key KPI’s for any company is Conversion Rate.
Conversion Rate definitions and statistics are across the board depending on your industry. We loosely define Conversion as the act of helping a potential customer take an action which in turn helps them become a client at some point. It’s usually shown as a percentage and is based on the number of customers that took a specific action on site or on page divided by the total number of customer that came to the site or page.. So if I had 100 people come to my website and 10 of them filled out a form for more information then my conversion rate is 10/100=.10 or a conversion rate 10%.
Why is it important:
Conversion rate tells a lot about what is working and what is not. It’s also not as straight forward as it looks. There can easily be multiple conversion rates to follow within the timeline of a sale. First you may convert someone on your site to fill out a form for more info. Then you can track how many of those that filled the form out and converted to a sale or a phone call or both. Remember that each stage of the process can have it’s own conversion rate. This allows for focused tweaks at each stage. In essence when you increase the conversion rate at the micro level you in turn increase the macro performance.
Also remember that the rate you see in your analytics may not be telling you everything at face value. Let’s say your overall conversion rate is 2.1%. Not great but not terrible. Dig more though….. If you break it up based on device you may see that the PC based conversion rate is much higher than the average but your mobile conversion performance is in the tank which will lower the overall average. It shows that there could be a ton of room for improvement simply by updating [or actually creating] a mobile site or making your main site responsive.
Conversion rates come in many forms. Here are few quick ones that pertain to our business. What conversion rates are important to yours?
Conversion Rate Examples:
- When a site visitor fills out a form on site. [You may use these to capture email addresses for signups or free downloads]
- When a site visitor orders a product.
- When one product is ordered over another based on page position.
- Inbound lead calls converted to a second appointment.
- Leads which were contracted.
Conversion rates are important because if you constantly track them and base site changes and/or verbal selling techniques on those rates, you are able to consistently increase and optimize the numbers that are important to your business.
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