Optimization of goal conversions

A very basic definition for ‘conversion’, or rather ‘conversion rate’ is the percentage value that represents the amount of times a goal has been reached divided by the total number of visitors that started the click-through path towards the goal. A few examples:

Conversion rate of a single click-through: If 2,000 visitors placed product A in the shopping cart and 26 visitors actually ordered the conversion rate would be 26/2,000 = 1.25% for that action

Conversion rate of a series of click-throughs (path): If 5,000 visitors entered your site and 230 visitors ordered Product A, the overall conversion rate for Product A is 130/5,000 = 2.6%

There are many conversion events that are worth measuring. There might be other goals that are valuable for your business, such as subscriptions to RSS feeds or newsletters, download of trial versions of software, downloads of whitepapers but even less clearly defined actions such as visitors that spent five minutes or more on your site, or visited at least five pages.

Conversion funnels

If visitors reach your conversion goals through a number of steps, clicking from one page to another, the whole path of click-throughs is often called a conversion funnel. Basically for every step that is needed to reach the conversion goal a certain percentage of visitors exits the path towards the goal or even exits the site. As a result, if you organize all steps as vertical levels you get what looks like a funnel, with the largest top layer being the total amount of visitors that enter the conversion funnel and the bottom layer the much smaller amount of visitors that reached the goal.

If your site’s conversion goals are reached through several click-throughs it’s advisable to not only look at the overall conversion (from total visitors to goal-reaching visitors) but also at the conversion rates of all the intermediate steps. By doing so, you’ll be able to find out whether there are any bottlenecks in your conversion funnel, meaning pages that convert a very low percentage of visitors.

For example, if your product information page is the first step in a 3-level funnel that leads to an order as the ultimate goal, but after the first level you see that only 20% of your visitors are persuaded to continue then it shouldn’t be a surprise to find out that your overall conversion is less than 1%. In this case, optimizing your product information page could result in a significant increase of your overall conversion.

The ultimate goal of conversions

The conversion rate is an essential metric for businesses in that it indicates how successful they are in persuading their visitors to perform the action they set out for them.

Many online businesses are still unaware of what web analytics can do for their revenue. There’s so much potential to improve the ROI for online expenditure when you allocate resources to analyzing the internal processes (the use of your corporate website). For businesses that don’t go into web analytics their websites are basically a black box where money goes in and – if everything goes right – more money comes out on the other side. These businesses still have the frame of mind that the only control they have over their ROI is where they spend their marketing budget (attracting visitors that reach goals) while tracking and using conversion rate data can help make their websites much more transparent and optimizing conversion funnel pages very rewarding.

The use of conversion data

Conversion data is mostly valuable if you keep track of conversion rates over time, especially when you apply changes to your website. Trying to improve conversion of particular levels of your conversion funnel can be done through simple testing for optimization. Once you know the average conversion rate of Page A > Page B you can try to change a particular item on Page A which is most likely to dissuade visitors from clicking on to Page B, or you could try a drastic re-design of Page A. Keep a log of when you apply your planned change to Page A so that you can compare before and after data to be able to determine what effect the applied change had on the conversion rate.

How do you know what changes to make on your “Page A”? It’s all about a mix of knowledge and simple guessing. The first step is to get to know your visitors – Where do they come from (referrers) and what do they want once they’re on your site? You could simply look at your site’s pages and consider what is and what isn’t working in persuading your visitors to click through to the next page, you could get someone who doesn’t know your site to surf while you look on (going in to web usability) to discover obvious hurdles you didn’t notice yourself and you can go into more advanced methods of developing personas and/or analyzing site overlays and heatmaps.

Google Analytics reports

The following Google Analytics reports are of particular interest for conversion optimization: Marketing campaign results, Goals and Funnel Process and Search engine marketing reports.

More information

Follow the Googlelytics blog for concrete examples of conversion optimization through landing page or email marketing optimization.