Conversion

When a visitor to your website goes from being a visitor to becoming a customer, that is considered a “conversion”. Isn’t that the main reason businesses are online? To generate customers!

Conversion can be several things but is always when you achieve a desired outcome.  Consider a "conversion" to be some sort of result – such as a sale, posting a comment or review, filling out a form, or whatever action you are looking to achieve by your website visitors.

Successful conversion may be defined differently by different individuals.

One example of a conversion event can be the obvious -a sale. But what if a customer were to abandon an online shopping cart? This event could then be used to market a special offer, e.g. free shipping, in order to convert that visit into a sale.  

Maybe your desired conversion is to have your visitor fill out a form, maybe a membership. By reviewing your website metrics you can determine why this event is not happening. Maybe your site is unclear on how to get to the form or perhaps the visitors are all bypassing the form and bounce to another website. It’s time to revisit how that form is perceived.

Conversion measurement of your website becomes important to showing the return on investment (ROI) for your company. To accomplish this, you need to manage the customer experience by making it memorable and personal. Optimized navigability is necessary. As well as, well-optimized site pages, landing pages and calls to action. Making small changes can make a large impact to your bottom-line. How will you ensure that customers can find what they want?  Let’s start by looking at an example of a company’s homepage. The homepage should include enough to educate, engage and encourage a diverse audience to explore the rest of your website (Meher, 2012). An effective homepage can turn many visitors into buyers.

In this example the Homepage of this software company is missing some key elements.  “the original homepage did a good job outlining its five different product lines, it failed to guide visitors to the right product due to a lack of information…..85% of the homepage's traffic was unique, meaning that the majority of visitors were unfamiliar with the company and its products. Visitors were unable to identify the difference between each product and which one to select” (Meher,2012). The original page is also missing an effective call to action (CTA). A CTA is what drives your customer to take the desired action. In the original homepage the CTA, although nice and red, it is below the fold where the visitor has to scroll to see. On the new homepage the CTA is front and center attracting the eye of your visitor immediately.  

Other factors that aid in conversion are the same factors that make you want to return to any business. It’s clean, credible, transparent and trustworthy. If you establish trust visitors believe in your brand and messages. Remember it is easier to keep a customer than to attract a new one. Loyalty builds those lasting relationships.

The use of conversion metrics can help your business find out what works, and focus your advertising dollars there. There are many metric tools out there (Google Analytics, ChartBeat, CrazyEgg , MOZ, Compete , and Optimizely). Making informed business and content management decisions can make your website a profitable. Use your statistics to track your progress over time. Measure a campaign from start to finish, evaluate, update your site, and measure again. You will be surprised at how this focused effort affects your company’s performance.

Share what has worked for you.

Meher, J. (March2012) How to Increase Your Conversion Rate. Retrieved from: HubSpothttp://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31104/Extreme-Homepage-Makeover-How-to-Increase-Your-Conversion-Rate-106.aspx

Kusintz, S. (April2014) The 7 Principles of Conversion Centered Design. Retrieved from: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/principles-of-conversion-centered-design-slideshare

Exit Page

When a visitor decides to leave your website, that last page is identified as the end of a visit or session. Web analytics interpret the exit page as the page where readers didn’t find what they were looking for and therefore, went elsewhere. Evaluating exit pages can help you improve your site to make more valuable to a visitor or to turn an exit into a call to action (CTA).

Exit rates are a standard metric that marketers use when analyzing their site performance. Exit rates are not to be confused with bounce rates. “Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits to total visits, whereas Exit Rate (% Exit) is the percentage of site exits that occur. A visitor, who visits your website, loads one page and leaves, is considered in both your Bounce Rate and your Exit Rate. A visitor, who visits your website, loads one page and continues on to another blog post or another page on your site, is considered in only your Exit Rate” (Wahl, 2012).

This is where I get confused, and maybe you do too. Everyone who comes to your site has to exit. The exits should always equal the number of entrances but the exit rate is a percentage calculated by dividing the number of exits into the total page views.

Exit rate is difficult, it’s important to understand the data and understand what your users are doing, but not clear if you should take further action. The perception is that the exit rate metric shows “leakage” from your website something should be fixed to prevent customers from leaving.

The reasons for an exit could be a user reading a review and then looking to buy in the store, or picks up the phone to contact your company or are they exiting your site because of usability issues. Knowing the exit page is not always useful. “The only solid exception to the rule is structured experiences that are of a “closed nature”. For example the Cart and Checkout experience. You add to cart, you click start checkout, you fill out your address and credit cart, and you hit submit and see the thank you page. In this structured experience it can be insightful to measure which page is the top exit page and why might that page causing “leakage” and how to fix it (Kaushik).

Bottom line is that the Exit page and Exit rates are not enough to determine if you should fix a page. Other factors must also be considered.  If the visitors to your website were engaged when they first entered, don’t you think they would visit another one of your pages instead of leaving? If an exit page is consistently the same page as the bounce page then you might want to consider exploring the metrics further. The lower the Bounce rate the better, and ultimately the more engaged your visitors will be on your website.

What do you think, is and exit rate metric useless to your webpage analysis?

Wahl, M. (May2012)  What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics? Retrieved from: http://www.morevisibility.com/blogs/analytics/what-is-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics.html

Cornwall, J. (Aug2012) Top Exit Page Analysis? Retrieved from: http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2012/08/top-exit-page-analysis.html

Kaushink, A. Standard Metrics Revisited: #2: Top Exit Pages. Occam’s Razor blog

Retrieved from: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate/