How is Your Conversion Rate?

Or are you?

Unfortunately, there is very little point in having great streams of traffic arriving at your site every day if you are producing very little in terms of sales at the end of it.

What you want is a high conversion rate. So, for example, let’s say that you are aiming to achieve 20 sales per day. You are achieving 3 but you have 100 customers. Your conversion rate is 3% which isn’t what you are aiming for at all.

Let’s take that same example and say that you are achieving 3 but you only have 6 customers, well your conversion rate has just shot up to 50%. Which is a much better performance than the previous example?
So what! You still don’t have any extra money in your pocket do you? Well, at this stage – no you don’t. But what you are putting into practice on your site is correct. You now need to focus on driving more of that targeted traffic to increase your sales.

So what is targeted traffic then?

Targeted traffic = your potential customers.

These are the customers putting something specific into a search engine and being led to your site to buy it. They haven’t stumbled across it whilst surfing or looking for a completely different product – they came to you to buy it as you came up in a search engine or a PPC (pay per click) ad. It’s now your job to keep them on your site long enough to buy it.

Your 50% conversion rate would suggest that your site is well laid out and easy to navigate. Your prices are reasonable, you have good payment gateways in place and the customer gets a sense of professionalism. They are after all about to part with their money to a complete stranger – this is a completely different experience to high street shopping.

If your bounce rate is high (people landing on your site for a few seconds before navigating away) means you either have your ads set up wrong or your site is confusing or unpleasing on the eye.

If you are going to embark on a PPC ad campaign then make sure that you spend time over your ads and choose your keywords carefully. Use a keyword tool and try out various ads on the same campaign. I cannot stress enough how important it is to input your landing page on your ads. If you are advertising a specific product in your ad campaign e.g. a silver necklace, you must put the URL of the page where the silver necklaces are. If you put your homepage URL the customer will not be bothered to hunt it down for themselves!

If you apply excellent SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to your site then you should be able to get by without PPC once the search engines have picked you up. Then you will get your targeted traffic from the organic searches (unpaid search results), which is where you want to be.

Monitor your traffic closely as time goes on and don’t get cocky if it starts to climb and your sales don’t as it isn’t anything to celebrate – you need to reflect on your site and establish why that customer isn’t buying – or if they have ended up on your site for the wrong reasons (wrong keywords or ads etc). If, on the other hand, your sales increase alongside your traffic flow then you are maintaining a good conversion rate.

20 customers a day with 20 sales is far better than 100 customers a day and 10 sales. Always remember your conversion rate!