What is Conversion?

Want to improve your profitability?  Increase your conversion rate.

Every additional visitor you are able to convert means additional business for your firm which translates into additional revenue.  It doesn’t matter if you are an e-commerce site, a lead generation site, or a membership site, increasing your conversion rate means increasing your profitability.

Defining Conversion Events on Your Site

Conversion is defined as a visitor taking a desired action on your site (a conversion event).   Depending on your site, a conversion event can mean completing and sending a Contact Us Form, signing up for a newsletter, or completing a purchase.

What is Optimizing for Conversion?

Conversion is all about your site and your visitors and how they relate to each other.  Optimizing for conversion means that your visitors can quickly and easily find what they are searching for on your site, and they are not delayed, frustrated, confused or distracted on their path to conversion.

Self-Help Guides to Conversion

Lists, blogs and papers on conversion are good way to start thinking about optimizing your website for conversion, but they’re not the solution.  If conversion checklists worked, everyone’s conversion rate would be fantastic.  So why don’t they work?

Self-help guides don’t work for two reasons:

  1. Your site is unique
  2. Site familiarity

Your Site is Unique

There is no one-size fits all conversion magic.  Your site is unique.  Your solution will be unique.

Here’s why:  your site evolved over time.  It reflects your view of how it should look and how it should work.  If your conversion is less than you want, you have inadvertently created issues that are causing visitors to leave your site, without converting.   Those issues will be unique to your site.

Site Familiarity

You’re an expert on your own site, but your visitors are not.   In optimizing your site for conversion, familiarity is not just a hindrance, it’s a real obstacle.

Here’s an example of what we mean:  Forrester Research says that the #1 reason for website abandonment is confusing navigation.  How can you tell if your site’s navigation is confusing your visitors?  Even if you carefully analyze your navigation, it probably won’t seem confusing to you, you’re too familiar with it.

Optimizing Your Site for Conversion

Start with a conversion site review.  Think of it as an audit of your site’s conversion issues.  It measures your site against 10 major conversion metrics and then gives you actionable recommendations for conversion optimization.  By addressing just these 10 metrics, you will see real improvement in your site’s conversion rate.

After the Conversion Site Review, you may decide to do some landing page testing or a usability study. Testing and usability studies, along with analytics, merchandising and marketing are all part of the ongoing support program. Once you have seen the impact of the Conversion Site Review, a process of continuous improvement can keep the benefits flowing.