Conversion rates for website traffic

There are two types of conversion rates when talking about website traffic. The first conversion is when a web user clicks from another place on the web into your site. This can be from an advert you have placed or from a link on someone else's site or even from an electronic mail-shot you have sent. THis conversion rate is worked out by knowing how many people have seen your web address in the other place and comparing it against however many of them clicked into your site.

If you advertise with DIY Doctor and 10,000 of our visitors see you advert on our pages and 1000 of them click through to your site. Your user conversion is 50%. In reality the average user conversion on a targeted site like ours is between 7% and 15%. The average conversion rate for Google Adword customers is 3%.

To continue to use DIY Doctor as an example we can move on to talk about what you do with these potential customers when they get to your site.

If 1000 users have clicked through to your site after seeing your advert on DIY Doctor, you should expect to sell to at least 9% of them. This is because your advertising on our site is targeted toward an outcome revolving round your product. This is the sales conversion. The percentage of users visiting your site who actually buy your products.

If your advertising is targeted and your sales conversions are low, get someone to look (independently) at your website and your sales process to feedback how it feels.

Customer behavior, despite observations to the contrary, is predicable. If your customer has a good experience with you, they will probably buy from you. If you frustrate the customer in any way, or they see your prices as too high, your delivery costs are hidden or they perceive you are not telling the truth in any way, they will leave, never to return!

Case study:

Let's say you sell paint stripper. DIY Doctor publishes an appropriate advert for your paint stripping product. Because we optimise our pages for discovery by the major search engines, the page containing your advert is quickly seen and listed by Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

Because we want the maximum success for your advertising we publish your advert on a page which gives all sorts of advice on how to strip paint from various surfaces and how to use the product advertised on that page. This is targeted advertising. It is purely targeted towards people who are most likely to use the product on that particular page.

Most advertising sites do not use targeted advertising. They use "Broadreach" which means they publish your advert in front of many thousands of people in the hope that some of them might be looking for paint stripper. If your advert for paint stripper is on a page about sex (because this page will get the most visitors) don't hold your breath for sales!

76% of the general public use the search engines to find information they are looking for on the web. They type "Stripping paint" into Google. Because we have optimised our pages so well, up pops DIY Doctor in first or second place.

The user clicks into this page, reads the information we have published and see's that your product will help them to finish the project they have in mind.

Because the advertising is so specifically targeted and is surrounded by appropriate, useful content, your product is trusted and useful to them. They click on your advert to find out more about your product.

If the product is well presented on your site; Your site is easy to navigate and contains more usefully information on the product; your images are clear and the site is presented professionally with no dubious claims; Your purchasing information is easy to understand and payments are as secure as they can be; your product is the right price and compares favourable to other suppliers of a similar product, you should have no problem making a sale.

If your site is badly designed and difficult to navigate etc, users will see this in fractions of a second and they will leave to find another place to buy. Your sales conversion, when you are paying for specifically targeted advertising, depends on you.

If your advert is just placed at random on a page which may not even have anything to do with your products, your user conversion will probably be tiny. If however you have a well managed site you can still maintain a high sales conversion rate.

If only 5 people see you advert, 2 click through and 1 buys it is still a 50% sales conversion.

The more targeted your advertising, the greater the cost to advertise BUT, the higher the sales conversion should be.

To make sure you are getting the best possible value for money you should be able to work out a cost per customer. This means working out how much you have spent on advertising and administration against how many customers have bought from you. Divide the cost by the customer numbers and you can see how much you are spending to get a paying customer.

How can I get the best sales conversions.

Target your advertising specifically and make sure it is surrounded by appropriate content.
Build landing pages for your advert: If you advertise e.g. with DIY Doctor, build a page on which these users can land. It can even have a "Welcome to customers from DIY Doctor" headline. It should have more details about the specific product they have clicked through to see. It should have images where appropriate and it should have clear precise action statements (Calls to action) on how the user can buy the product, what the features are, what the benefits are, why it is the best product for the job and it should also list any special offers available to them. This may seem like a faff, but it is vital. Your customers should be made to feel welcome immediately and know, without the shadow of a doubt, that they have come to the right place. If your advertising does not match your presentation, you have just lost a customer.
Make sure it is obvious to your customers how to buy. Don't forget you know your site inside out, they do not. Get someone to check your sales process for you.
Be transparent. Do not have hidden delivery charges or offers from 99p when clearly the product is useless at 99p because it needs another £5.00 worth of extras to make it usable.
Provide various contact options. Telephone, address, fax, email. This way, if anything should go wrong, the customer knows they can contact you easily.
Provide good images of your products. The better an image is, the more likely the customer is to buy from you.
Make sure customers know your site is secure. Display your security label clearly to give your customers confidence.
Publish Newsletters to keep your customers informed of special offers and news about your company.

There are many many more ways you can market your site to get the best possible returns. DIY Doctor can help in all of these when you advertise with us. Simply click through to our advertising pages and join us to get the very best of advertising and marketing help.

To read Google advice on Six steps to great conversion rates click here