What is Website Conversion and How You Can Improve it For Your Business

If you’re starting an online business, you probably know that you will have to monitor a ton of metrics, one of the most important ones being your website conversion rate. By doing so, you will be able to monitor how effective your marketing is, whether a particular campaign is working, and what you need to improve on.

Now that you know this, you’re probably wondering how you can calculate conversion rates and what the ideal conversion rate is?

In order to answer these questions and any others that you may have, keep on reading this blog post. We will be discussing what website conversion is, how you can effectively measure it, as well as what specific techniques you can use to improve it.

Let’s get started.

What is a Website Conversion?

A website conversion occurs whenever a visitor performs a desired or pre-determined action on your webpage. This can be anything from signing up for your newsletter, to ordering an item or sharing a post on social media. The percentage of people who complete this kind of action make up your website’s conversion rate.

What you determine to be a conversion depends entirely on the way your business operates. More often than not, ecommerce companies tend to focus on generating sales as a conversion, while service providers more so concentrate on generating leads and counting them as conversions.

In order for you to have a clear idea of what a website conversion is, here are some of the more desirable actions that most companies use to count as conversions:

• Signing up for an e-mail subscription
• Clicking on a specific button
• Sharing content from the website on a social media platform
• Subscribing for a mailing list
• Generating a sale

Of course, there are a ton more. You have to remember that what you consider to be a conversion for your company might not be for another, as no two businesses are the same.

How to Calculate Conversion Rates

After learning about conversion rates, most entrepreneurs start asking about a conversion rate formula so that they can use it for their business.

Luckily, for all of us, measuring your conversion rate is a fairly simple task. The formula looks like this:

(Total visitors that performed the conversion action/Total visitors of your website)x100 = conversion rates.

Let’s make it more clear with an example.

Say you have 10,000 weekly visitors to your webpage. 200 signed up for your company newsletter. If you translate these numbers into the formula you get the following:

(200/10 000)x100 = 2%. In this scenario, your website’s conversion rate will amount to 2%.

However, if you don’t enjoy doing the math, you can also use one of the free online conversion rate calculators.

What is Considered to be a Good Conversion Rate?

Now that we’ve already established what a conversion rate is and how you can calculate it, it’s time to talk about what is considered to be a good conversion rate.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: there’s no magic number that determines the best rate for any business. Usually, what is a good percentage for your company will depend on a variety of factors:

• The industry you operate in
• What products or services you offer
• What you’re willing to spend on a marketing campaign
• What your sales cycle consists of

As all of these factors can have an influence on your conversion rate, it’s impossible to pinpoint a specific number that every business needs to achieve. In order to determine a percentage for your company, you have to look around in your industry, see the average and go from there.

How Does Your Sales Funnel Influence Your Website Conversion Rates?

If you discuss conversion rates with marketers, you will most likely hear about the sales funnel as well. Most experts in the field will tell you that in order to earn more conversion, you have to be able to successfully navigate customers through the sales funnel.

You may be wondering, what connects the sales funnel and the conversion rate? Let me try to explain.

The sales funnel plays a vital role in turning prospective buyers into customers. It usually goes through four stages:

• Awareness: People have just found your brand and are starting to get acquainted with it by looking at your website and seeing what you’re offering.
• Interest: At this stage, website visitors are starting to turn into potential clients as they’re beginning to consider your company as an option.
• Desire: When people reach this part of the sales funnel, they’re ready to make the decision. They already know what they want, so this is the perfect place to make your last effort to try to win them over.
• Action: Here, the visitor does the action you wanted them to take in the first place. That can be anything from ordering an item off the website to signing up for your weekly newsletter.

As you can see, people usually need to go through at least three steps before completing the desired action. This means that each step should influence the visitor to get to the next one before finally getting to the “action” part.

That’s what makes the sales cycle so crucial when it comes to your website’s conversion. You have to invest in each step that the visitor has to take in order to influence them to reach the “final destination”. By doing so, you ensure that you will more easily reach your desired conversion rate.

5 Tips for Increasing the Conversion Rate

Now that you’ve learned what a conversion rate is and how to calculate it, you can go ahead and do it for your own business to see where you stand in comparison to the average for your industry. If this is the first time that you’re doing this, it’s likely that your company’s result will be slightly below what you’ve thought. However, don’t let that get you down.

Let’s take a look at five tips that can help you increase the conversion rate.

1. Create CTA (call-to-action) buttons that pop up on your website

By having the right amount of CTA buttons, you will be able to guide users through the next steps in your sales funnel and thus increase your website conversion.

CTA buttons are one of the best ways to let your customers know what the next step is and to invite them to take that step, which makes them fundamental to your website.

A good CTA button should pop off the page and be easily noticeable – your customers shouldn’t be wasting time trying to locate where it is. In order to help them, try using a different design for the CTA button and a more funky, bright color – that’s one of the easiest ways to draw the attention of the viewer to that particular part of their screen. Another vital element of a good CTA button is the text that you use for it. Use catchphrases that immediately grab the attention of the audience, like “Get it now” or “Go now”.

2. Take a Look at How Your Audience Interacts with Your Site

If you’re struggling with the website conversion, it may be because your potential customers are having trouble navigating through your website. User experience (UX) is crucial when it comes to conversion rates and more often than not, businesses who struggle to make their customers convert need to think about redesigning their webpage.

In order to see if that applies to your company as well, you need to analyze the way your customers interact with your website. By doing so, you can see what makes them leave – is it a certain page or the overall experience?

When you finish analyzing, you can work on improving the website. It’s likely that you will see a boost in conversion rates pretty quickly after that.

3. Create a Site That Works Great on Mobile Devices

Nowadays, 40% of online transactions happen on mobile devices, which means that if you want to have a high converting website, it needs to be able to work on smartphones and tablets as well.

If you have no idea how to improve the mobile experience, here are a few ideas:

• Integrate responsive design to your website. This feature ensures that your page will adapt according to the device that the user is viewing it on.
• Make sure users can easily work with the buttons on your website when doing so on a mobile device. In order to do that, try making the buttons on the mobile version bigger and more “thumb-friendly”.
• On that same note, try making fonts larger when it comes to the mobile version. Using smaller fonts may make reading on mobile devices more difficult for your customers, so avoid doing that.

These are just three simple ways in which you can dramatically improve the way your website works on mobile devices. However, in order to know exactly what needs improvement when it comes to your company’s page, try testing it out yourself and seeing what parts of the mobile experience irritated you. That’s how you’ll know what needs to be changed.

4. Make Navigating the Site Easy

More often than not, I see companies who, in their desire to make an aesthetically pleasing website, have created one that looks good, but is extremely hard to navigate.

The thing is, it’s not bad to have a good-looking web design; in fact, it’s probably recommended to have one. However, the looks of the site should not come by compromising its functionality. In order for your website to bring you conversion, your customers should enjoy using it. It should be easy to navigate, fast, and have proper color coordination.

5. Make Conversion Easy

Often companies will overcomplicate their sales funnel by making it a hard process to go through. That can happen when you ask for too much information right from the start or when customers have to go through a few unnecessary steps before finally converting. It’s important to make conversion easy for your clients, which means simplifying the process and the steps it entails.

To do so, try reviewing your conversion process and sales funnel to see where improvements can be made. If you can’t notice anything wrong by doing this on your own, ask a family member or a close friend to go through the steps and tell you where they struggle or what they find to be annoying. This can give you a hint on what you should change.

Conclusion

I’m hoping that after reading this article, you have the answer to the question: “What does convert mean?” and you know why it’s important.

When it comes to online businesses, conversion rate is extremely important. It’s one metric that you will consistently be analyzing because it really helps you see where your company is heading and what it can do better in terms of its digital marketing strategy.

That’s especially true if you own an ecommerce business that operates only online and has no physical store.

In this blog post, I tried to give you the basics of what you need to know about what website conversions are, why they’re important, and how to measure and improve them (if needed). Of course, this huge subject cannot be explored in detail in just a 2,000-word article, so if you need more information, take it bit by bit and research all the different aspects separately. This will help you understand more about conversion rates as a whole and will be a worthwhile investment of your time (especially if you own the business).