Increasing Sales Conversion Rates

Conversion Rate – What’s a sales conversion rate? It’s your sites ratio of sales verses visits. Worldwide average conversion rates land somewhere around 2 – 2.5% depending on your industry. This tells you that if your site brings in 2 sales for every 100 visits your sales conversion rate is close to average. This is an important rate to know, as it can help you decide where to focus your online marketing efforts. If your conversion rate is stellar, yet your not making a lot of sales, you’ll want to focus on bringing more traffic to your site, and vice versa, if your traffic is high, but sales are low, you’ll want to focus on user experience and product marketing. However, when determining why a conversion rate is low, it’s very important to know how targeted the traffic to your site is. Perhaps a large percentage of your visitors are landing on your page via a google search that doesn’t really have any relevancy to your products, thus driving your conversion rate down.

Bounce Rate – This is an important metric and one that should be paid close attention to. The rate should be a part of the marketing plan as well, normally as an objective accompanied by appropriate strategies and tactics designed to reduce the rate to an acceptable level. Once the bounce rate has been reduced to a consistent acceptable level, then efforts can be concentrated against increasing the buy rate. Bounce rate is defined as the number of times someone exits your site from the very first page they landed on, without viewing any other pages. Its important to identify pages with a high bounce rate, in order to “plug up holes” and convince the visitor to proceed with further site navigation.

Scenario Analysis – Scenario Analysis reports identify at which step visitors abandoned a given process and indicate areas of weakness in a web site’s content, offer or navigation. This report can help you optimize your web site’s content by eliminating the scenarios with high abandonment rates and identifying specific funnels with high conversion rates.

20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment, Part 1

20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment, Part 2