Conversion
Rates
These conversion
rates or ratios are, in part, a measure of success of your web site.
There are two main
ratios to consider:
a) what proportion
of people visit you site when presented with the opportunity to do so:
through a link, search engine or as a result of seeing an advert
b) what the number
of visitors converts to in terms of pounds, dollars, leads etc.
There are a number
of factors that affect this - if you attract the wrong audience (b)
will be low, if you dont present yourself properly then (a) will be
low. If your links are in the wrong sites or unpopular sites (a) will
be low. If your service is unique or in high demand (a) and (b) may
be both relatively high.
In theory you need
to achieve high rankings in both. This will be achieved if you focus
on what your customers want, have a high quality service, competitive
pricing and an effective sales message.
In planning your
web site you will have to estimate what these might be. You should be
aware that a conversion rate of 1% for (a) and 5% for (b) would not
be uncommon. This would be mean that only 0.05% of visitors that could
find you on an engine or other advert convert to actually spend money.
This sounds very low - but then think how much of newspaper is advertising
that you ignore, or how many shops you always walk or drive past to
get to the handful that you use.
The conversion rates
could vary very widely depending on your product, site and market. You
also need to view the initial order or sign up, as a customer acquisition
process, and you will seek their return. If you are planning an ecommerce
operation (and to an extent, other web operations too) you can get an
idea on estimating your conversion rates by using the following techniques:
1) Commission
Junction publish the differing conversion rates for click through
to commission paid for their advertisers, as well as the commission
rates compared to sales value. You can look through to get a rough idea
what rates are achievable for a range of businesses.
2) You can join
some programmes listed on the networks at UK Affiliate
Programmes. You can then easily set up (there is a modest cost to
this) simple adverts at GoogleAds to get
a rough idea of how popular certain adverts might be. If you have an
commission earning affiliate link, to a site similar to your planned
site, you can see how what commission you receive and extrapolate the
customer acquisition rates and initial revenue.
We have conducted
experiments for a range of consumer targeted web sites. The best click
through rate (a) we got was 12%, the worst was 0.5%, on highly focussed
keywords. The best revenue conversion rate (b) was about £1 (total
sales value) per click through and the worst was <£0.0001 per
click through.
Given this is a
difficult area to estimate, it is prudent not to make assumptions of
high conversion rates. Do not spend your entire budget or bet your business
on your first site development. If you have an initial operation underway,
you can build up some real market data, and then still afford to make
changes to improve your performance.
