Setting up a website for your business is not enough to guarantee success. You need to measure its performance to make sure it’s doing its job. A conversion rate can tell you how efficient your website is with generating leads and increasing sales. This allows you to identify changes that need to be made. Here’s how to set up conversions, measure conversion rates, and use them to analyze the performance of your website.
Setting Up and Calculating Your Conversion Rates
First things first: what is a conversion? This is an action taken on your website. Every unique visitor who signs up for your email list or purchases a product completes a conversion. Conversion goals are set up to track these actions. They are often an indication of your website’s effectiveness, as well as your bottom line as a result. They can also be an indication of future progress. They help you to identify problems as well. If conversion rates drop, it could be an indication of a problem with content, navigation, user experience, lack of marketing, or drop in search engine rankings.
To calculate your conversion rate, take the total number of conversions (number of times someone completes an action) and divide it by the total number of sessions (unique visitors). This will give you a percentage that can tell you how well your website is doing.
How does this inform you about your bottom line? You can multiply the total number of visitors by the conversion rate (percentage) to get the total number of orders. Multiply this number by the price of each order to get your gross profit. You can then subtract the cost of maintaining the website and running marketing campaigns to arrive at your net profit.
Analyzing Your Website Properly
To use conversion rates to analyze the performance of your website, follow these steps:
- Determine the conversions to be measured. Most websites will be concerned with the number of sales made. However, if you want to measure the effectiveness of an opt-in offer, you may want to focus on the number of new sign-ups for your email list. You should decide which metric is most important to you and focus your calculations on that specific conversion.
- Calculate the conversion rate.
- Calculate your gross and net profit to determine how the conversion rate is affecting your bottom line.
- Compare this month’s conversion rate to the rates for the last two or three months. This will be enough data to inform you about patterns. You will then be able to tell whether your conversion rate has risen or dropped.
- Use this information to develop a plan for changes. If you determine the problem is with your opt-in offer, work on optimizing the offer, its call to action, or its landing page. If navigation, user experience, or SEO needs improvement, make the necessary changes to improve your conversion rate in the near future.
An easier method of measuring conversion rates would be to install a tool that will calculate it for you. Examples might include:
- Google Analytics, which is a basic user analytics tool
- KissMetrics or Mixpanel, which specifically offer conversion analytics
- User interaction software, such as heatmaps
Let these tools run and gather data for at least a few days before you start interpreting it. These tools will help with the interpretation itself since they provide data other than a simple percentage. They can also give you numbers for the average time on each page and bounce rates (how many visitors leave a page immediately). This information will help you see pages that need to be optimized. It will also tell you where conversions are coming from – for example, a higher conversion rate from search engine visitors or a lower rate from Twitter followers. This helps you focus on a specific source of traffic, such as SEO or social media.
Secure Hosting Can Help Improve Your Conversion Rates
One more factor that can affect your conversion rate is your choice of hosting provider. Some hosting companies may offer analytics and reporting, while others leave it all up to you. At BionicWP, we want to help you succeed, and we know that providing you with conversion data is an important step towards that goal. All of our hosting plans offer real-time uptime monitoring, which helps you monitor the speed of your site, an important aspect of SEO and user experience. A slow site is guaranteed to drive traffic away. We also offer monthly hosting reports with each of our plans. More advanced hosting plans include monthly SEO advice, SEO reporting, and Google Analytics. Security features, such as off-site backups, software updates, daily malware scans, CDN integration, a free SSL certificate, and a hack promise keep your site running smoothly, which increases your visitors’ confidence in your site and can affect traffic. We also offer support services if additional needs arise. Contact BionicWP today to ask how we can improve your conversion rates.
