Unfortunately, receiving high levels of traffic to your site doesn’t always translate into more sales. In this first blog of our series, we will talk about the all-important metric conversion rate. Continue reading to learn everything you always wanted to know about it.
Conversion rate in a nutshell
Conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors who complete a specific, desirable action. This action is a conversion, and it can come in different forms – newsletter subscribers, downloading a whitepaper or making a purchase.
The higher the number of visitors to your site that complete a conversion, then the higher your conversion rate. As a result, a higher conversion rate equals more leads, more engaged contacts, and potentially, more business. Conversion rate is a key metric for your website and for your marketing; a high conversion rate will indicate a successful marketing strategy and user experience design. People like what they are seeing and reading and ultimately they interact with the site!
How to calculate your conversion rate
To calculate conversion rate we need to take the number of conversions and divide this by the total number of visits to our site. For example, imagine that last month we had 100 visitors and 25 new newsletter subscribers, with newsletter subscriptions being the conversion we want to measure. If this is the case, we will be able to get our percentage by dividing 25 by 100, obtaining a 25% conversion rate.
Nowadays, thanks to technology we have a number of marketing tools on offer that calculate conversion rate for you. If you are looking for a conversion rate calculator, most analytics platforms will provide you with this metric as an out-of-the-box report, such as Google Analytics.
How does conversion rate affect your business?
As we explained in the introduction to this blog, conversion rate is a helpful tool to measure your website performance. If you understand how your traffic behaves you will be able to make better decisions.
When you work to improve your conversion rate, this translates into more interactions on your site. A good conversion rate means a stronger Return On Investment (ROI). The main idea is that boosting the conversion rate, eventually turns into bigger revenue.
How to Improve
At this stage, it’s more than evident that a low conversion rate is not what we are looking for. For this reason, one of the most important questions is how to improve this metric.
Well to put it simply, you improve your conversion rate by increasing the number of conversions. So using the example earlier on, if you could increase your conversion rate to 30% – that would result in 5 more newsletter subscribers.
The first thing to consider is repurposing your offer. If what you have is not bringing any conversions to your site, it’s always better to consider making a change in your offering – whether that’s content, or how your products/services are positioned. Make it engaging!
A second key tip is working on optimising your site. This means optimising your website, which can be achieved by improving your call to actions, redesigning your site interface or providing high-quality images.
In summary, conversion rate is an essential metric for assessing and improving website performance. It’s essential that we understand its impact on the business and how it works.
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing – whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
