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General Approach to Conversion Improvement The basic approach to improving conversion rates of your site is as following: measure, experiment with changes, and test the results. We now need to define the core set of conversion rates and metrics to measure. Then, we will move on to changes that can be made and testing the effects of these changes.
Main Conversion Rates to Be Measured Regardless of the business model, every website has a wide variety of different conversion rates that can be measured. The most obvious are those leading to the completion of an online purchase process or any other activity. These activities can be divided into two main groups: - Product purchase
- Lead (online registration, or any collection of user information)
Both of these groups are broad (especially the 2nd one) and have many variations. Furthermore, any product purchase or lead can be broken down to a series of smaller discreet steps (each step with its own conversion). However, several big-picture conversions should be your primary focus in the process of web analytics. They are: - Home to purchase
- Special offer to purchase
- Lead generation
Home to Purchase This conversion rate measures the share of your home page visitors that made an order with you. (Home to Purchase Conversion) = (Orders by Visitors to Home Page) / (Visitors to Home Page) Usually, the order page is located several clicks away from the first page. Therefore, a user should go through a sequence like (home page) – (product category) – (individual product) – (shopping cart) – (checkout) – (purchase complete) The Home to Purchase conversion is the broadest of all conversion rates and is a good general benchmark. However, if your site has many products, this measure becomes irrelevant. It is not wise to compare conversion rates of purchasing iPod Shuffle with that of and 80Gb iPod Photo. Differences in demand and customer perception may often make conversion rates for different products incomparable. A variation of Home to Purchase is a Search to Purchase conversion. It is, essentially, a Home to Purchase rate for the sites that rely heavily on internal search results. This rate shows performance of the following sales funnel: (search results) – (product page) – (shopping cart) – (checkout) – (purchase complete) Special Offer to Purchase This conversion rate measures responsiveness of your visitors to different special promotions. This includes everything from different merchandising and pricing options to email or advertising landing pages. It is extremely important to measure these “Special Offer” conversions to see what works and what doesn't with your site and your offerings. The sidebar shows how you can track your special offers with Web CEO. Lead Generation A great number of web sites do not try to sell their products immediately, hoping for an impulse purchase. Very often, the main function of a web site is to generate leads – that is, to gather some valuable user information, usually by offering them some incentive. Later, this information can be used to perform e-mail marketing campaigns etc. to promote the product and generate an order. A typical funnel in this case is (incentive) – (form) – (reward for filling the form). You can change incentives and tweak form parameters (or break it into several forms for a better insight) to see how the changes would affect the lead conversion rate. Abandonment Rate Abandonment rate is a flip side of conversion rate – it shows how many people failed to move to the next step in your sales funnel. You should calculate abandonment rate for each step in your multiple-step process. For example, if the process has four steps like (visitor) – (download trial software) – (register the software) – (purchase the software), then you will have three abandonment rates: (visitors) – (downloads); (downloads) – (registrations); (registrations) – (orders). On each of these steps (and everywhere else), abandonment rate will be (Abandonment rate) = 1- (number of users at the step) / (number of users at the previous step) For example, if of 100 visitors, 20 downloaded the trial software, the abandonment rate for downloads will be (Abandonment rate for downloads) = 1 – (number of downloads) / (number of visitors) = = 1 – 20 / 100 = 0.8 Improving Conversion “How can I improve my conversion?” – this is probably the most often asked question by people who own any kind of web business. As we have already noted, there is no unified approach (or, even better, a secret magic pill) to improving the conversion. The process is about constant changes (but only one at a time!) and gauging the response. It is extremely important to make small incremental changes to see which of them make a positive difference, which make no effect on your conversion, and which harm your performance. There is, however, a certain set of web site elements that need your attention more than others do. These are: - “Calls-to-action”
- Registration requirements
- Purchase process advancement indicator
“Calls-to-action” Any marketing communication should be completed with a clear call to action. It is very important to avoid unnecessary “leakages” (when prospective clients go to other pages from your site away from the intended selling scenario). Therefore, every page should have one clear and persuasive call to action. Furthermore, it should be one of the most prominent elements of the page. Forget the perfect harmony your designer is asking for! Make the “Add to Cart” button big and outstanding! AMAZON.COM 
BARNES & NOBLE.COM 
As you can see, Amazon has two prominent buttons: “Pre-order this item today” and “Pre-order with one click”, whereas Barns and Noble has a much weaker “Pre-order now” call-to-action. Registration Requirements If your goal is an impulse buy, you shouldn't require registration from your prospective customers. 10 minutes and 10 clicks needed to fill in all the forms may be enough to discourage them from buying with you or cause them to simply change their mind. Let's look how leading e-tailers are solving this problem. APPLE.COM merges new customer registration into the checkout process 
DELL.COM does the same in one big form 
Looking at the above examples, we can conclude that customer registration should be seamlessly integrated into the checkout process. Again, it is better to make customer registration optional and offer a prospective customer some incentive to register than to make registration obligatory, intrusive, and distracting. Purchase Process Advancement Indicator If you want your customers to feel good during the purchase process (and of course your do), you should have a good purchase progress indicator. Then, your customers will see where they are in the purchase process and will not wonder why you are asking them for a certain information. Below are two examples of good-looking and informative purchase progress indicators: AMAZON.COM 
APPLE.COM 
What You Should Remember - Conversion is a ratio of people who completed an action (purchase, registration, etc.) to those who started the process (site visitors, etc.)
- The main conversion rates are home-to-purchase and special offer-to-purchase showing how many people that entered your site (or were subject to a special offer - advertising, price promotion, etc.) and eventually bought your product.
- Abandonment rate shows how many people failed to move to the next step in your sales funnel
- To improve conversion you should experiment with changes to find out what works best for your site. The main areas for experimentation should be calls to action and registration requirements.
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