When it comes to driving traffic to your website, your website traffic should be a conversion of some kind. Otherwise, why have the website?
What’s a conversion? When a visitor arrives to your site, there should be a specific task you’d like them to complete. Whether it is making a sale, contacting you, downloading something, sharing something they’ve found on your site etc. Those visitors who complete the desired task can be said to have become a ‘conversion’.
Analytics will help you track them, and help you determine where to make improvements to your site to have more conversions.
For example, let’s assume you have a services website of some sort and you want your visitors to contact you with a business inquiry. Through analytics you will be able to determine how many visitors get to your, and then visit your contact page. You could even determine how many of them fill out your form, and click ‘send’.
A simplistic way to determine conversion rate (and trust me, collecting, and analyzing analytics data can get very complex, but for the sake of a beginner, let’s start here).
Let’s use a little math to determine your conversion rate. Let’s also use a visit to the contact page as your conversion goal.
You find that you have 100 visitors to your contact page last month and 5 of them actually completed a contact page inquiry. If you then divide 5 by 100 and the multiply by 100 you can then come up with your percentage of conversions. Out of those 100 visits to your contact page you ended up with a 5% conversion rate.
You may be saying, ‘Well, 5% isn’t too many!” But, keep in mind a lot of research will show that a 2-3% conversion rate is close to average.
Again, the conversion formula:
Total conversions / Total Views x 100
