Why does your website exist? Think about it for a moment, and you’ll realize that it’s not an easy question to answer. If you can’t give a concise, fifteen-word answer to this question, you know you have a problem. Once you know why your website exists, you can start to figure out what actions you want your website visitors to take. After all, if your site exists to generate leads for your service company, and none of your thousands of monthly visitors ever pick up the phone or send you an email, is the website a good investment of your time and money?
There are two big problems with conversion rates, however.
Problem #1 with Conversion Rates
Since a conversion rate is seldom higher than 3%, you can spend all of your time obsessing about how to improve that number while ignoring the other 97% of your traffic. There are usually a lot of steps that visitors go through before they will convert, and we have all been to the sites that won’t let us view anything before we give them our name, email, social security number, and the keys to our home…and we hated it. My general reaction to these kinds of sites is to grudgingly give them my info, get whatever it is a wanted, curse the company under my breath, and never return to their website.
So what’s the solution? Don’t forget that not every visitor will convert every time, and don’t try to make them do something they don’t want to do: they will never come back, just like the visitor to the used car lot who can’t afford to buy right now but is relentlessly to buy right now. And, pay attention to other metrics such as your bounce rate that are leading indicators of a poor customer experience. If you can, use exit surveys and other qualitative data to ensure that your visitors are having a good experience on your site and that they are left wanting to return in the future.
Problem #2 with Conversion Rates
Not everything can be easy to measure. Let’s say that I want to measure the number of leads that Synotac generates from our website. What if someone sees the site, loves it, but when they want to call us look our number up in the Yellow Pages online? How do we track that? Or, let’s say you want to measure the number of visitors who use your resources section and successfully resolve their problem without calling or emailing your company. Is it good or bad if people spend a lot of time on a page? What if someone looks at a lot of pages?
The solution to problem #2 is, not surprisingly, to get very clever about how you can measure these things. In the digital world that we all live in now, there very little from the web that we cannot track (one huge advantage we have over print, tv, radio, and all other forms of media). Here are my top four tips for getting the data you need to measure your website’s conversion rate.
Tips for better measuring your conversion rate
1. Get a different 800 number for your website. This can be done for $10-20 a month with a good service, and now you can track all of the calls that come from your website.
2. Rebuild any email links on your website to be email forms that can be tracked.
3. Add tracking code to your e-commerce success page, contact form, newsletter sign-up form, case study download link or whatever else you might be trying to track.
4. If you are trying to measure customer success in resolving a problem without using email or phone support, add a page-specific survey to ask if the page was useful in fixing the problem. If the answer is no, ask them for details as to why.