Conversion – what is it and why should it be measured?

Website owners primarily focus on getting traffic to their site. But high traffic does not automatically guarantee high sales.

Only properly defined conversions, guided conversion paths will show us how much sales we record thanks to the website.

From a website owner’s perspective, it’s measuring conversions that provides the answer to the important question, how many sales does my website deliver? How many sales is that? What is the cost per sale?

What is conversion?

A conversion is an expected action performed by a user in response to a company’s marketing efforts.

In other words, conversion is the transformation of a passive website user (i.e. just browsing the site) into an active recipient, performing the action we assumed. With remembering to use one rule – we have to encourage the Internet user to be active.

What are goals and conversion types?

We can divide conversion into macro conversions and micro conversions.

Macro conversion is the main goal from the point of view of the owner of a particular website. It is the priority task that an internet user should perform.

Micro conversions, on the other hand, are any less significant but also important action taken by users, ultimately leading to a business relationship with you.

Conversion goals can vary depending on your business model and company specifics.

The goal of conversion is both the “big action,” i.e. registering a customer account, and those minor actions, such as leaving your phone number.

We can divide the conversion targets due to micro conversions and macro conversions.

Depending on the sales model, the goal of micro-conversion may be:

• newsletter signup
• filling out forms, surveys, statistics from the website
• sending a request, message
• return to page
• click on the banner ad on your website
• viewing and clicking on infographics
• sharing an article, an offer, an entire page by a user
• providing your contact number at callback24
• viewing of a video on the site by a user
• clicking on the phone number on the website
• download file, PDF, checklist, guide
• displaying more subpages during one session
• gateway to another site
• displaying the website you are interested in
• reading the article
• watching the video posted on webpage
• the longest stay on the page

Depending on the sales model, the goal of macro conversion may be:

• making a purchase from the site / adding the product to the cart;
• registering a customer account.

These actions, generally called conversions, will vary because the tasks of each website are different. They can be sales tasks, informational tasks, getting people for some action. Moreover, each owner may expect different action from the users – one will want to sell a course and the other will want to inform about the appearance at the fair.

If the users perform a different action than expected, it is likely that we have placed the wrong messages on the page or the wrong user path. Our site is unreadable to them and the buying process is unclear.

Why measure macro and micro conversions on a website?

Macro conversion provides us with knowledge about the effectiveness of marketing activities. Analysis of specific data and realized goals allows us to determine whether our online store is profitable or not. From the owner’s point of view macro conversion gives us the answer to the question about profitability of running our business.

On the other hand, the analysis of micro conversions shows us the path of our customer’s purchase. Even if the number of macro conversions on the page is small, these micro conversions will show us what we can change, at what point users withdraw and abandon purchases.

Every conversion brings us the answer to the question, where am I? Are my business activities well targeted?

What are the tools for measuring conversions?

Conversion in itself will not tell us much. Only its measurement and analysis will show us the way and guide us in writing strategy.
To measure conversions we will need tools from Google.

Among the most popular tools is, of course, Google Analytics. It is available for free, for everyone. It shows data that we did not have access to before, allows us to track almost all actions and behaviors taken by people on the website. Thanks to Google Analytics we can answer such questions as:

• how many people have registered?
• how many visitors came to your website from Google Ads?
• how many people have navigated to your site from social media?

In your Google Analytics dashboard you will also find Google optimize – a tool used to conduct A/B tests – very useful in optimizing your site – we write about it below.

Website owners should implement Google Analytics as soon as the site is released to the Internet. This will give them a lot of information about the group of people visiting the site or store.

And the ultimate time to implement Google Analytics is when you turn on your first ad campaign.

If we add Callback24 to Google Analytics we will get a powerful information harvester, marketing data at a premium.

Integration of these two tools will allow us to track the calls made from Callback24 widget and straight from the web pages (calltracking). Thanks to this integration we will register up to 50% more conversions.

What is conversion rate?

Conversion rate is a measure of a website’s success.

It shows the number of conversions per number of total page visits. The conversion rate is expressed as a percentage. The higher the conversion rate, the better the effectiveness of marketing activities.
The more popular a website is, the more users will take an interesting action on the website. This means higher conversion rate and higher earnings for us.

Example:
1000 people visited our site and the conversion rate was 8%. It means that 8% of the visitors realized the conversion goal, e.g. made a purchase in the store, downloaded an advertising catalog or filled out a contact form.

What conversion rate is satisfactory?

The average conversion rate is between 2 and 5%. You, as the site owner, should care about the highest possible rate. About a quarter of online companies manage to achieve a ratio above 5%. One in ten companies achieve ratios of 10% or higher.

According to the 2018 Ecommerce Conversion Rate Benchmark report, topic blogs and discussion forums generate the highest conversion rate at a whopping 5.44%. In second place, with a rate of 5.32%, is email marketing. Social networks convert the least, with a conversion rate of 0.74%.

How can you count your conversion rate?

To calculate the indicator, you should divide the users who performed a specific action(conversion), by the number of all unique users or by the number of all clicks on the ad. The result should be multiplied by 100%.

How to increase your conversion rate?

Work on the conversion rate should start with setting conversion goals. Once we know them, we take actions to eliminate “empty traffic”, i.e. minimize the short, not profitable, visits to the website.

It’s worth working on every detail – from headlines, to call to action, to purchase path optimization.

What does a customer’s purchase depend on?

To find out, it’s best to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer.

Type a few keywords of interest into Google, so we can see if we are on the Internet at all, if we can be easily found. We will immediately verify which online stores are better positioned and who our competition is. We will check if there are other links to our online store, if someone talks about us, mentions us in articles.

Moving on, already to the site itself, we immediately check how long our website takes to open. Opening the home page of our online store, we wonder what the first impression of users will be. We verify if we have access to contact data, if there is a contact form, if the content of the message is displayed well, if there is a newsletter and if signing up for the newsletter is rewarded in some way. We look at marketing consents, whether the information processed is described in some way.

When running marketing campaigns, we should have specific goals. Goals, or micro and macro conversions. Based on the achievement of these goals, we will know whether the campaign is effective or not.

If we notice that the conversion goal is not being met, we should look at the behavior of the audience and see where the abandonment occurs. It is worth paying attention to elements such as:

• the speed at which a page loads on the Internet;
• site readability on mobile devices;
• how the products are presented/described;
• transparency of the purchase process / order placement / form filling
• product and shipping price;
• the availability of reviews on Google;
• store position in Google search engine;
• availability of contact information.

For users, the following are also very important:

• security – that is why you should take care about the security certificate – encrypted SSL protocol. It affects not only the sense of security of Internet users, but also a positive perception by Google algorithms. Appropriate consents are also important in the place from which the entered data will be processed.
• opinions – positive opinions in the search engine and in social media build reliability, credibility and trust to the company. A user is more likely to use the company’s services/products seeing opinions about it and the way the company reacts to neutral or negative opinions.

• simplified way of shopping, i.e. without the need to register or provide too much data. Making a purchase by the customer is the result of many variables. It is in fact the last stage of their adventure with our business. We must make sure that the Internet user reaches the end of the purchasing process and leaves our store satisfied.

How to prepare a website?

The purpose of your website is to sell or make an offer. You create a website for users, potential customers and not for yourself.
Of course, you are not alone in the market. The goal of your competitors, both near and far, is exactly the same. Therefore, your website must stand out and must attract customers. How to do it?

a) user experience – aesthetic impressions, functionality, loading speed, clarity of individual features, accessibility on the mobile version, all this affects the viewer’s experience ending in conversion.
Mismatched smartphone screen or too slow loading page will discourage potential viewers and will not attract new ones.

b) Target audience – the design, content, graphics of the images should match the expectations and needs of the predefined target audience. If the content of the website does not meet the needs of the audience, it will also negatively affect the conversion.

c) minimalistic look, calmness – a website attacking with banners, bright colors, too much text will make the customer run away from it very quickly.

What elements should be included on the website?

Do you care about a high number of conversions? And high sales?

Marketing is not enough. Effective promotional activities will attract users to your website, but they will not guarantee higher sales.
It is your product that has to encourage the customer to make a purchase. It is your product and your services that have to convince a potential customer that using your offer will change his/her life for the better.

Therefore, before you start selling, check if you have these elements on your website:

• logo, headline, your company name;
• contact information, company information;
• Privacy Policy and Cookie Module;
• Terms and Conditions, Shipping Methods and Costs, Return Protocol (online store);
• Call to action – calls that urge customers to take action;
• Brief information about you, what makes you different, why your offer is worth using;
• Testimonials / Customer Reviews;
• pictures and reliable product descriptions;
• Footer with information;
• Callback24 widget to call the customer back within 15 seconds;
• SSL security certificate
• Links to social media and YouTube channels.

How do you build credibility and position yourself as an expert?

Many factors affect the credibility and effectiveness of a website, not just good advertising. Very important are the so-called soft factors, such as building the position of an expert, building brand integrity. This is a specific long-term action, developed on the basis of the strategy, in which basically the whole team participates.

Such activities include:

1. Sector-specific, unique, expert content – very often the user is not looking for a product but a solution to his problem. Finding someone who will help him from the position of an expert and will have the right assortment in the offer will benefit both sides.
2. Videos – People buy with their eyes. An attractive presentation of the product, its use and benefits using video material will be much more attractive than a dry description alone. Especially that it does not have to be a long video, just a few seconds is enough to convince the user.
3. Graphics – Infographics, interesting charts, data summaries – everything that a user can see and assimilate at one glance. What matters is the message and attractiveness of the presented materials.

How to optimize conversions?

First we need to answer the question, what is conversion optimization?
Conversion optimization is making changes to a website or online store that will increase our conversion rate.

These changes could be:

• content modification
• graphic changes
• call to action button changes
• layout change
• purchase process
• the layout of the site’s elements and tabs.

Any small change (such as words on the front page ) can increase lead generation by up to 221% – this was the case for Switch Video, a producer of instructional videos..

Also incorporating Marketing Automation and surveying participants can increase sales by 50%. Customer sentiment and their experience with the website is important here.

In fact, very often a good UX contributes to an increase in the ratio. This was the case in the fashion industry – by 170% and in the transportation industry – by 120.75%!

On the other hand, placing a Callback24 widget – which allows you to call back an interested person within a few seconds – allows you to increase your conversion rate by up to 224%!

To influence the conversion rate, we must first optimize the site.
This process should be done only in consultation with an SEO Specialist who will guide our actions and show us the possible results.

Optimization is nothing but testing. When we conduct an analysis, compare metrics, then we get the answer A/B tests are useful in this case. They consist in preparing several versions of a given element and showing them to the target group. This way you can test a landing page, filling out an offer form, changes in content and graphics.

In testing, we can assist with tools:

• PageSpeed Insights – calculates the speed and usability of the website separately for the computer version and for mobile devices
• Google Analytics – allows you to measure and analyze traffic to your site. 
• Callback24 – allows you to verify how many users are calling and in combination with Google Analytics shows the full customer path. 
• Google Optimize – allows you to test different versions of a website
• HotJar – allows you to preview individual customer movements on the site, see which places are the most popular
• conversion funnel analysis – allows you to carry out mailings and verify their effects

As we wrote at the beginning of this article, conversion means something different for every site.
Similarly, conversion optimization – the steps taken should be individual, tailored to the specifics of your industry.

What are the tangible benefits of performing such optimization:

• higher conversion, i.e. sales
• increase website traffic
• acquiring new customers.

In conclusion, the term conversion should become a permanent part of your marketing vocabulary.
From the above article, you already know that creating a website is just the beginning of your online business. To make your website work and deliver tangible financial results, you need to have defined goals and specific metrics.