Every website owner has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with driving more traffic to their site. We all want more traffic, if for nothing else to be able to brag to others how many unique visitors we've received. Competition among web owners aside, actually doing something with that traffic is equally as important as getting it. Yet for some reason, most site owners make the mistake of focusing most of their time on getting more traffic and rarely, if ever, focus on improving their conversion rate.

What is a conversion?

A conversion happens whenever a visitor to your site performs a desired action. It might be purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, signing up for an account, or even clicking on an advertisement (although I'd advise against making the goal of your site to have someone click away from it). One way or another, if you have a site, you've got a desired action that you want the user to perform.

How big of a difference can it make?

Consider Company A and Company B. Both sell online subscriptions to their news services for a one-time fee of $100. They each attract 1000 unique visitors per day. Company A converts 2% of their visitors whereas Company B converts 5%. Big deal right? How much does 3% really matter? Well, Company A sells 20 subscriptions per day, or 7,300 per year for $730,000 of revenue. Not bad. But Company B sells 50 subscriptions per day, or 18,250 per year for $1,825,000 of revenue!

Without any variation in traffic, you can improve conversion rate on your site and drastically increase revenue. Now, is increasing from 2% to 5% going be a challenge? Certainly, but it is by no means impossible and in most cases is probably easier than you think.

What's a good conversion rate?

Some people will tell you that an “average” conversion rate is 2%-5% and an “amazing” conversion rate is 10%-15%. To me, that's a broad statement. I'm not saying that you should completely ignore those numbers, just that you should understand where they are coming from. Those numbers tend to apply to e-commerce sites selling to consumers. They also don't factor in where traffic is coming from, product pricing, and about a hundred other potential factors that could affect your conversion rate.

There are times when a 2% conversion rate is phenomenal. For example, if you are selling software licenses for $20,000, converting 1 in 50 visitors is pretty exemplary. On the flip side, if your goal is to have people sign up for a football newsletter and all of your traffic is coming from an ad you placed on NFL.com, 15% might be considered really poor.

My answer to “what's a good conversion rate” is any conversion rate that's better than your current one.

Start by doing a self-evaluation and set a baseline

Before you can even think about trying to increase your conversion rate, you need to have a system in place to track your current conversions. In its simplest form, conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions into the number of visitors to your site for a specified time period. Most site owners will want more in depth statistics (such as what page visitors came from and what pages potential customers left their site from) so I would recommend a web analytics program like the free Google Analytics that provides in-depth reporting and can calculate your conversion rates for you.

How will I know if my changes worked?

In my mind, the only way to think about conversion rate is to start at your current rate and start striving to convert 100% of the visitors to your site. Is that ever going to happen? Probably not, but as Les Brown said - “shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” Shoot for 100% conversion rate and even if you don't get there, in attempting to do so you'll be instilling the necessary qualities for amazing improvements.

With that in mind, you should begin the process of trying to improve your conversion rate from your baseline. The bad news when it comes to increasing conversion rate is that there is no “one thing” that every site owner can do to increase it. The good news is that there are literally thousands of things that you can try that might increase it. Each one of those things might help, or each might hurt.

And therein lies the key to success in increasing conversion rate – testing, evaluating, and then testing and evaluating some more. Each time you should be striving to “beat your previous best.” If you went from 2% to 2.2%, keep the change and try for 2.5% with your next change. If you went from 2% to 1.5%, undo the change and try to get back over 2% with your next change. In general, you should give a sufficient amount of time to evaluate a change – I generally use one month as a rule of thumb, but you should factor in how much traffic you get and how large the change is when determining how long collect data for before evaluating a change.

What type of changes should I make?

As I mentioned before, there are thousands of things that you can change that can affect conversion rates. So where should you start? Start by walking in the shoes of your customer. Using the example of an e-commerce site, there are several types of customers that find your site. For the customer looking to buy immediately, is it easy to find the “buy” button or do you have to look around for it? For the customer wanting more information (product info, shipping info, or info about your business), is that easy to find? And for customers just browsing, do you have a way to entice them to buy, or at least entice them to sign up for a newsletter so that you can try to convert them at a later time?

Asking yourself those questions should result in several subtle changes and probably a few not-so-subtle changes that you can make. In addition, ask yourself whether or not the design of your site - logo, layout, colors, and font - appeal to senses and make it easy for people to find what they're looking for.

You should also seriously consider the content of your text. Is it possible that some people don't understand what your product or service does? Could international users interpret your phrases differently than domestic users, and if so, is there a way you could re-word your copy to avoid confusion? Ad copy is a funny thing – a subtle word change can often drastically affect conversion rates. The only way to know is to test.

Remember, you should only make one change at a time to be able to properly evaluate it. Each change will help point you in the right direction of the next change. Much like SEO, increasing conversion rate is not a one time event, it is an improvement process that you facilitate over the life of your site. That said, it is not an extremely difficult process, and when used in conjunction with sound SEO it can bring results to your site that you could have never imagined.