Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors to a site that complete a desired action.

Conversion rate is the primary measurement for testing and optimizing an eCommerce website. If the conversion rate goes up a larger percentage of people are completing the desired action.

Generally conversion rates measure whether a customer bought something, but it can measure other goals like newsletter sign-up or creating an account too.

Conversion rate can measure specific actions on a single page or can be used more broadly to represent an action relative to the site.

A single-page conversion rate could measure people landing on a “contact us” page and deciding to submit the contact us form. When making changes to the “contact us” page, aim to increase the conversion rate of people who decide to submit the form.

A broad application of conversion rates could measure visitors to a site for a specific keyword who convert to a goal.

Common tools to track conversion rates are Google Analytics and Google Optimizer.  Setting up goals in Google Analytics gives the broad conversion rates described above, while Google Optimizer manages tests and optimizes page specific conversion rates.

Tags: Analytics, conversion rate

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Analytics, General E-commerce, Google, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.