A conversion rate may sound a little off-putting to many bringing an almost religious tone to the title but, it couldn’t be further from the truth. A conversion rate calculator is the best tool you have to measure the success of your advertising campaigns.
Called “converting in the marketing industry” it is the best way to help gauge your ability to get the consumer to follow what you want them to do. The better and higher the conversion rate means your marketing strategy is either working or needs improving.
The conversion rate is determining the number of visitors to a site and that you have “converted them to do what you would like”, depending on your business goals. Here are just some examples:
- Registering on your site
- Purchasing your online business
- Signing up for a newsletter or other subscriptions(paid or unpaid)
- The number of pages visited, how long spent on the site, and how many repeat visits to your site.
- Downloading mobile apps, ebooks, or a software trial
- Or to help upgrade their services
There are many ways people/customers on your site can take, ultimately this should give you an insight into what a “conversion” is and help the potential customer towards making a purchase.
Calculating The Conversion Rate
To calculate your conversion rate is surprisingly simple. If you take a weekly or monthly total of visitors to your landing page or website and take the number of conversions dividing and then the two 2 figures and multiplying by 100% is the total of conversions on your site.
For example, being last week you had 10,500 visits to your site and converted 2,000 customers your percentage ratio would be 19%. If set up correctly most analytical tools (Google Analytics etc) and online advertising (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and other platforms) will show the conversion rate within the interface.
A fantastic thing about conversion rates if you can be none specific and broad in your data, here are some examples:
- Which keywords deserve more attention and budget also known as keyword conversion rate
- Does your site help to convert the site from other sites?
- Conversion page-level rate and which of these pages is better at converting traffic
These are just a few examples, it doesn’t matter how many clicks you receive on our site what really matters is the conversion rate. If all the visits to your page amount to nothing then there is an inherent problem with your online marketing and something needs to change.
Obtaining Meaningful Data
The quality of the data is essential to understanding your business. Data can be misleading if not thoroughly examined. Many sites can boast of achieving a 100% conversion rate but, when you examine the data the site had very little traffic, sometimes only 3-4 customers.
If your site is not receiving much traffic it can be hard to get accurate data but not impossible. It will simply take more time, a large online store like Amazon could ascertain with a fair amount of accuracy the conversion rate in a day or two. For smaller businesses, it could take up to 6 months to analyze the data due to much lighter traffic. There is no correct time frame, so long as the data is accurate you will be able to understand your conversion rate possibly within one month if traffic is busy enough.
Tracking Conversion Rates
Whilst conversion rates may not be the most accurate measure of a business impart due to accidental clicks it will give a more clear picture of the success of your marketing campaign. Here is an example of which sites have the best conversion rates:
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads (technically Facebook)
- Google Analytics
- Google Ads
- Pinterest Promotion Pins
- Twitter Ads
If you have a good web website developer then tracking the results is fairly easy, it is worth investing in a strong development team or individual to implement a good and reliable system of tracking the results. By not tracking or understanding the results then it is very difficult to understand where the problems are and how to resolve them.
Summary
The conversion rate is essential to any online business, the data collected can indicate where there may be any problems with the online strategy employed, similarly, it can show what is being done correctly. Even a 3%-5% conversion rate is considered good but there is always room for improvement.
Whilst 3%-5% may be an industry acceptable standard rate, it is a small number but when you consider the math a mere 1% or 2% increase can have huge effects on your profit margins.