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Website Conversion Metrics: Why You Should Know Yours and How To Improve Them
Matt Browne, Z57 REALTOR® Resource
Conversion is a term many have heard in online marketing discussions, but what exactly is it?
Simply stated, conversion is a measure of how many people complete the intended action. An intended action could be a registration form, lead generation form, simple search, or any other desired task that proves fruitful for business. To determine the completion percentage, you simple take how many opportunities you had at converting that visitor divided by how many actions were completed.
For example, if your intended action was for people to pass through your home search form you simply take how many people viewed your home search form (say 1,000) divided by how many people completed your home search form (say 100) and divide the numbers. 100 divided by 1000 yields a home search conversion of 10%.
Success Measurement
Ultimately the conversion metric is one of the most important success measurements for your website. Why is it important? First, you can measure the effectiveness of your web forms, and secondly because it provides a statistical analysis of how comfortable people are with your website or with the action you are asking them to complete. If you have a low conversion percentage you may want to look at your value proposition. The "What's In It For Me" test should help conversion.
Benchmark Your ROI
In a sense, your conversion metric tells you how much money it costs to sell homes. If you know the value of your visitors and your conversion percentage you can project your ROI from Internet marketing. For example, if someone pays $1 per visitor from Google and they have a visitor-to-lead conversion percentage of 10%, they will need to buy 10 visitors to get one viable lead. So, you pay $10 per quality lead. One can then take this logic one step further and calculate their lead-to-transaction conversion percentage (say it is 2%). If you are paying $10 per lead, and 1 out of 50 leads close, you must pay $500 to get to your next transaction.
Increase Your Profit
Most people experience a visitor to lead conversion of at least 10%. It's not uncommon for a home search form to convert at 20% (see the our landing page conversion study). "Warm & Fuzzies" help people feel more comfortable at your site. This includes pictures, testimonials, or anything that conveys your good nature. A tip that has recently been successful for marketers is to make the text on the submit button more descriptive. Instead of saying "Continue", try re-labeling the button to a term that describes the action that will happen next, such as "Search Homes".
Keep Experimenting!
It's extremely important to remember when you do testing you keep all other variables except the variable to are testing constant for effectiveness. You also must give your test a long enough run time to get meaningful data. We recommend testing 90 days at a time.
With a careful review of your website statistics, and a willingness for trial and error, you can begin to increase your website's profit potential exponentially.
