Traffic Conversion: Return on Investment (ROI)
Summary overview
In this article, you will find information about:
- What is a conversion rate?
- How to improve your conversion rate
- Conversion rates for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Conversion as a measurement of ROI
- ‘Desired actions’ and ‘shortened paths to actions’
- Drop-off points and leaks
Return on Investment (ROI)
Just like a brick-and-mortar business, a website needs careful management to ensure commercial success. Content management decisions should be based on web metrics, not guesswork. Setting measurable business goals and monitoring progress will help you to build a website that generates revenue.
Your website conversion rate tells you how many of your visitors are being ‘converted’ from visitors into clients, customers, leads, or subscribers.
If you purchase your traffic through a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisingcampaign, or invest money into website management, then a visitor who has been converted into a client, or completed a purchase (an action known as a ‘desired outcome’) is a return on your investment.
A well built PPC advertising campaign with optimized search terms can bring you visitors at an acquisition cost of pennies-per-click.
Once visitors are on your site, optimized navigability is necessary to ensure that the traffic you worked so hard to drive to your website also finds what they want (provided that you have it).
An important feature of Opentracker that will assist you in this process is clickstream analysis. How many clicks stand between your visitors and the outcome that you desire? Are there obvious drop-off points between ‘add-to-cart’ events and checkout? A drop-off point, or a leak, is a place where visitors leave your site, but are not intended to do so. In some cases eliminating a click, leak, or drop-off place will lead to a substantial increase in conversion rate.
The idea is to identify bottlenecks and shorten the path to desired actions.
Steps to Improve Conversion Rate:
- Reduce the number of clicks to your desired action
- Identify drop-off points and eliminate them
- Identify bottlenecks and improve traffic flow
Learn about your Conversion Rate:
- What percentage of your visitors are converted?
- What is your best source of converted visitors?
Learn about Visitors who Converted:
- Study the visitors who complete specified actions and become clients
- Do they come from a specific advertisement or search engine
- Do they return?
- Learn what your ‘model visitor’ looks like
Making informed business and content management decisions can make your webiste a profitable enterprise. In essence, conversion metrics are about finding out what works and putting your advertising dollars there. Use your statistics to track your progress over time. Measure a campaign from start to finish, evaluate, update your site, and measure again.
Glossary:
ROI
Goal
Conversion
Source
