No, this isn’t a religious site and we’re not going to start telling you all about the Holy Trinity (nor for that matter will we be discussing the Book or Mormon or the Quran or the Torah or any other religious teachings). Instead, when we say conversions here, we mean sales. The term conversions basically means that you ‘covert’ a visitor to your website from a visitor to a buyer. Now, doing this involves watching certain pieces of information. Here’s what you need to know:
Google Analytics
If you haven’t signed up for it yet, go ahead and sign up for Google Analytics. It’s free and will provide you with a wealth of information about your customers. There are a whole bunch of things to see here but the stuff we’re most interest in is:
Bounce Rate
By far the most important thing to look at is your bounce rate. Presumably, you know how many people overall visited your site and how many sales you made (if you don’t know, Analytics can help with the former and your sales receipts can help with the latter). Bounce rate shows you how many people dropped by your site, looked at your landing page and then walked away. The lower your bounce rate, the more you are getting through to your customers. If you have a very high bounce rate, take the time to tweak your landing page and try to use split testing to see which version works best.
First Visit or Return Visitors?
Most people need to see an ad for a product around 7 times before they’ll decide to make a purchase. You need to check closely how many people have visited and then immediately signed up as opposed to people who returned. This is also easily checked in Analytics. Look for the individual page where your sales are made and check how many visitors to that page are return visitors and how many are first timers. The more first timers you can convert, the better off you are.
Cost Per Sale
This is not really an analytics thing. Instead, this requires simply doing some math. How much does it cost you to run your site, how much are you spending on your advertising and how many overall sales are you making from it? Now divide the total cost by the total number of sales. If your cost per sale is more than your profit, you are losing money and need to find a way to increase the number of sales or trim your costs.
Bottom Line
The bottom line here is that if you want to build a successful business, it’s not enough to simply put up a website and then hope people buy things from you. You need to take everything into account so that you maximize your sales and minimize your costs. Without doing this, you could easily find that even with lots of conversions, you are throwing money away because it costs you too much to get each one of them.