Last time we spoke about bounce rate, the amount of people who “bounce off” the site without going into it, and location of visitors. We used the example of London web design, and said the location can tell you how effective marketing campaigns are being by showing you where the visitors are from.

Continuing from this, we move on to conversion rates. This is another important piece of data that helps you target your site in a much more effective way to maximize return on investment.

Even if your site isn’t ecommerce, it’s useful to know the percentage of visitors who convert in one way or another. That might be a sale, a contact, a query or any other kind of action taken by the visitor on your site.

It’s useful to know where in the process they are stopping, abandoning their efforts or otherwise not engaging any further with your site. Some failures are inevitable, from visitors changing their mind, realizing they don’t have money, or other reasons. To put it into perspective, for an ecommerce site, 3% conversion is viewed as a decent rate. Yep, 3%.

Bearing that in mind, study the path most of your visitors take to get to the basket, contact form or whatever and analyse where the majority of them abandon. This should give you an idea of what’s in the way of them completing, and lets you do something about it.

You can also check what visitors do after they convert. If they leave straight away, you could be missing out on highlighting other offers or upselling. Interpreting this data and knowing what to do about it is part of sales and marketing, and is often best learned through trial and error. If you see a potential problem, change it and see how it works for a while. If things improve keep the changes, if they don’t try something else.

Now let’s look at target pages. A target page is a product, services or offer page. For example a blogs target page is its latest post, whereas a businesses is it’s information or services page. If there is traffic on the target pages but far less conversion, it makes sense to follow the trail from the product page to the checkout. Look for anything that gets in the way of the conversion and remove it.

So let’s put it all together in an example.

As you should know by now, we do London web design. Our bounce rate is calculated from visits to our home page that don’t visit the portfolio, testimonial or contact page. Our location data tells us how many visitors are from London, or the UK.

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