Forum Moderators: buckworks
Are your products good enough? Are they priced competitively? Are your keyword phrases ones that attract high quality visitors? Are you helping people and advising them as well as flogging stuff to them? etc
Which resources send you the high quality traffic? Can you increase your profile in those resources?
What is your conversion rate?
Millie
On one of my sites I offer free samples. The customer enters their details etc and gets a free sample. The only thing is that the form is currently broke. But!
I think that someone who is ordering a free sample probably won't be interested in spending the $20 / $30 that it takes to get the product proper. Therefore I am not really loosing too many sales, if any at all. If someone is really desperate they email and ask.
However, I think that to the prospective customer the offer of free samples is reassuring. It says to them, this is a company which is giving away free samples of their products, therefore they must be sizeable and well established. This then builds up their confidence in the site and trust in the company, making them much more likely to purchase.
I think without the offer of free samples my sale conversion rate would be much lower.
Anybody else with similar experiences?
It seems to me that 'typical' is what you / we all need to go beyond, in terms of content, usability, benefits to the customer, customer service etc in order to elevate yourself / ourselves above the rest, and therefore gain greater mind-share and sales.
M
Firstly we have no idea of the specifics of so many items in relation to the question and the answers posted so far.
For example "conversion"?
of what into what, expressed as what?
Secondly because I dont think people will share more than a general idea one way to "go about something" .. and I think it is unreasonable to expect people to be more specific about tactics that are making them money which may be a benefit to their competitors.
So I think such threads are best read "between the lines" especially as people are selling all sorts of things to all sorts of people .... e.g:
- airline tickets online ....
When I decide to fly somewhere I go online and I do buy tickets .... that session ... after looking at no more than 2-4 options because there often is no more choice than that and delay will result in increased prices ...
So thats a 50% to 25% conversion ratio for my visits and it is an online sale? but you guys have been saying 1-2% above here .. so that does not seem right .... most people I know also only go looking for airline tickets when we actually want them, its not much of a life to window shop for those products :-)
- repeat purchases of consumables .... I am a 100% conversion for the firms I use because I go back select my products and buy them ...
so % conversion of what, first time visitors or repeat visitors who have bought before ....
These threads are so unspecific / unscientific in fact that I dont think you should lodge those percentages anywhere in your consciousness as they may completely pollute your thinking.
No offence intended to anyone btw :-)
I personally think that this particular subject is very effective. OK, maybe I may or may not be looking at specific things that would help, but I am sure people have experienced growth in conversion to sales following changes that they have made to their sites.
[edited by: jweighell at 4:32 pm (utc) on Nov. 12, 2003]
100 visitors = 1 sale conversion done = 1% of peole buy.
yes you may call back and buy and yes the conversion rate should over time increase if the sites run correctly.
And the facts speak for themselves. Also, I think it's generally agreed, that if we talk about conversions we mean a visitor to a sale. Most of the time ignoring repeats and the like because those are industry specific. I beleive htere is a LOT of value in generalisations and statistics, most of the world operates like that quite successfully.
When I look at my stats, I can say I hax x visitors and y sales, thats a conversion of x/y. This is general and universal. I do not need to qualify anything else. This will include repeates and drop ins and all sorts of noise, but luckyly the statistics are on our side and since this noise will be present on all sites in some form, we're back to general, universal stats.
Most people (98%+ according to the statistics) don't come to the site to buy. They come there by accident, looking for info, or pre-shopping without intend to buy. You say you visit 2-4 sites before you buy... how many sites do you visit per day? How much do you buy? probably less then 1 in a 100. In fact this value across all surfers is the same as teh conversion ratio across all sites.
I agree you can bend stats every which way, but I also believe very firmly that statistics are both relevant and extremely valuable.
Do not underestimate statistics, and every number spat out by a poster here, is invaluable to everybody else, adding yet another piece to the giant puzzle of the whole.
Just to add some of my own: My "Buy XYZ" pages have conversion rations of 7-9%, but my "XYZ Information" pages ahve 0, simply because htere is no way to buy fomr there. Most people look for info and never move on to the buy page. Since hte site is not stricktly sales, my conversion rate is therefore somewhat belov average. I guess maybe around 0.1-0.5%.
Cheers,
SN
Hi Essex_boy (I am also in Essex :-) ok .. so a tactic to increase conversion rates would be to get delisted for terms that rank for which you dont get business.
That would increase your conversion ratio but of course it would not increase your business by one iota which is why the whole premise of conversion rates has to be discussed with a lot of other information from the site at hand. Is any part of the site informational or educational for example?
killroy I agree facts are great, when they are specified and everyone knows precisely what they are. When they are not they are often used to mislead, hence the phrase about statistics and economy with the truth :-)
Regarding benchmarking I agree its an area that can be valuable and interesting, I would qualify "with what" are you comparing / benchmarking though, for all I know jweighell could be selling cigarrettes over national and tax boundaries at discount while the majority of sites reporting the 1.5% conversion rates in the studies millie reports could be supplying B2B services or something.
I was careful in my original message not to start quoting percentages as, yes, it is all very dependant on what you are selling.
Assuming that the testers you have asked to try your site, navigation, product selection options, cart, payment gateway, etc - the usability issues - say that it is all fine and there are no issues to attend to, a way to increase your business would be to stimulate a better quality of visitor than you are currently getting.
By a better quality of visitor I mean one that is more qualified to become a customer and of the type of customers that are most valuable or profitable to you. Not just any customer or any sale.
Thats not necessarily going to increase your conversion ratio - but is conversion ratio the most important point? Are your costs related directly to visitor numbers?
Equally is your profitability directly related to how many individual sales you make? is it not more related to how much profit you make on the total of your sales compared to your total costs. That includes costs which relate to each transaction, processing costs and product costs and your overall fixed costs which are spread over all your revenue generation.
So it is possible that increasing your general conversion ratio for your lowest margin or lowest value products might negatively affect your profits while perhaps a tiny increase in conversions or sales of your highest priced item or your most profitable item could have a much more positive effect on your profitability.
It may seem a distraction to kick the stat that you are talking about (conversions) but is it the most important thing .... as mentioned above .. do you need to educate your customers, educational pages may convert over a much longer time period than listings pages.
Are repeat visitors who looked at educational pages 2 months ago treated as the same single visitor that they are or are they reported as a new one because they came in on a different dynamic IP from their ISP and your stats could not identify they had been there before.
That single item could make a generalisation of the generalisation of comparing conversion stats if these are not cookie identified visitors - and only uniques per day or per IP are counted in all the conversion comparisons you make.
You will find that the more someone visits your site, the higher your conversion rate is.
Segment your site by referring url. Traffic from some sources will convert better than others.
Same deal for certain PPC campaigns, entry urls, days of the week.
My point is that your overall conversion does not mean too much if you do not understand the different variables underlying it.
For instance you could wake up tomorrow and find yourself number 1 for a slightly related keyword that is going to drive a ton of traffic to your site. Your overall conversion will fall because the traffic is less targeted, but your sales will increase because of higher traffic.
Oh what a merry Xams its going to be!
