Conversion rate

This article is about the internet marketing term. For chemistry term, see Reaction rate. For currency term, see Exchange rate.

In internet marketing, the conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who take action to go beyond a casual content view or website visit, as a result of subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.

$\mathrm{Conversion\ rate} = \frac{\mathrm{Number\ of\ Goal \ Achievements}}{\mathrm{Visits}}$

Successful conversions are defined differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, a successful conversion may be defined as the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity.

Measures

For websites that seek to generate offline responses, for example telephone calls or foot traffic to a store, measuring conversion rates can be difficult because a phone call or personal visit is not automatically traced to its source, such as the Yellow Pages, website, or referral. Possible solutions include asking each caller or shopper how they heard about the business and using a toll-free number on the website that forwards to the existing line.

For websites where the response occurs on the site itself, a conversion funnel can be set up in a site's analytics package to track user behavior.

Methods of increasing conversion rates in e-commerce

Among the many actions taken to attempt to increase the conversion rate, these are the most relevant:

• Generate user reviews of the product or service
• clear distinction of the website for a certain conversion goal (e.g. "increase sign-ins for newsletter")
• Improve and focus the content of the website (which may include text, pictures and video) to target conversion
• Increase usability to reduce the barriers to conversion
• Improve site navigation structure so that users can find and browse without thinking too much about where to click
• Improve credibility and trust by showing third-party trust logos and by good site design
• use AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) to move the user through the conversion funnel

See also

• Conversion optimization
• Win-loss analytics
• Conversion funnel

Sources

• Definition of the Conversion rate [1]
• Facts about typical conversion rates and hints how to increase them [2]
• Berkeley-Study on Conversion rate in Spam [3]