15 June 2007
Bluelinemedia marketing specialist Ben Jeffery looks at the importance of converting browsers to buyers

Introduction

Successful websites know what they want customers to do, and more importantly how they are going to be encouraged to do it. In other words, conversion of visitors to enquiries, sales, or saved time.

In the early days of the web, many sites would proudly display a "hits counter" explaining how many page visits their site had received since it launched. All very nice, but what does it actually mean? For one thing, hits only tell you how many times a page has been viewed, not how many people have visited the site - one visitor can easily generate 100 page hits.

More importantly, the number of people visiting your site may not relate to its success. You could receive 10,000 visitors a month, but if none of them get in touch the site has still failed.

Getting results from your website

Every website needs to achieve one or more of the following: bring in enquiries, generate sales, improve customer service, enhance business efficiency. If you are looking for enquiries, what proportion of site visitors used your contact form, or phoned, or registered for a newsletter?

If you want to use the web to improve your efficiency - for example by creating an online application tool so your staff don't have to complete the information - then measure the drop in staff hours spent on customer applications. Whatever the goal, make sure you are measuring the right response. Look for a 5% response rate, or 100 enquiries a month, or a 50% increase in phone calls.

Once you have established your conversion measures, you can take real and often simple action to improve them. If only 1% of people visiting your site are completing a sale, where is the process being broken? Look at ways to encourage people to get in touch, provide more information about the products, check the reliability of your payment provider.

With the right measure of success, you can watch and improve your results much more effectively.