Conversion Rate Secrets: 1 of 4
I’m often surprised at how many of my clients (even the technical ones) don’t understand what a conversion rate is. There are all kinds of definitions floating around. As is often the case, the simple one is the right one.
What is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to desired action. Whatever your goal, it is the standard metric term we web people use to describe how well a web site turns casual viewers into deliberate actors or achievers of whatever goal you set.
Here’s a highly technical graphic that spells it out:
In order to measure your conversion rate you have to establish:
- 1. Your goal definition
- 2. The number of visitors
- 3. The number of defined goal actions achieved
Define Your Goal!
Goals come in a million custom flavors. However, the most common ones are a purchase (ecommerce), sign up for a free offer (lead), or contact request (prospect). Almost all goals fall under these three headings, ecommerce, lead, and prospect.
It is extremely important to define your goal from the start. Pick one type and go with it. Once you define your goal, focus your entire site on that goal and don’t get distracted by your ego. Formulate your content and your design to actively encourage your visitors to achieve your goal. So many studies have proven this to be the most effective strategy to obtain a high conversion rate. The simple principle: If you want someone to do something, ASK! Beg even!
My conceptual goal for this site is to make my twitter followers happy. So, my defined, quantitative goal could be retweets – as that is my definition of twitter happy. The dynamic tweetmeme button shows how many tweets this article has received would be an easy way to quantitatively measure that goal.
Please, click that button now. You know you love to tweet. 
It’s exciting! It’s Twitter! You love to tweet and you love cute babies. For the love of God and sweet babies - I’m begging you to click!
See? I asked. I begged. Irresistible babies helped beg.
That is called Begging For the Click or “BFC”. I call buttons like that cute tweet button, “BFC buttons” and they really, really help with conversion rates. So do BFC helpers (those cute babies) that direct the eye to the button. The white space around them even helps focus the eye on the button. More on increasing conversion rates later!
So, even if you didn’t click it (you know you want to…) you at least thought about it. And. That. Is. The Point. Physically focus your content, design and, therefore, the visitor on the goal. Get your visitors to think about it early and often. Get them thinking about it often enough, while keeping them attracted to the site and they will likely successfully score! Now go click that button!
How to Count Visitors
Visitors, another simple term to confuse so many, means the same thing as visitors to your home. One person visiting. … doesn’t matter why or from where. … doesn’t matter if they came in the back door or the front door. A visitor is just one person who visited you.
In the old days, we used to manually count visitors by reading the server logs. That’s like that guy in movie The Matrix who said he likes to read the flowing green symbol code. Pretty crazy! These days, most people use an analytics tool to do it for them.
Google Analytics is pretty much the best tool in the toolshed for tracking visitors, visits, goals and just about every thing else you’d want to track…and it’s FREE! If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, go sign up for an account right now. You can do that by clicking here. We’ll wait here for you, while you do that. The rest of this article will assume you have an Analytics account.
Visits vs. Visitors
Visitors can make multiple visits. If you like someone, you want them to come 
back, right? As they come back, you have a chance to get to know them better (leads) and, if you’re selling something, you have a better chance of them buying something (ecommerce). The best visitors are the ones who make lots of return visits (“return visitors”) and achieve a goal every time!
Using Google Analytics to Track Conversion Rates
This sounds pretty complex. When the charts come out, people get nervous – haunted by visions of their seventh grade math teacher. This isn’t her. It’s Google and Google is fun!
To track conversions, identify goals in Analytics by clicking “Goals” in the Analytics menu. See? … easy!
See the handy screen shot of Google Analytics below if you’re still obsessed with that scary, bifocal-wearin math teacher.
Mmkaaay… stop thinking about the teacher and check out the Analytics pic. … Please? Thanks. [sigh]
Now that I have your attention again, see the circled goals and notes buttons. More on the notes button in just a bit.
The first thing you need to do is define your goal in Analytics. To do that click on “Set up goals and funnels“. Once you’re on the Analytics Profile Settings page, scroll down a bit and click on “Edit” in the top “G1″ row.
In the “Goal Settings: G1″ page, turn the goal on. For now, select “head match” and enter the page you are designating as the GOAL! page. An Italian would say, “Goala, goala, goala!” This is the page that the visitor can only get to once the goal is achieved. It is commonly referred to as the “thank you page.” You can name the goal and define a value on this analytics page as well. Don’t worry about defining the funnel as we’ll get to funnels later.
Add Notes To Google Analytics!
The notes button is super sweet. It allows you to add dated notes to Google Analytics to help keep track of marketing activities and design changes that you think might have an effect on visitors, goal conversions and other notables you want documented.
By now you’ll have noticed that you don’t have the notes button on your Analytics screen. But I do! Google only adds it for their favorite students.
[Pause for dismay and chagrin]
…And since I’m not one of Google’s favorite students, I add it to Analytics myself. …I’ll show you how to do add your own Analytics notes button in the next episode of Conversion Rate Secrets! Until then, enjoy Hot for Teacher by Van Halen.
ok – I have been seriously entertained and educated and yes the babies were cute and I hit the retweet button.
Looking forward to the next edition…