What To Aim For: More Website Traffic Or Better Conversion?
One very common measure of website success is traffic: Greater traffic equals greater success. You can see just how common this idea is when you think of some of the more widely quoted web metrics:
- ‘Hits’
- Page Views
- Visits
- Clickthrough Rate
Yet, unless you’ve already done so, putting some work into your website’s ‘conversion rate’ (its ability to turn a visitor into a customer) is usually more rewarding. Here’s a quick example that proves the point:
As you can see, with 500 visitors & a 3% conversion rate, a site can be much better off than one that gets 1000 visitors & only converts 1% of those into customers.
Conversion rate doesn’t have to be visitors:orders, here are a few other ideas:
- visitors:email sign ups
- visitors:quote requests
- visitors:commenters
What’s your current overall site conversion rate? Are you tracking it individually for key pages? Are you tracking it over time?
Vario Creative Blog » OpinionatedMarketers.com: Go for the Dollars… said,
March 27, 2007 @ 7:31 am
[…] John Whiteside has a great post today on OpinionatedMarketers.com in which cites OMStrategy.com saying that while traffic is nice, it’s conversion rates that we should be watching. Here’s a great example: The OM Strategy piece gives a simple set of examples; on one extreme, there’s a site with 1,000 visitors, a 1% conversion rate, and $1,500 of revenue. On the other extreme is a site with half the traffic but a 3% conversion rate and $2,250 of revenue (on the same hypothetical $150 average order). […]