Conversion Ratio

The Most Important Web Statistic

It’s not how many visitors you get; it’s what you do with them. When analyzing the success (or lack thereof) of a website, the conversion ratio should be your first stop.

A site’s conversion ratio is calculated by dividing the number of successes by the total number of attempts at a specified goal. For example, if you own an eCommerce site, your goal is to create customer orders. In this scenario, your conversion ratio would be the number of orders divided by the total number of unique visitors to the site in a given period. If in a month you had 10 orders and 200 unique visitors, you’d have a 5% conversion ratio.

Every website has a goal and therefore a conversion ratio. If you run a blog for example, your goal might be to have people click the link to subscribe to your RSS feed. Again, you would calculate the number of clicks per unique visitor to get your conversion ratio.

So why is the conversion ratio so important? For starters, because driving traffic to your website is typically costly and time consuming. It’s much more expensive to run a pay per click advertising campaign than to increase your conversion ratio. Besides, if you were converting 5% of your users today, wouldn’t you want to try to get this up to 7% before you started your ad campaign?

So how do you improve your conversion ratio? Through user experience and goal driven design. No matter what your goal is, you need to make accomplishing that task as easy and as attractive as possible for your users. Make it exciting or convincing, but make it drop dead simple.

On your next project, before you start development and before you even start your design, identify the key goals of the website that you’re going to measure with your conversion ratio. Capture and track this data, as it will serve as the pulse of your website.