What are conversions and why do they matter? Conversions are actions visitors take on your website. By setting conversion goals and measuring every action, we learn why people come to your site, what they want, and why they stay.
When someone visits your site and does nothing, it’s called a bounce.
Bounces are bad. Why’s that? Because we’ve learned nothing about that person. They didn’t interact with our site and we don’t know how to serve them. Bounces make us sad. 🙁
When you think of conversions, you think of sales. A sale is the best conversion, but every site is different, and any action we can record is good. Our goal is to design your site so that it actually works for you. If we don’t convert, we’re not winning. And we want you to win.
The goal is for people to do something, to interact with our site. We design your site with this main focus in mind. And over time, we improve and refine pages to better convert.
What is a Conversion?
What do we want people to do once they get to your site? Conversions and conversion goals are different for different kinds of sites.
For Ecommerce, a site that sells things, a conversion is a sale. Sure, it includes a completed purchase, but we also track when someone clicks a product, adding a product to cart, and then each step in the checkout process. Improving how people buy your products is important.
For Content sites, a conversion means clicking on an article, a page, an offer or a contact form. Each is an action we can track. For analytics, we set conversion goals, making it much easier to see progress in your web traffic.
When Lead Generation is our main goal, a conversion is completing a form and clicking send, downloading a white paper or clicking an offer.
If your focus is a Newsletter, then a conversion is when someone new signs up to get your news. Often we run ad campaigns just to grow our subscriber list.
Turning browsers into buyers
When someone goes to the trouble of adding items to your cart and even filling out some info, but doesn’t check out, we want to know. We want to market to people who left a purchase in their cart, even if it’s a pop-up as they leave or an email reminder.
We also want to understand why people leave, so we can improve your site and sales. Shopify says there’s four reasons people abandon their carts.
- Being forced to create an account.
- Struggling with complicated checkout processes.
- Unexpected delivery costs.
- Concerns over security.
After we build a site, we work to refine how everything works, improving how your site performs over time.
Summary
Conversions and Conversion Goals help us make your site work better, over time. And they make reading your Analytics reports easier, because we have clearly identified goals and measurements for success.