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People often ask me what my website conversion rate is, which I think is an absolutely ridiculous question. But before we continue, let’s assume you don’t know what a conversion rate is OR let’s define it so the rest of this post is based on a mutual understanding of conversion rate.
Here it is: Number of Visitors ÷ Number of people who buy = Conversion rate (as a percentage).
Example: 100 people visit the site, 10 people buy. Conversion rate is 10%
Easy enough, right?
Let’s start with a real life example (except I’ve been asked to mask the name of the company) so let’s use www.antioxidantexample.com, which is an antioxidant nutritional supplement that advertises heavily on TV and Radio – but no advertising on the internet.
95% of their web traffic is derived from folks who heard the 30 minute radio infomercial or saw the 30 minute tv infomercial then went to the website to buy the product. What do you think their conversion rate is? Well, it just so happens that the conversion rate is 30%. That means 3 out of every 10 visitors buys the product.
Website Conversion Rates are Meaningless
For a while they advertised using Google’s AdWords program which means they bought ad space on the Google Search Results pages. When they did that they drove thousands of people to the site who had searched the term antioxidant. But guess what their conversion rate was then? Yep, it was .7%
Same website. No changes.
The only thing that did change was the quality of the person that arrived at the site. From infomercials they had 30 minutes of explanation and product examples, but with Google ads they had curiosity seekers, inaccurate clicks and people not getting what they expected.
So the conversion rate is bunk.
What isn’t bunk is the conversion rate for Google AdWords clients who arrive at the site. What isn’t bunk is the conversion rate of the TV infomercial clients that end up at the site. And what isn’t bunk is the conversion rate of the people who found the site via organic search.
Your website conversion rate is meaningless. The conversion rate of your source’s web traffic, on the other hand, is like spun gold.
Your Website Conversion Rate is Meaningless. Period. | Letters From Dan…
People often discuss and compare their website conversion rates, but they really don’t mean anything. What should be compared are the traffic sources….