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Website promotion is carried out in order to improve site rankings in the search engines by certain search queries. However even if your site has acquired its position in the TOP 10 search results, it doesn't necessarily mean that sales will be successful: if conversion rate of your site is low, it will hardly bring you success. How can you determine website conversion rate?
Conversion rate is one of performance indicators of a website. Conversion rate is defined as the ratio of site visitors who performed a necessary action (e.g. purchased a good) to the total number of visitors. As a rule, this rate is calculated in percent. There exist special web analytics tools that help to calculate website conversion rate.
For example, a popular web analytics service – Google Analytics – offers the so-called goals for calculation of website conversion rate. Goals include certain site pages, certain periods of time spent by visitors on your site as well as ratio of the number of visited pages to the total number of visitors.
Google Analytics goals allow to record the behavior of visitors on the site and determine how many visitors became customers (this is what conversion rate is about). If you have set up a certain site page (a particular URL) as a goal, all users who visited this page will be considered “converted”, i.e. the goals will have been achieved.
What site pages should be set up as goals? It may be “Thank you for registering” pages, “Download complete” pages, purchase confirmations etc. In some cases goal pages may include pages containing information about the company or terms of promotions and competitions – it is more important during brand promotion because it allows to estimate the efficiency of interaction of visitors with the site.
If you set up time periods a goals, all visitors who spent a certain period of time on the site are considered to have achieved the goal. For example, you can set up an interval of 10, 20, 30 minutes as a goal; in short, a period of time which in your opinion is enough for site visitors to study the proposals presented on the site and make further decision.
Ratio of viewed pages to the number of visits is an important parameter for website conversion rate analysis therefore it can also be set up as a goal in Google Analytics. This type of goals is used to determine the capability of a site to make its visitors interested. For example, if you set up this goal type to analyze the conversion rate of an online shop, you will be able to know if visitors are interested in the product catalog you offer.
Website conversion rate in Google Analytics can also be determined on the basis of goal events. If site visitors perform certain actions, for example, downland files, these visitors perform conversion which will be taken into account for the set goal. This type of targets may prove useful if you need to analyze conversion rate of websites that offer their visitors electronic products.
Technically it is not very difficult to set up goals in Google Analytics. All you have to do is select one of free goals (altogether there are 4 sets, each of sets consists of 5 goals), specify the goal type, choose a suitable name and fill in required parameters.
For example, if you set up a URL as a goal in Google Analytics, in most cases you have to choose the type of match and specify the goal value. The type of match is determined depending on how the goal page is formed, and the goal value allows to see if achieving this goal is really cost efficient.
The features of Google Analytics web analytics service which allow to determine website conversion rate are not reduced to setting up different types of goals. Effective website promotion also includes thorough analysis of ways to achieve the goals. It allows to discover “weak links” in the chain of harmonious interaction between site and visitor.
TAGS
website conversion rate,
website promotion,
google analytics,
web analytics services,
website performance indicators |
web promotion 
