Introduction

One of the most important pieces of information for any marketer to know about their website is the customer conversion rate. This is the number of visitors that take the action you want them to. For most sites this means making a purchase, but it could mean joining your mailing list, signing up for your forum or telling a friend about your site.

Commercial websites typically have a conversion rate between 1% and 3%. That means that for every 100 visitors to the site, between 1 and 3 of them become paying customers.

You can see the benefit of increasing that percentage!

The first step to improving your conversion rate is to determine what it currently is. If you don’t already have tracking software that tells you exactly how many visitors you’re getting and how many sales you’re making, you’ll need to put one in place right away. Ask your hosting company about what they provide or check out Clickalyzer.

Once you know these numbers you can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the total sales by the amount of traffic and multiplying by 100.

For example if you get a total of 1,000 visitors per month and you make 10 sales you divide 10 by 1,000 and then multiple by 100 to get a conversion rate of 1%. That means that your site is currently converting at one percent  – or 1 in every 100 people who visit your site takes the action you want them to.

Now that you’ve calculated your conversion rate, let’s look at ways to improve it!