Conversion Rates Revisited – The One Percent Solution April 30, 2008
Posted by debbiepascoe in accessibility, high performance site analytics, privacy, quality, search engine optimization, usability, web analytics, web design, web standards.Tags: accessibility, cart abandonment, conversion, engagement, optimization, pivacy, quality, search, traffic, usability, web analytics
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Download the Conversion Rate Calculator
In my last post, I noted that Coremetrics has begun releasing benchmark data collected from their ~300 clients. A couple of the stats really caught my attention:
- The typical conversion rate is 3.29%
- Conversions Where Site Search Was Used – 14.84% of consumers used site search during their visits – conversion rate 5.60%
- The shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.42%.
Wow….think about it….
- out of 100 people, only 3 of them actually complete the desired action. AND
- out of 100 people that begin a shopping cart, only 32-33 of them complete the transaction and buy something (through the website – we don’t know if they walked in the store later and concluded the sale there); AND
- of the people that use internal search, they convert at a much higher rate than the ones that do not.
While some of my esteemed colleagues have decided that it’s not about conversions, it’s really about engagement (I’m not naming names, you know who you are 
), it really is about conversions. That’s the bottom line. For every small improvement a site owner makes to improve their conversion rate or reduce their abandonment rate, they get repaid many times over. The philosophical diversion into “engagement” is really code for “we know people are leaving the site and completing the sale offline, we just don’t have a way to tie all the data together”. When that day comes, conversion will come back into vogue in a huge way.
Take this rate that Coremetrics has given us as a benchmark. If this conversion rate of 3.29% can be improved by one percent, sales would increase by 30%. That translates to real money. Similarly, 68 of 100 people walking out of your virtual store when they have things in their basket that they abandon in the last aisle represents real money that didn’t make it into the till. Everything that can be done to chip away at that represents real money.
So, how do you identify those improvements? Strip it back to its basic elements; look at what you’ve created – how usable is it, how findable is it, how free of defects, does it respect the visitor’s privacy, is it accessible to all potential customers? Are the key pages that lead people to the conversion event optimized? Do they have the right stuff in the right places with the right call to action to propel people forward and keep them moving forward to completion? You’ll notice these questions don’t have anything to do with studying how people have reacted to your site; rather they have everything to do with understanding deeply what you’ve given people to interact with. Traffic is a measure after the fact – it’s forensics. Evaluating traffic is great for understanding what people did; it is not a predictor of what they would do if things were different.
To help you visualize the impact that small improvements in conversion rates and abandonment rates can have, I’ve created a “conversion rate calculator”. I am not an accountant or finance expert. This is not complex econometric modeling. This is just a simple way for you to plug in some numbers that are meaningful to you to see that the impact over time is real and measurable. Have fun, dream big, and see what it might mean
Here’s the link to the Coremetrics Benchmark page.
Top Four Characteristics of the Optimal Web Team February 13, 2008
Posted by debbiepascoe in accessibility, content management, high performance site analytics, quality, search engine optimization, usability, web analytics, web design, web standards.Tags: accessibility, optimal web team, optimization, search, SEM, SEO, web analytics
1 comment so far
It doesn’t take too much reading and talking to people to recognize just how fragmented the various web management related disciplines are within organizations. This was recently reinforced by the results of the two surveys I did – Where in the Organization is the Web Analyst and What in the Organization does the Web Analyst Do. I also ran across a survey over the weekend that was done by the Internet Strategy Forum(PDF doc) that mirrored my findings in a lot of ways.
This is not a criticism – in fact quite the contrary. Even though the web has been around for what seems like a long time now – can you remember how you did certain things before the web, like locate addresses on a map, look up a phone number or make travel reservations – the “web” organizational structure has not yet reached equilibrium. It is still evolving, the moving pieces are still being identified, and people are working to get their heads around how those pieces fit together. With that as the backdrop, here is my list of the top four characteristics that the Optimal Web Team will have.
1. The Optimal Web Team will be multi-disciplinary. Currently, web analysts are gaining in numbers and growing as a discipline. SEO/SEM people may be in the same work group, but there are equal odds that they are in a different work group. Content contributors are scattered through the organization, and the people managing the content management system, if there is one, are in another organization altogether. The Optimal Web Team will be a multi-disciplinary team, where people with specific expertise will work closely and regularly to make decisions based on a 360 degree view of the complexities that impact data quality, site quality and compliance issues.
2. The Optimal Web Team will report to a senior level executive. Organizations have come a long way from “the web as IT…thing” to “the web as mission critical”. Increasingly processes are performed by employees, vendors, investors, customers, and prospects via web-enabled pages and forms. Even so, organizations have not yet fully recognized their web investment as equal to land, labor and capital. It is that important, and the management of it must be at a level in the organization that reflects that importance.
3. The Optimal Web Team will have a bigger seat and a louder voice. The current state of fragmentation results in people reporting into lower levels of the organization and despite investments in tools and training, the expertise that these people are developing is often not heard at a level within the organization that can effect changes as a result.
4. The Optimal Web Team will manage what it doesn’t directly control. Organizations everywhere are employing web analysts and people with SEO/SEM expertise. At the same time, other disciplines such as voice-of-the-customer (VOC) surveys, A/B and multi-variate testing are frequently best done by organizations that do it for a living. Content management will continue to loom large and touch many parts of the organization as the number of contributors continues to grow.
The Optimal Web Team will consist of people with specific expertise sharing knowledge across disciplinary lines, leveraging existing market expertise when it makes sense and coordinating requirements like content contribution and defect correction that are, of necessity, dispersed throughout the organization.
