Paul Sizemore

A lot of people in interactive believe traffic is king; not true, conversions are king. Every web site has a goal, or should have. Every site has a way to measure value. Conversions are the measure of value on a web site. The higher your conversions, the higher the value of your site. 

Sales or leads are evident as conversions, but what if you don’t sell anything on your site? If your site is in place to build a brand, or communicate a message, then when a user lands on that page, they are a conversion. Your goal has been reached. 

Conversions are more clear cut in a sales or a lead generation site. Every conversion has steps the user follows to make it to the conversion point. This is often represented as a funnel, and it’s great to look at a funnel report in your analytics package. Once set up, it can help you identify places in the sales cycle that users fail to make it to the next step. For example, if you have a large number of visitors delivered from organic search results, and those users are failing to convert, that might indicate a problem with the user’s expectations based on the search terms. 

You can test several designs and funnels using A/B testing or multivariate testing. Your analytics package might be able to help you implement this, and it’s best tracked in your analytics package. The concept is you test, for example, two versions of a page and then collect data on the one that leads to the most users doing what you want them to do.