Website traffic is not the ‘be all and end all’; converting visitors into customers is as important as having them in the first place. You may win the ‘battle for traffic’ but if the website is not optimized for conversion you will ‘lose the war’.

What if you convert 2 out of every 10 visitors you get instead of 1 out of every 10 visitors – your profit doubles. It is therefore imperative to track and analyze the actions visitors perform when they come to your website, and ascertain the reasons which stop them from performing the desired actions. It will help you to maximize conversions (read profit) by implementing corrective actions.

In this series of two newsletters, we would be discussing what website conversion is, the importance of optimizing your website for conversion, ways to make your website convert more, and the role of web analytics in helping you achieve increased conversion. This newsletter in particular deals with website conversion and its importance.

Conversion happens when visitors coming to your website perform a predefined action. This predefined action is mostly referred to as goal. The conversion rate is therefore the percentage of visitors who perform the desired action/goal.

Websites have different goals and a single website may have more than one goal. An actual purchase, submission of a sales enquiry, signing up for a free resource like newsletter, subscription to future promotional offers, etc. are some common goals. For example: our website has 3 goals namely newsletter subscription, blog subscription, and sales enquiry.

Based on the type of goal(s), website conversion can be broadly classified into three:

1. Informational Conversion: This type of conversion happens when the visitor finds the information he/she is looking for. Most government websites are information based and would achieve informational conversion. Such conversions are difficult to measure, however, average time spent on the site is considered to be an apt indicator.


2. Transformational Conversion: When a visitor subscribes to a free service such as a newsletter, transformational conversion is said to have happened. When someone subscribes to our newsletter/blog/article, we deem it as transformational conversion.


3. Transactional Conversion: When an actual sale happens or the business receives (or may receive) money from any other activity performed by the visitors, transactional conversion happens. Sale of product, for an ecommerce websites, is classified as transactional conversion. A sales enquiry, for us, is considered as transactional conversion.

Most business websites are built to achieve transformational and/or transactional conversion of some sort. Conversion rate optimization helps you in accomplishing more of these conversions to enhance profit, and therefore is essential.

The importance of conversion rate optimization is derived from the benefits that it has to offer. There are numerous benefits of optimizing the conversion rate of your website, and it only adds to what you are already achieving through your website. For instance: Out of every 100 visits only 5 goal conversions occur. This effectively means that the website conversion rate is 5%. On the other hand it also means that 95 visitors do not perform the desired action. Making minor changes to your website could very well increase the website’s conversion rate to 10%. Your sales double and at the same time your cost per acquisition is reduced by half.

Mentioned below are few of the benefits of conversion rate optimization:

• Increasing conversion rate will give your business more customers – the most obvious one.
• You can earn more profits than your competitors even if they get more visitors than your website. This is because you would be converting more visitors into customers than they do.
• The increase in profit, as a direct result of conversion rate optimization, will help you make your online business more robust. The profit can be utilized to expand your offerings and consolidate your online presence.
• The process of conversion rate optimization will help you to address the shortcoming(s) of your website. This will make the website more users friendly and thus enhance the overall website experience.

Conversion rate optimization makes perfect business sense, especially in the present financial conditions. Maximizing conversion rate will help you realize increased return on investment (ROI). It will also ensure the worth of every marketing dollar you spend.

Conversion optimization is the most certain way of converting your website into a money making machine. Also, conversions are a good measure of return on investment (ROI) and a KPI that you cannot afford to ignore.

In the next edition of our newsletter we would delve into ‘how’ to optimize your website for conversions, and discuss the role of web analytics in conversion rate optimization. In the meantime we would love to hear your feedback and suggestion. Keep them coming!

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