In measurement and benchmarking of conversion rate never make comparison of conversions rates or other metrics between different websites. You often find users quoting statistics like 5% conversion rate in retail industry, 10% conversion rate in services Industry etc..

There are publicly available tools like Fireclickhttp://index.fireclick.com/: or shop.org which contain benchmarks on conversion rate statistics w.r.t to industry.

How accurate is it to fix a conversion rate number for an industry? The comparison of conversion rates is irrelevant & inaccurate, Web site A might have 8% conversion rate and Website B may have 5% conversion Rate for variety of reasons

Difference in Conversion Rates between sites may be dependent on:

1) Branding & Overall Popularity of the site: Web site A may be industry leader; Web site B may be a startup.

2) Products Service Offered.

3) Landing Page Structure

4) Sources of Traffic

5) Seasonal Offers, discounts offered by few sites.

Measuring Conversion Rates (Issues): There are issues in measuring conversion rates.

Latency issue:

a. Users may convert at later point of time; Users may bounce but return after a certain time period to sign up or complete the form.

b. Users may call you on the number displayed on your landing page

c. Users may visit your site and buy offline.

Tracking Issue:

d. Google uses a 30 day cookie

e. Analytics Software may use track differently, (Log file analysis tracks conversions differently using IP based tracking)

f. Deleted Cookies

Incomplete conversions:

g. Users who buy a product but abandon the cart at checkout page.

h. Users who fill incomplete details in form

A user visits your website many times and may be through different channels before making a purchase or converting. Is your business capable of measuring such users?

Reasons for users not converting on the site:

1. The User did not want to visit your site in First place
2. Miscommunication between Ad text and Landing Page
3. The Landing Page did not load
4. The Advertising Traffic was not directed to the Right landing page
5. >Sponsored advertising & external links on landing page may be driving away users

There are various methods to increase conversion rates.

http://www.sherpastore.com/RevisedLandingPageHB.html?8913

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/02/learn-about-landing-page-optimization.html

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/

Other Users

Majority of Users who have landed from advertising channel do not convert. Should we care about them? Yes, because they tell a different story. We can know a lot about our website if we just know the activity of these users online.

How do you measure the activity done by users who did not convert? However advertisers have paid the channel to bring them on their website. Since we are paying to get users on the site, can we identify these users and their actions?

What actions did these users perform?

• Did they click sponsored links, links to external site
• Did they view/navigate to other pages of the site?
• Perform a search on the site.
• Did they view the FAQ, Contact Us, About Us pages?
• Subscribe to Feeds
• Downloaded any content, files.
• Tagging, Bookmarked, Rated any content
• Submitted a Comment

Attributes of these Users that should be measured:

A) The Time Spent by these users on our Site

B) Depth of their Visits

C) Frequency of each Visit (Did they return again to our view the site)

D) How many Unique Visits (Detect unique IPs)

What were these users looking for? The Ad text, keywords and even the channel of advertising can give us a better Idea.

If you are an ecommerce site, find out how many times a user visits your site before making a purchase. And how many users are repeat customers, and through what sources do they visit your site.

Marketing is not about acquiring One Time conversion, it about building relationship. Therefore it is necessary to identify different users online and understand their activity, behavior to value them differently.

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