Do you need help to turn more of your website visitors into paying customers?

Getting traffic to anyone’s website is possible, getting people who are genuine potential clients to the website is possible; but, one way or another, that will have a cost and unless the website converts a high enough percentage of  those visitors into business to justify that cost, then it can’t be sustained.

So the conversion ratio of visitors to sales is usually a major factor in the success or failure of any online marketing campaign. The higher the profit margin and the bigger the difference between the cost per visitor and the value of a sale, the better the campaign will work.

The simple formula for success will go something like this:

• How many visitors to your website over a set period?
• What is the cost of generating those visitors? B
• How many sales did that produce?
• What is the net profit from those sales? A

If A is greater than B, your campaign is working and once you are comfortable that this success is ongoing, then your campaign should start to be driven by demand rather than by budget.

If it is not working and you are confident that the keywords being used are generating the right type of visitor, then the next step is to identify why visitors aren’t converting to sales in sufficient numbers.

Split testing can be used to trial different changes to the website. Assuming it is not something as simple and obvious as price, or technical issues, there can be many reasons why a website is not converting visitors into sales or enquiries. In some cases it may not be one issue but several, that combine to make the user journey just that bit too complex or unfriendly. In others cases it may be that there is too much choice of similar products, that individual taste element is a key factor and that the percentage of visitors that the product range available appeals to is not large enough to provide a cost effective return.

Finding ways to improve conversion rates of visitor to sale or enquiry (or whatever it is you want the visitor to do before they leave your website) should really be an ongoing process. We have clients that after over a decade of driving traffic to their websites are still aiming to constantly do better in this respect, by trying new messages, changing images or even the colour of the Buy Now button. Anything that can give then a marginal improvement.