Don’t be fooled - this is not a dramatic reality TV show from E!; but instead, we have a blog post about what exactly Conversions are and what they can do for your website and business.
What is a Conversion?
Conversions are defined as “the number of times a desired outcome was reached” (Reed College of Media, 2021). These “desired outcomes'' are your Goals that you have created, and the conversions themselves are basically counting each time your said goal was achieved through your business or website.
Just a few examples of a business conversion could be whenever a visitor on your site:
Makes a purchase
Completes a form
Clicks on a specific button
Shares content
("What is Website Conversion?", 2020).
Every business is different, which means it’s likely that you won’t have the same website conversions or goals as others do (2020). Conversions are all based on what kind of Goals that you have chosen for your website, which vary on your business-type and what you aim to accomplish overall. For E-Commerce sites, you may focus on more sales-driven conversions; Others, like informative blogs, may be more interested in an increase in email sign-ups or having their content shared to other platforms.
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
When keeping up with your Conversions, it is important to keep the Conversation Rate in mind, as it shows how many of your sites visitors are actually completing your goals. To calculate your site’s Conversion Rate:
[Total visitors that convert/total visitors on site] x100 = Conversion Rate
Ex) 1,000 people visit your site
300 of these visitors convert (complete a goal)
[300/1,000] x100 =
[0.3] x100 = 30% Conversion Rate
There are also sources that can calculate your Conversion Rate, including this one from WebFX.
Conversion Rate Optimization
For businesses, it is useful to create sales funnels to help visualize what you expect your visitor’s to do when they arrive at your website.
When you take each step of the funnel process into consideration, it will help influence your website’s visitors to complete the “Action”, aka the Goal ➡️ Conversion. Using the sales funnel will allow you to plan accordingly and make adjustments to your site as needed, which will ultimately increase your Conversion Rate.
The use of A/B testing, or “split testing” is also very effective when trying to discover what is leading, or driving away, conversions. With A/B testing, you are able to test different variations of any feature on your site, and compare each to see which was most successful. You can test pretty much anything from text size, images, font, etc. - You’d be surprised on what could actually affect your website and its visitors!
The Sims 3 Case Study
An example of a brand optimizing their platforms for increased Conversions is EA’s The Sims 3. In case you don’t know what The Sims are, it is a platform life-simulation game that is primarily used on PC. The Sims 3, offers its own launcher on your desktop that allows users to start the game, download content, make updates, see promos, and register their games.
The issue here is that the Sims 3 launcher was primarily used to just start the game, and not enough people were actually registering for them. According to the study, the Sims 3 team believed that even a small increase in their Conversion Rate could have an great impact on their revenue alone (“The Sims 3 Identifies the Most Compelling Offer to Drive Registrations”, 2013).
The team decided to use A/B testing to find out what changes would lead to more game registrations, creating 6 different variations of their game launcher. These different variations included highlighted offers such as “Shop”, “Free Town”, and “Free Stuff”. The results concluded that all 6 variations were able to improve game registrations by at least 43%. The top-performing variation was the one that offered a free town, delivering a 128% conversion rate over the original launcher, and the second-best variation, “Free Points”, increased conversions by 79% - which overall indicates The Sims users responded more to specific offers for gameplay.
Storm, Macy. (2020, February 14). What is website conversion? [+5 ways to improve conversions]. https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/what-is-website-conversion/
The Sims 3 identifies the most compelling offer to drive registrations. (2013, June 11). https://www.widerfunnel.com/case-studies/the-sims-3-doubles-game-registrations-by-identifying-the-most-compelling-offer/
What is conversion rate Optimization (CRO)? (2021, March 25). https://www.hotjar.com/conversion-rate-optimization/
Hi Ali,
ReplyDeleteSuper cute title for your blog post. I did something similar in one of my posts, but used a movie. Anyways, conversions are super important when considering purchases. All businesses want their conversion rates to be high because it means that they have loyal & interested customers who want to use their money for a particular product or brand.
Any business, big or small, will want to optimize their website if their conversion rate is not high enough. Like you, I found a case study that used A/B testing to optimize for conversions. A few years ago, Walmart was noticing a majority of their website visitors were using mobile devices, but also saw high bounce rates. From here, they made their site as responsive design and used both versions in an A/B test. After the test, they found that the new mobile design received a 20% increase in conversions and mobile orders in general went up 98% (Niggulis, 2020).
It's really interesting to see just how one change can optimize a website and increase specific metrics.
References
Niggulis, O. (2020, October 22). 6 conversion rate optimization case studies with surprising results. CXL. https://cxl.com/blog/surprising-conversion-rate-optimization-case-studies/
Hi Ali,
ReplyDeleteI used conversion rates as one of my assignment topics also because that is one of the major goals of Google Tag Manager, to measure and optimize conversions. I was not aware of the Sims 3 example you used but its a perfect one of how you can find the issue quickly with a tag then address it and see a major impact. The Walmart case Kendell mentioned is great one also and you can image the immense numbers a Walmart sees when their percentages go up like that. I like this article about actionable metrics because they make the difference.
https://www.addthis.com/academy/what-are-web-analytics-the-data-you-need-to-succeed/
Thanks for including how you can affect conversion rates. I used to manage a medium-sized newspaper website and would always be fascinated by how changes we made to the site affected our analytics. For instance, we wanted to increase traffic to our e-edition, which you had to be a paid subscriber to view. We had a link in the nav bar at the top of the page, and my designer suggested we try putting a red rectangle around "e-edition." Seems super simple, and it worked- we saw a 30% increase in people clicking that link simply by making it red (the rest of the nav was blue). That's why I was always constantly tweaking our site for optimization, and A/B testing was a big part of that.
ReplyDelete-Nick Kratsas
You brought in a funnel and that was pretty interesting. It is important to remember that it is possible to have conversions at all levels of the funnel. You can have subscriptions, emails, form fills, downloads, etc. It is not just end of the tunnel macro conversions.
ReplyDeleteAlexandria,
ReplyDeleteThis post is great. Understanding conversion rates to improve your business is extremely important. As an avid Sims player since it started in 2000, I love that you included them in your case study. I remember when they made this change and I didn't consider at the time that it was to improve on their conversion rate. Thanks for sharing.
-Shari Stewart