It’s certainly useful to know how much traffic is essentially “noise” that can’t be converted.

I’ve personally found that the most effective way of increasing my conversion rates, apart from testing, is to use a “mind reading” technique which gathers the thoughts of a visitor at particular points on a site.

In other words, at the end of a major section of your site (such as after explaining a major benefit), you can ask for feedback from the visitor on whether they understand - and if not, you can elaborate.

This kind of interactivity gets people involved, and provides me with valuable feedback as to what is going on in a visitor’s mind at the time. I use my own software to do this.

While searching for some info on conversion rates I stumbled across this article.

It rocks and it’s an idea I never really entertained before. It makes sense. But what percent of that “bounce” as you call do you think is possible to capture if you added the right element to your page?

I’ll be following your work and hope to check out your book soon!

Jae Jans

Thanks for the note above on tracking real conversion rate. It really provides deep insight into the conversion rate metrics for any website.

In einem exzellenten Artikel berichtet Web Analyst Avinash Kaushik über Konversion und Zahlen. Eines der Hauptursachen für eine Fehleinschätzung des Potentials ist die Annahme, dass alle Besucher auch potentielle Käufer sind. Das sind sie nämlich nicht.

In aller Kürze hier die Hauptaussagen von Avinash Kaushik:

1. Rund 30% aller Besucher gehören normalerweise in die Gruppe derjenigen, die nicht einmal 10 Sekunden auf einer Webseite verbleiben und gleich wieder gehen. Das hat verschiedene Gründe, meist ein Fehlklick.

2. Weitere 5% können für Besuche von Bots, Screening Programmen und anderen gesteuerten “Besuchern” hinzugerechnet werden.

[...]

Increasingly, our work at Red Ant involves understanding how customers are using and responding to something online. By tracking and measuring how people interact with a particular site / game / online form, we’re able to improve and adjust…….

The article does give some idea about calculating it right. But how does that really help in the long run? For short term to show to my superiors, it looks good. But we work on ‘improving’ things.

As long as i use a consistent denominator (regardless of real denominator or unreal denominator in your words), the increment/decrement in the conversion rates would indicate the happenings the same manner. An example (no html) is the sales increased, the visitors increased. There is no change improvement in the conversion rates calculated in real or unreal way.

Quarter 1 Quarter 2
Unreal Real Unreal Real
Sales 2 2 3 3
Visitors 100 75 150 112.5
% conv rate 2.00% 2.67% 2.00% 2.67%

I think, the recommended action item no 4 is taken up generally anways.

Thanks,
Venkat.

Avinash is an obvious thought-leader when it comes to web analytics. Recently, he had a couple of really great points about Conversion Rate and how to properly assess the real conversion opportunity pie (i.e., how not to overestimate the number of ‘convertable’ visitors). [...]

What should your conversion rate measure? Is the typical measure of how many of your visitors buy too broad? Aren’t some of those folks hopelessly improbable prospects? Aren’t there other successful outcomes besides a purchase?

These are the question being discussed in a recent blog post from our friend Avinash and many other respected analysts who have left thoughts in his comments……..

Difference of ~ 27%, for us, by Visits & Pages.
~ 2% by Visitors (Unique).

For busier sites, I find that the Crud doesn’t seriously impact the more “at a glance” useful metrics. Most bots et al, come from the same IP addresses so this does make sense. :-)

For detailed analysis, the Crud Must Go(tm).

- Steve

Agree with your filtering advices to get a more insightful conversion rate. I just published a post in our blog regarding this and Future Now’s ‘offical response’.

Don’t give up, you’re helping lots of website owners with your Excellent tips ;-)

I won’t be able to make it to London in a couple of weeks but I’m looking forward our next rendez-vous ;-)

René

I’m an avid reader of Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor, and I quietly anticipate each new post. In general, Avinash is incredibly insightful, thought-provoking, and just fun to read. But as a fan and follower of his work, I was…