Stop Obsessing About Conversion Rate

SLCMost web analytics practitioners define Conversion Rate as the percent of site visitors who do something the company who owns the website wants them to do. So submit a order, sign up for a email, send a lead etc.

Measuring Conversion Rate is usually the cornerstone, if not the king queen and jester of the court, of any web analytics program. It is perhaps the very first “KPI” that is measured by any good analyst and we can’t seem to get enough of it.  We report it up and down the chain of command and it occupies a place of prime importance when we present to senior management.

After all why would you not, the logic is: your conversion rate is 2.2% (shop.org study Q2 2006 for retail sites) and if you improve it by 0.01% you will make a million bucks (replace that with a really high number for your company).

Yet there is perhaps there is no other single metric that is abused as much as conversion rate, none that is perhaps more detrimental to solving for a holistic customer experience on the website because of the company behavior it drives.

The behavior most observed is that people obsess about conversion rate, it is every where, massive amounts of energies are spent on getting it up a smidgen, entire site strategies exist simply to move the number up at the cost of caring about anything else.

My recommendation is that you should stop obsessing about conversion rate, put Overall Site Conversion Rate in some appendix of your weekly / monthly presentations but that is about it.

The core reasons for this recommendation are:

  • Minor Reason: Overall site conversion rate (non-segmented) for your site is a nice to know metric but it is quite meaningless in terms of its ability to truly communicate actionable insights. You got 100 visitors, 2.2 of those converted, where do you start to look for what the heck happened?
  • Major Reason: A minority of visitors that come to any website come to buy (minority defined as usually less than 50% of site traffic). Consider amazon.com or ebay.com or intuit.com or store.apple.com, all major “ecommerce sites”. So if a minority of people come to your website to buy why should we obsess about Conversion Rate? Are we not guilty of letting this relentless focus on conversion rate result in criminal negligence towards those other website customer segments?

     
    The question is: If you solve for conversion rate are you solving for all your traffic and are you improving the website experience for all your customers?

My answer to that last question is a big whopping thumper of a No. We are guilty of causing sub-optimal customer focus by using conversion rate and web analytics, and I recommend that we stop that.

So what might you be missing if you only focus on conversion rate?

  • Customers who will come to your website to “research”, product specific. They will never buy from your website, maybe if you do a awesomely kick butt job on the website maybe you will convert them but it is highly unlikely. An example of this is you/me using amazon to primarily read customer reviews or watch the new Bill Maher show, or wanting to read specs or print web pages with product information.
  • Customers who will come to your website to “learn” about you, the company. They are looking for jobs, they are looking for press releases, they are looking for your company founders bio, they are looking for why you exist, they want your blog, they want to unsubscribe from your emails etc.
  • Customers who come to our websites for “help”. This is people looking for support or looking for driving directions to your office or they want to send you a nasty email or register their product etc.
  • Customers who come for reasons that we don’t know simply because we simply never bothered to ask (this is huge by the way).

All these segments, and there may be different ones for your website, will never buy from you. All these segments are not static, they change based on market conditions, based on actions your company takes (say campaigns or branding etc), based on stuff your competitors do etc etc.

Obsessing about conversion rate means a focus on the 20 – 40% of the traffic on your website that is “in the game” and solving for just that minority.

Obsessing about conversion rate means that you are implicitly ignoring major parts of the traffic that you should be creating optimal customer experiences for (pages, content, whatever).

Obsessing about conversion rate, perhaps most importantly, means you solve for the short term, the now, and just Submit Order,  at the cost of solving for long term metrics like creating Net Promoters.

(And I say that knowing that perhaps for your site 0.001% improvement in conversion is ten million dollars.)

So if you take me advice and mount this coup in your company and dislodge conversion rate from the throne which metric should take its place?

Let me submit one powerful metric for the coronation: Task Completion Rate by Primary Purpose.

Figure out what the the core reasons why people come to your website (the question to ask is: Why are you visiting the website today?) and then figure out if for customers in each of those segments of primary purpose if they are able to complete their task, whatever the task the customer came for (the question to ask is: Where you able to complete your task today?). Do a little cross tab and you’re in business.

The answer to Primary Purpose question will look something like this: Research Products/Services, Purchase Products/Services, Look for Company Information, Register the Products I have already Purchased, Looking for Support, etc etc.

The answer to the Task Completion Rate question will be Yes or No.

If you can do this you suddenly are 1) massively aware of why people come to your website 2) just a few of them are there to buy, and how many 3) where is your website failing you.

Now you know what you need to do to improve your website experience for your major segments of customers to increase their task completion rate. It is impossible that higher conversion rate will not follow.

But as you can see the behavior you will drive in your company will be fundamentally different under this approach. 

Let me close with a humble/arrogant (your choice) point of view by applying the recommendation to a real world practice.

I am a fan of Persuasion Architecture by Future Now Inc. I have had the privilege of hearing Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg and John Quatro-von Tivadar speak, they are awesome (Future Now blog). I like the overall beauty of Persuasion Architecture, especially the Uncovery process.

Stated simply the overall approach is: Understand customers really well, create personas for customer segments and then use patented software from Future Now to redesign website to solve for those personas needs/wants leading to sales/conversion. 

Based on the logic of this post IMHO the overpowering focus on Conversion (getting visitors to buy) and doing all the work to get a site visitors to buy limits the massive impact that the methodology can have.

Rather than being “Persuasion to Conversion by solving for customer needs” of just buyers there would be a exponentially powerful outcome for Future Now and their clients if it was “Persuasion to perfect Task Completion Rate by solving for all customer segments”. Everything about the architecture stays the same. Except the final goal.

It is much harder to solve for multiple goals, to move from solving for conversion rate / buying to solving for task completion for your major personas and the purposes they come to the site for. But doing that will provide long term sustained competitive advantage that would be hard to replicate by your competitors. (Besides my mom says that nothing worth valuing in life comes easy. : ) )

In the end, when the dust settles, it is about creating satisfied site visitors no matter why they come to your website and secondarily it is about short term revenue.

What do you think? Too much la – la  – la? Anything I am missing in my thinking? Are you convinced and will you mount a coup in your company to dislodge conversion rate? Would you like to give me a hug? Please share your feedback via comments.

[Like this post? For more posts like this please click here.]

PS: This post is dedicated to my dear dear friend Blaire Hansen, for reasons she and I know :^).

Comments

  1. 1

    Hi Avinash,
    is it possible that your examples of "what you might be missing" are more indicitive of a failure to define all the possible and *relevant* "conversions".

    The problem being that the "conversion" has previously been focused on selling something, but no focus on quite successful "conversions" that don't sell something. A rose by another name…

    Steve

  2. 2

    Remember one of your first posts, Web Analytics are Dead (or something like that?) I think you meant: webmasters and analysts who care about "How many visitors did I get today?" or even, "How many visitors did I get today from my Google AdWords?" are living in the past. But there are a lot of people just like that out there and I would love to see them all start to care about conversion rate before I tried to persuade them that conversion rate by customer need was the metric to go to. (This is because we all crawl and then walk and then run.)

    WRT moving those people who are measuring conversion rate to measuring conversion rate by customer intent/need — the hard part is measuring the need, the conversion is easy once you know it. Sometimes figuring out the need is easy — maybe you could say, if more than 50% of their pageviews were customer manual pageviews, they must be there for customer service. But the customer who goes to one page and bounces — did he bounce because he was at the wrong site, or did he bounce because we didn't make it clear to him that he was at the right site? And he sure didn't take the time to fill out a "What is your intention today?" form.

    So will your next post be about how to measure conversion by customer intention?

    Robbin

  3. 3

    Steve: If conversion can be thought of as "someone came looking for a answer to fix error code qpc160245 from our product and found the right answer on our website and fixed the issue" then I think it would be indicative of a failure of conversions not defined.

    Most often though conversion rate is connected to selling or submitting a lead etc. Hence my recommendation to use Task Completion Rate as the new metric. It could be "rose by another name" but in my mind it is a different metric that focuses on getting people to complete the tasks they came to the site for.

    I am pessimistic that if we keep the metric the same, conversion rate, and now say we are focused on helping all customer segments complete their task on our website for all the main purposes for which people come to the site for.

    Staying with Conversion Rate might still promote the short term focused behaviour from company employees. What do you think?

    Thanks so much Steve for taking the time to comment.

    Robbin: I want to stress that I am not recommending measuring Conversion Rate by needs. Please see my reply above to Steve.

    (This is because we all crawl and then walk and then run.)

    I am being bit of a smart ass here but: In most Central Asian countries they never had land line telephones, they went from Morse code to cell phones and progress came faster, cheaper and more efficiently.

    In my mind if there are people who are new and don't care as much about conversion rate I would much rather they got brainwashed into mindsets like Persuasion Architecture to learn about their customer needs and then focused on measuring what the Task Completion Rate is by Primary Purpose on their website. They will make much more money.

    Here perhaps I am being too optimistic. What do you think?

    Thanks so much for taking the time to comment.

    PS: Robbin I would caution against measuring "need" based on page views. All web analytics applications would be sub optimal at that.

    (My next post, to reply to your last thought, is on basics and best practices for measuring conversion rate, because I don't want people to think conversion rate is not important, it is but just not as much as all the hoopla that exists. I finished drafting it last night, would love to know what you think of it.)

  4. 4

    Avinash, your post today reminds me of Jared Spool's presentation from Emetrics 2005 (I believe) where he said (I paraphrase) "Conversion Rate is Dead!" Instead, for online retailers, he evangelized the use of "Revenue per Visit" and "Revenue per Visitor" … what do you think about those metrics as top-line for online retailers? Do you think they're suffering from the same lack of segmentation and specificity or do you use them at Intuit to keep an eye on the big picture?

    As always, your devoted reader.

    Eric T. Peterson
    http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog

  5. 5

    Eric: Jared's guidance was excellent and takes us further along the journey. Both of those metrics are good. But they potentially fall short.

    Measuring Revenue Per Visit is sub-optimal when a minority (less than 50%) of site traffic comes to buy. We are inflating the denominator and making ourselves look worse.

    This might be better: Revenue Per Visit for Visitors who came with the Remotest Intention to Buy. That would be cool, but nearly impossible without chips implanted in our visitors brains that communicate to us their intentions.

    My advocacy is for a step away from the whole "revenue" mindset to a "task completion rate" mindset.

    For customer segments who come to buy, or with any intention to buy, measure conversion rate and revenue and all that good stuff (task completion rate will give you a similar feel for segments who are there to buy).

    But for other customer segments don't measure any revenue metric because that is not why they are there, try Task Completion Rate. Then we solve holistically and for the long term.

    Does this make any sense? : )

    Thanks for commenting Eric, it is so great to hear from readers of the blog.

  6. 6
    Kathy French says

    Interesting! Our site does not sell anything so our "conversion rates" have never been about making a sale anyway. We do use personas and then at that point we do think about what we want those personas to be able to do. A career seeker would be considered to have converted if they accessed our job database or submitted a resume, for example. That is what we have called "conversion rate" from the beginning. There is a bit of a difference in that we still ask, what do we want them to be able to do, instead of are they completing the task they came to do.
    As always, an avid reader!
    Kathy

  7. 7

    Hi Avinash,

    Excellent post and a lot to think about here; I also read the comments which were also very helpful.

    I have found that a particular metric – conversions / task completions are best defined in partership with the site owners – just as keywords for your pages need to be defined by the site owners/stakeholders in partership with your SEO/SEM person.

    The ability to segment your visitors in ways that are meaningful to your site is probably the most important step prior to measuring the conversion (ie: segmenting by intent or segmenting by industry, etc). If we can figure out who the visitor is and what segment they belong to – then what we'll call the conversion or task completion comes into view.

    I'll see if I can write a post on this tonight on Webmetricsguru.com; pulling in my own experience and ideas. One thing I'd like to see dealt with is the effects of Multi Channel Conversions (as I wrote about in http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/07/measuring_multi_channel_market.html ).

    I'd be curious to see what weight is put on the various points that lead to a conversion – in this case awareness that leads to seeing a movie.

  8. 8

    Hey, Avinash — great post as usual! But I like it when you share this with everyone in the Web Analytics Forum, too!

    My goal is to try to measure conversion along the funnel between each step of the customer lifecycle: unaided awareness, awareness, positive perceptions, consideration, intent, customer, satisfied customer, loyal customer, and advocate.

    Of course, these can be combined into fewer steps, and measurement is always problematic, but just the act of thinking about the customer's lifecycle in these terms has been helpful to us (even when we violate what you and others said at eMetrics — sometimes we measure things even though we can't make decisions based on them, d'oh!).

    What do you think?

    Wandering Dave

  9. 9

    Great post and great comments.

    Avinash, would you say that it would be a valid approach to try and understand visitor intent by looking at referring keywords? I.e. perhaps have some kind of "bucketing" mechanism whereby you would group such keywords according to visitor intent? So, keyword "buy Canon sku xyz" might go in the "Sales prospect bucket" whereas "review Canon" might go in the "Browse/research" bucket. And once you have those buckets in place you can then start addressing the needs of those different types of visitors.

    Cheers,
    Michael Whitaker

  10. 10

    In response to the last post by Michael Whitaker – there's been a lot of work done to qualify search queries by intent. IBM has done a lot of that work, and Bill Hunt and Mike Moran cover it in SeoINC, their search marketing book published by IBM Press.

    The problem, as I see it, is to scrape all of your query logs and segment the search terms by the categories that are meaningful to your business. You might actually have to go several thousand terms deep (ie: in Surfaid – now CoreMetrics) you can go down 50,000 deep for a background report. If there was a way to write a program that would take your query log and segment it into say…..LEARN, SHOP, or BUY….and then tie it to the pages the searcher landed on …. you'd have something very intersting to look at.

    That would be a major program – and has yet to be written.

  11. 11

    WDave Rhee: One should always "play" with the data and experiment and if in the end we don't make any decisions we chalk one up for Lady Experience. :)

    I apologize for not completely understanding the concept of conversion between steps of the funnel and being unable to reply.

    But your thought on measuring different stages, lifecycle, is absolutely the right thing to do. I was in a presentation at another company yesterday and saw them use the lifecycle: Learn, Shop, Purchase, Support. Very focussed, targetted and helpful.

    My caution would be not to infer any kind of "conversion" from a page view. So "you come to my site, we detect you don't have a cookie, you saw the page for Gateway NX100X, you exit and so you are in the intent or consideration bucket."

    Potentially that would be sub optimal. There are alternatives to measuring if people who are truly "consideration" are moving along the life cycle and I would recommend some non-web analytics options.

    Hope this is helpful. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment, it is clear you are doing some great stuff at Gateway.

  12. 12

    Michael W: Your idea is fantastic. Marshall has pointed out one caution in his reply to your comment, how do you deal with volume (this is specially true in big companies like IBM).

    But for many websites the tail is really long but in reality around 10 to 15% of keywords represent a majority of the traffic, in which case your idea will work perfect. The challenge, IMHO, is to find enough keywords in our top 10% where we can attribute intent because mostly traffic is driven by generic brand and category terms (which makes is harder to attribute intent).

    You could go one better, if you have a truly dynamic platform, say like we have with ATG, it can detect that you came on "buy Canon sku xyz" and the platform can change content on the page to be a bit more targeted to what you need. So you don't run around creating landing pages (and I am not implying that you do :)), the page stays the same, content changes on detection of intent as defined by you for keywords.

    Thanks for commenting, that was a great suggestion.

  13. 13

    Hi Avinash and other commenters – very interesting posts! I have always thought of a conversion as "the site visitor doing whatever it is you want them to do" (and this could be purchase, download, or offline action, or something more brand-awareness oriented), but I have never thought of it as "the site visitor doing whatever it is THEY wanted to do." (It sounds strangely altruistic!)

    What I love about this is that it expands the "conversion" concept to include people like learners, who are in the research stage of a process. However, I guess my concern would be that if you can't tie the happiness of the learners back to the Bottom Line (ie, earnings for your business) in more than just a theoretical way, then it's going to be hard to use these metrics to justify spending or make budget-based decisions.

    This may also be a case of people being a bit afraid of knowing the truth about their website- ie, that a large percent of the visitors may *never* be paying customers!

    Gradiva
    http://www.yourseoplan.com/

  14. 14

    I've been reading your articles- great stuff! However, I'm trying to understand what is a good conversion % of impressions clicked? Any suggestions on how to build that higher and with more traffic so when I get that 2.2% sale conversion it didn't take me 6 months for the ppc traffic of 100 clicks?

  15. 15

    Purrinlot: I am not sure of a easily available benchmark.

    But my recommendation is that you benchmark against yourself, i.e. are you getting better over time? It is not perfect but atleast something you can use.

    The other idea in your specific case to improve conversion is to ensure there is "scent" between your ads / impressions and your landing pages. This is one of the biggest causes of low conversions (and high bounce rates) – ensure that your ads are "not writing a chq that your website cannot cash".

    To improve that you might already be using something like the Google Website Optimizer to do a/b or multivariate experiments. It takes only six and half minutes to set up a a/b test and it is one of the best ways to improve conversion rates.

    More here if you are interested:

    Experimentation and Testing: A Primer
    Build A Great Web Experimentation & Testing Program

    Hope this helps a little bit.

    -Avinash.

  16. 16

    I think you have hit on an important and often overlooked factor that there are multiple types of "conversions". The goal is for users to be able to get the information that they are looking for, whether they are a buyer right now or not.

    Of course, if they are a buyer, we want to convert them. :)

    Thanks again,
    Vi Wickam
    http://www.PrincipalWebSolutions.com

  17. 17

    This is exactly what i'm talking about. You have made clear that seo is pointless if your website does not convert…Great blog! Better than mine.

  18. 18

    Hi Avinash,

    Great Blogpost! I read your book the other day, because it's compulsary reading at my study and i must say its great!

    Based on your book we must write a Online Strategy for our company and i'm now trying to find out some more in-depth info about some pragmatic metrics like "task completion rate" and with which tools to measure it.

    Thanks for this post and keep publishing please!

  19. 19

    Wow! Thanks for writing this article, this has given me some new incentive and ideas, Thank you! LT

  20. 20

    Even though this is a really old post I feel that this is still very apt. I think this makes great sense for companies whose main objective is to measure how much and what they sell. Although its equally important to measure the task completion rates for the visits whos intention is not to buy.

    Do you have any recommendation on how you would identify the visits who do not have an intention to buy?

  21. 21

    Raghu: One simple strategy would be to use Site or Page level surveys to measure Primary Purpose. That should help understand why Visitors come to your website. From that isolating the "no intention to buy'ers" is but a small step.

    For one method see this post:

    ~ 4Q – The Best Online Survey For A Website, Yours Free!

    See the reports on that page.

    Avinash.

  22. 22

    Such a great post Avinash, even four years later! I came to this one after your post on microconversions. Now I just have to convince the team to abandon conversion rate, which, unfortunately, I convinced them to adopt. Learn. Change. Rinse. Repeat.

  23. 23

    Thanks Avinash for this post.

    I'm moving my company to this direction. Stop looking at the conversion rate and looking more and more to the conversion rate of what I call my "qualified visits" for more info on this please refer to my post: bit.ly/eW3Tq8

    Thanks again! Loic

  24. 24

    Hi man,

    As the responsible of CR and UX for my company, I think you definitely have more than a point, but with this fire you made a huge mess on terminology. How could you say that focusing on Conversion leads to sub optimal users' experiences, when tweaking the CR is the process of improving UX based on real user data!

    I think this article is referred more to all these wannabe guru online than to real CR, but you made your point really well Avinash.

  25. 25
    Ravi Vadher says

    Hello, Avinash! You have got quite an angle here and this is the first time I have read something like this when it comes to conversion rate niche.

    You got me with the "Obsessed" bit in your title, and although I am quite confused, I do see and quite get where you are coming from, although you cannot really stop owners from obsessing about their conversion rates as one of the biggest telltales of their businesses' health.Your article did give me something to think about.

    I know that there are just fundamentals things you need to do in order to make sure that you get a continuous stream of conversion, and one of that is ensuring that your website is fast when it comes to loading time and that you can offer the best user experience possible.

    Another article that I can recommend on how to improve one's conversion rate is this one. This one cited Spotify's massive success on converting their trial users into loyal customers.

Trackbacks

  1. […] Like Avinash, who recently posted a declamation about why you should stop obsessing about "conversion rate" as a metric, I have encouraged my clients to use “conversion rate” as a performance indicator. […]

    http://digitalmediaanalytics.com/blog/2006/07/31/why-youd-better-obsess-beyond-conversion-rate/

  2. To Conversion Rate or Not To Conversion Rate…

    The importance of ‘conversion rate’ as a core analytics metric is being debated in blog posts from Avinash Kaushik, Matt Jacobs, and LunaMetrics. Avinash makes the point that conversion rate as generally defined is a vastly over-rated metric becaus…

  3. […] Setting up goals in Google Analytics is a vital step in monitoring the success of your website. While it is not necessary, setting up goals helps you harness the complete power of the application. Most people usually set up goals and scrutinize the conversion rate. I'm not going to comment on conversion rate, Avinash has already caused a stir about that. But I do want to point out some other Goal functionality and Goal related reports. I think an example would be the best way to structure this post. […]

  4. […] Too much focus on overall conversion rate on the web site without understanding the different groups that are visiting the site. Avinash Kaushik points out that an overemphasis on overall conversion rate means that we are not investing in efforts to create a great experience for the other segments that are visiting our site. […]

  5. […] Avinash recommends unique visitors as the denominator: "Definition first: Conversion rate, in percentage, equals Outcomes divided by Unique Visitors during a particular time period." […]

  6. […] But not all metrics are created equal. For instance, conversion rate, which so many people live by, has some fundamental flaws. While I don’t feel as strong about as Avinash Kaushik, I agree that conversion rate is not the most useful metric. All useful web metrics share 2 key attributes: […]

  7. […] intención de cumplir nuestro objetivo final (comprar, registrarse, etc.). Aquí me retrotraigo a un artículo de Avinash ("Stop Obsessing about Conversion Rate") en el que nos recordaba que el “Ratio de Conversión” estaba sobrevalorado porque está […]

  8. […]
    Another tip: focus on increasing trust. Bryan Eisenberg has a webinar describing multiple ways to improve customers’ trust of your landing pages. Almost everything Bryan discusses here can apply just as well to your checkout page.

    Assuming your conversion rate falls into “industry average” (it varies widely by vertical), most people coming to your site aren’t buying. And, when I say “most”, think 90%, 95% or more. Obviously, not all customers come to buy. But accepting more customers won’t buy is self-limiting.
    […]

  9. […]
    Neo Marketing = Permission Based Marketing, meaning that we’ll only approach people, humans, individuals -and not “target audiences”- with relevant conversations if and when they see fit; taking in their feedback directly, treating it with respect and giving it some order of priority, all the while keeping a sharp eye on Conversion Rates or Task Completion Rates by Primary Purpose, when speaking of the web specifically. Very transparent, results-driven and opt-in actually ;)
    […]

  10. […]
    I do agree with Avinash is that Bounce Rate is a key indicator about the quality of a website. However, it is sometimes a sign of a a bad advertisement as well.

    Also, the key indicator is the conversion rate (however, it is only ONE indicator). But don’t obsess about it…
    […]

  11. […]
    Konversiolla on tietenkin paikkansa osana web-analytiikkaa. Oikeassa liiketoiminnassa sillä on kuitenkin merkitystä ainoastaan suhteessa muihin, vertailtaviin lukuihin. Konversioon keskittyminen ei saa tarkoittaa sitä, että sen parantamisen varjolla hylätään ne käyttäjäsegmentit jotka eivät ole valmiita konvertoitumaan heti (ja mielellään helposti mitattavalla tavalla).

    Kausnik: Stop Obsessing About Conversion Rate ↩
    […]

  12. […]
    Konverteringsrate(eller task completion rate) er et nøkkelbegrep når det gjelder internettaktiviteter. Alle nettsteder har mål, og alle nettsteder har én eller flere konverteringsrater. Konverteringsraten er andelen av besøkende som oppnår det de ønsker å oppnå ved besøket(og/eller det du ønsker at folk skal oppnå). Konverteringsrater kan følges over tid slik at du kan vurdere om det du gjør med nettstedet har positiv effekt.
    […]

  13. […]
    If visiting a page is point A then what is point B? Most analytics tools will help you attach values to that step B and/or let you see user navigation paths.

    Don’t be disappointed if conversion rates are low. Really low. Two percent can be considered a solid conversion rate. The reality is that people are looking information and not wanting to be “converted” to what you need. It’s like door to door canvassing. Tough but results count and you can learn from results and try to improve your technique. Test tweaks to design, page layout, headlines, related offers or content.
    […]

  14. […]
    Depuis les débuts modestes de l’analyse Web en 1994, il a toujours été une fixation malsaine sur le taux de conversion métriques clés d’un site Web. Naturellement, les sites de commerce électronique mesurent souvent le succès de leur site par la quantité de visiteurs qui, finalement, l’achat d’un produit. Toutefois, comme un billet de blog par Avinash Kaushik conseille, il n’est tout simplement pas la valeur de votre temps à être obsédé par celle-ci, souvent déformée, le nombre. Il existe une myriade d’autres «micro» des conversions sur votre site que vous pourrait et devrait se concentrer.
    […]

  15. […]
    However, Kaushik states that by focusing on the conversion rate you neglect many other potentially valuable KPI’s. Firstly, knowing that your conversion rate went up wont tell you something about the people who are not in your conversion rate. Or put in other words, what happens with the rest of the people not doing what the objectives of the website are Secondly, less than 50% of visitors do so with the intention to buy something.
    […]

  16. […]
    Métricas que te dan información acerca de las necesidades, intención o percepción de tu audiencia, por ejemplo, Task Completion Rate. Si el porcentaje de conversión mide cuántos visitantes cumplieron tus objetivos, el Task Completion Rate mide qué tanto tú fuiste capaz de cumplir los objetivos de tus visitantes. Suena como algo importante para medir ¿cierto? Y hay una razón más, con el porcentaje de conversión estarás analizando el comportamiento de aproximadamente al 1% de tus visitantes, mientras que con el Task Completion Rate podrás analizar el otro 99%. Ahora suena como algo obligatorio ¿verdad?
    […]

  17. […]
    De vraag wat de website direct oplevert voor je bedrijfsresultaten betekent dat je een groot deel van de doelen van je klanten negeert: de meeste bezoekers hebben helemaal geen koopintentie. De meeste bezoekers komen voor productinformatie, banen, orderstatus, prijsvergelijking, bedrijfsinformatie, klachten, etc. Ook bij het zomaar uitgaan van paginaweergaven zal later blijken dat het niks oplevert: het zegt namelijk niks meer dan dat een pagina is bekeken, maar je weet niet of dat ergens toe bijdraagt.
    […]

  18. […]
    No one gets married on the first date, likewise no one buys something the first time they meet your site. How many little interactions, downloads, engagement, likes, views, subscriptions, reviews does it take to add up to a conversion? Like Avinash says, If you solve for conversion rate are you solving for all your traffic and are you improving the website experience for all your customers?
    […]

  19. […]
    Een wezenlijk punt wat Avinish Kaushik maakt ten aanzien van ABC is ABO: Outcomes in plaats van onze obsessie voor online conversies.
    […]

  20. […]
    Each time a consumer involves an internet site, they're coming to finish a process. It might be to analysis, get help, obtain one thing, buy, eat content material or many different issues. The holy grail of web site efficiency metrics is "Process Completion Price by Main Function." This tells you if a consumer was capable of full their activity and why or why not. Again to my opening query once more – are you able to think about how your backside line can be affected if each consumer that got here to your web site was capable of full their activity simply and effectively?
    […]

  21. […]
    For any website, the best metric you could possible optimize for is not conversion rate. It’s also not bounce rate, pages per visit, or revenue. It’s task completion rate. This metric answers two questions:
    […]

  22. […]
    Which brings us to Avanish, the Amazing Analytics Avenger. He recommends you focus on “Task Completion Rate by Primary Purpose” instead of obsessing over conversion rates. Um, what? Essentially, that means solving for why people visited your site in the first place. Basically, people come to your site for a whole variety of reasons. It could be to purchase, sure. But that’s only the tiny majority. Everyone else is visiting in order to learn something, find something, or do something.
    […]

  23. […]
    The breakdown above into KPIs follows the principle of stopping the obsession over conversion as it is right now in the E-commerce industry. At any point of time, most visitors/users on any website are just exploring and only a small minority is actually buying and business owners need to understand and acknowledge that.
    […]

  24. […]
    Even though the Conversion Rate decreased by 42%, the Average Order Value grew by 22%.
    So, you can easily tell your CEO or investors that there is no need to be stressed out as business is growing (even though you should also work on increasing your conversion rate, of course.) Great read: Avinash Kaushik tells you on his blog post why only obsessing about Conversion Rate is not the right way to go.
    […]

  25. […]
    Below are two solid resources you must read to learn more about this issue and go deep on the points mentioned above
    Stop obsession about Conversion Rate by Avinash Kaushik
    […]

  26. […]Macro-conversions, or sales, customers, and leads, are great. BUT, as the final step in a long process, they’re hard to drive directly. (Brush up on your Avanish for more digital marketing analytics and marketing ROI gold.) So. Do you want to move the needle on customers? From content?
    […]

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