Website Conversions
In digital marketing, website conversions are instances in which someone visits a website and as a result of what they experience in that company website decide to then interact with you as a business owner.
Business owners who want more customers usually want their websites to convert (if they know about this term).
That “conversion” could be to call you directly, submit an email contact form, place an order, request a download that subscribes them to a newsletter, book a consultation, watch a commercial video, or something else.
In some cases that conversion or interaction could be more than one event or a series of very brief events, (such as watching a video and then making a purchase).
The more website conversions a business website receives, the more phone calls or emails or sales the company takes in. It’s literally the process of converting casual viewers (most people) who are passively looking at websites into engaged potential clients or customers who may place an order.
In this post, what we want to discuss ways in which website conversions just are not relevant because they can’t be acted upon in a serious manner.
Journey Into the Unknown
Way back in the late 1960s there was an anthology TV program called “Journey Into the Unknown,” and in this particular instance our “journey into the unknown” is trying to deduce how many conversions a particular company website is attracting and of what type yet with very limited resources.
Limited resources can be trying to decipher conversions rates with a “free” DIY template where such tracking isn’t even a part of the site’s programming itself (so tracing it won’t work in the first place).
It can be not using the correct SEO for your particular demographic and market industry, not knowing who you’re trying to attract, not investing in paid online advertising (also called PPC for short), or not using eCommerce to process payments for services or products or other factors. In these cases, potential customers could leave the site because there’s no way for them to pay for what they want or the website SEO is off-target.
Conversion KPIs
The most dominant factor that can make trying to discern conversions as a whole is simply not having clearly-defined conceptions of sucess for conversions – in other words not knowing what sucess looks like for that project.
If you don’t know what your Key Performance Indicators are, you’ll never know when or if you actually hit them one day, so trying to measure them is like going on a road trip with no gas in the car tank.
It’s easy to get lost and actually likely. In digital marketing, it’s vital to know what goes toward success and what that means for the company before trying to figure out if you’re getting started on that journey into the unknown.
The solution to this dillemma is to define success for the project before thinking about conversions.
Success usually has to be very clearly defined by using S.M.A.R.T. goals; meaning definitions of project success must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable in the real world given what you have to work with (usually unrealistically low budgets as a common setback), Relevant to the business, and Time-bound with a date set for completion.
Non-Responsive
When websites aren’t responsive, meaning they literally do not respond to changing environments and situations, trying to measure how many conversions they may process is like driving backward down an interstate. Non-responsive websites – those that don’t adjust and expand or contract to correspond to changing screen size resolutions and device types, are typically penalized by Google search so as to appear lower in search results pages (SERPs).
This act of pushing them down the results pages means fewer people will see the site, and certainly fewer will find the site when looking up a type of business in a given city or state.
Non-responsive websites, while sadly still very common amongst smaller businesses and one-person entrepreneur businesses, can also be unsafe and insecure to use (not displaying the green lock showing proper encryption for forms), which can be yet another factor to delist them in search results pages.
Discombobulation
Discombobulation is the act of making something or someone confused or disoriented. In digital marketing this most often takes the form of design that doesn’t make any sense and “robs Peter to pay Paul.”
These can be instances in which someone new to marketing and design creates their own DIY website with the design they think is best.
These can be instances in which someone works with a hobbyist (or even professional) designer yet insists on forcing them to create haphazard designs that don’t seem similar to larger, more profitable industry competitors.
These can be incomplete sites with confusing text, half-written text, odd images or inappropriate images (such as a dog or cat or pet featured on the front page of a business website), unusual fonts, unusual colors, no Calls To Action, and a lack of a general funnel type of design. Any of these discombobulating practices can throw website viewers off and cause them to simply stop wasting time trying to find something and just go to Amazon, eBay, or back to Google to find a different vendor.
If your site doesn’t visually resemble an industry stalwart or larger more established brand at least partially, or if your site has unusual fonts (such as the dreaded comic sans), has odd sections, incomplete sentence fragments, no or incorrect SEO, and other factors already referenced, trying to game the number of conversions can be largely irrelevant.
Not Enough to Jumpstart the Conversion Process
Another factor that can limit one’s ability to create a way to measure website conversions is when that particular business website simply doesn’t generate sufficient hits (or visits) to create some kind of baseline to proceed forward from so you can begin watching growth.
At a minimal this is ten website visits per day from unique sources for at least 3 months.
Once that’s accomplished we’d want to ideally monitor at least a year or two seasonal spikes and subsequent declines (just like the stock market) to provide some kind of raw date to begin quantifying and keeping record of.
Now, yes, you can start cold, but it’d be a slow slog through swampy terrain without much to show for it until we’ve established at the very least those standards to build on.
Finding Your Conversion Match
The final reason why examining conversions can be counterproductive at times is when the company has not previously identified who they’re trying to reach and why.
In marketing we call the ideal customer you’re trying to reach your ideal customer persona (or avatar).
Included below are two very different examples of customer persona or customer avatar types as well as an infographic illustrating these main concepts.
The customer avator isn’t just a cartoon character or pie-in-the-sky fantasy exercise but should be a reality-based exercise in which someone key in the company’s infrastructure can reasonably and logically define who they’re ideal, preferred type of customer really is so a funnel design to overall general website design and implementation can then be put into action, followed up by marketing efforts and approached devised specifically to try to convert that type of customer on a daily basis through offers, design, paid advertising, blogging, SEO, and other targeted work.
Once we know who we want to convert, and only then, can we begin to create a solid approach for reaching and guiding that visitor.