When you improve the conversion rate on your site, you raise the percentage of visitors to your site who become customers, purchasing your product or subscribing to your service. Raising conversion rates is, or should be, the goal of every ecommerce marketer or business owner.
The average conversion rate for ecommerce and subscription based sites is widely debated. Most say that it falls anywhere between 2% and 8%. Not very high, is it? Even the sites with the most targeted traffic can claim only 15% to 20%. And those numbers are great! So how do you go about turning your little .5% into a number with double digits?
You can try a hundred different gimmicks touted by marketing gurus and business experts to drive traffic to your site, but if you don’t invest in some serious web analytics, you’ll never know what’s working and what isn’t. So the first step to improving your conversion rate is to use web analytics to track your traffic. How many visit your site daily? How many leave immediately? Where did these visitors come from? How many are return visitors? With web analytics, you can track all of this information and upgrade your site,...