I recently read an article by Dr Pete discussing conversion rates and one of the points he made was that nobody seems to share theirs. Hmmmm… could that be because we are all insecure about our conversion rate. Maybe… no one seems to be able to answer the question: What is a good conversion rate? And few things lead faster to insecurity than ignorance. Will publishing one’s conversion rate lead to the spontaneous purchase of a sports car with a very large engine as other shortcomings have.
I don’t know about that; but I’m up for a game of… I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours… I’ll start.
The 2 metrics I am most interested in are: the overall conversion rate (those who contacted the business) and the % of visitors who ended up at the contact page from other pages on the site (the path).
So, here I am exposed: (the website belongs to a small house painting company, it’s real)
Just About 4.5% of the uniques contacted the business.
Now, it’s your turn… please show me yours. Please use the comments below and tell me about the conversion rate of your best site… and maybe a tip about how you did it.
Now, I’m not sure if this is really a “small analytic” or not; but I do think it can do better. So, I’m going to split test it using the Google Optimizer.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about the test I set-up and from to time to time provide progress reports. And remember this is all about getting this dirty little secret out of the closet, so please comment and share as little or as much as you like… thanks!
For more about conversion myths.
Dr. Pete | 07-Feb-08 at 12:54 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the mention, and for picking up the discussion. I have to admit that I’m not sure I was calling for quite that much transparency (I know that can be hard when you’re dealing with clients’ numbers), but I certainly appreciate your willingness to share details.
My largest client actually floats right around 2% conversion, but the numbers at the first funnel have gone way up, as we’re more successfully doing long-tail targeting on the SERPs (and pulling people straight to product pages). Unfortunately, we’ve found that their overall conversion right now is very sensitive to market conditions, and swings in consumer sentiment seem to be having a bigger impact than even fairly radical site changes.
Local Search Hound | 08-Feb-08 at 10:56 pm | Permalink
Good info Dr Pete, thanks. There are so many factors that influence conversion. “Consumer sentiment” has to be one of the more frustrating ones.
Just the kind of info I was looking for… anyone else… Bueller? Bueller?
Tony Hilton | 11-Feb-08 at 6:32 pm | Permalink
Great post, its always interesting to look at different peoples conversion rates, I will tell you some from the web sites I have worked on. With the traffic coming mostly from PPC and SEO the quality of traffic can vary greatly and so can the conversion rates. For example traffic arriving on search term “buy a new 8 drive CD DVD Duplicator” will convert way better than traffic arriving on just “DVD Duplicator”. The quality of the landing page also seems to make a big difference. Anyway the conversion rates range between 0.2% to 23%. Its also interesting to note that in the industry I work in at the moment traffic converts way better in the evening.
Gab "SEO ROI" Golden | 13-Feb-08 at 2:33 am | Permalink
Correct me if I’m wrong, but 77, 37 and 38 equals more than 24 conversions, no?
BTW, AWESOME TITLE!
Local Search Hound | 13-Feb-08 at 1:34 pm | Permalink
No Gab that is the number that proceeded to the ‘contact page’, because I have only one thank you page and 3 paths, Google overstates the conversion by a multiple of 3 for each conversion. So I put a red X through the number of conversions Google is showing.