Conversion Math – What It Can Add Up To For You!

There is a reason that many smart webmasters are on a crusade to emphasize website conversion over most all else. All that ultimately matters is the bottom line. Whether you get 50 or 5000 visitors to your site, what you do with them is vitally important. In fact, if you manage to get your site converting well, it makes the traffic part that much easier. Fewer visitors can still translate to more sales! Let's do some basic math here to get a true perspective on this scenario. Say you get an average of 5000 visitors a month, and your site presently converts at 1% (50 sales) for a $97 product. You're taking in $4850, minus the costs associated with getting the traffic and any other costs. Raise your conversion percent just .5%, and you're looking at 75 sales on the same amount of traffic, no further costs, and a gross $7275 – not a paltry increase, by any measure. Now think if you were able to raise it to a 2.5% conversion rate. That is now 125 sales, bringing is a cool $12,125. Now you can see why it can be a very good idea to optimize your site for conversions as well as you can. Some of that increased revenue can be used to acquire even more traffic, thus priming the money pump even more! Enough of the math; you get it. What you may need to understand is how to optimize for conversions. There is a lot to it, and a great deal of it has to do with understanding how your site operates now and how your visitors relate to it. You need to have an idea of how your conversion process is working. How long do visitors stay on your page? Where do they go next? Do they follow the bread crumbs you're hopefully leaving for them so you can coax them into taking the desired action? Is your content weak at any given point, causing more visitors to exit at a particular point? These and more thoughtful analysis of your sales pages will help you make changes that could help improve conversion rates. Perhaps you need to change some of your content. Are your headlines and sub-headers compelling and actionable? Does your text lead people to inescapable conclusions? Are you asking for the sale/opt-in/contact? Are you being bold in your pitch? Are your site colors a turn-off? (Dark backgrounds are popular but very difficult to read!) Is your content striving to get an emotional response? Do you have shopping cart or other payment issues? If your payment process is a headache, then that will be the first thing you’ll want to fix. You want to make that part of your business as easy as possible! These and other factors need to be tested and looked at closely, if you hope to make headway. This type of site introspection will take a bit of time but in the end could be extremely worthwhile. As you've seen from the simple math examples above, a very small change in your conversion process can lead to huge increases to your bottom line!