Conversions

In the last section, we defined a conversion as when a visitor to your site responds to your site’s call to action by performing the desired action… whether that means a product purchase, the completion of a contact form, downloading a free trial, etc.

At the end of the day, conversions are the most important statistic to monitor because conversions are the purpose of your site! There is no secret formula for boosting conversions on your site. What works well for your may not work for your friend and vice versa. However, let us look at some of the factors that are most likely to influence your conversion rates.

Site Loading Time
Online users have extremely short attention spans. In fact, several web marketing experts say site visitors begin forming opinions about your site in just milliseconds. If your site does not appear almost instantaneously in a visitor’s browser, they may become frustrated and leave before your site even finishes loading.

For that reason, it is crucial to make sure everything on your site that may slow down the loading time, ties in with your call to action. Do not upload large, high-resolution images and seriously consider the value of a Flash introduction before adding one to your site.

Landing Pages
A landing page is the first thing visitors to your site see. Depending on your marketing strategy, you may have one landing page, often called your home page, or you may have a landing page for each specific product or service that you offer.

No matter how good your marketing efforts are, getting visitors to your site is just the beginning. Your landing page is what does the heavy lifting. Think about it. All your marketing did was convince someone to click on a link or type a URL into his or her browser. That is a decision they are likely to make dozens of times each time they get online.

Your landing page has to convince visitors to stick around long enough to make a much harder decision.

Do I really want to read more on this site?
As we said before, Internet users have extremely short attention spans. Do not frighten away visitors with large amounts of text. 90 percent of it will never be read anyway.

Just provide enough information to let the visitor know that, yes; they are in the right place.

Even small aspects like your chosen font, font size, and font color can encourage or discourage visitors from reading your text.

Providing too much information will likely decrease the likelihood that a visitor will answer your call to action. Many visitors will decide taking action would require a big decision, and plan to return when they have more time to think about it, or decide to forget it entirely.

Site Links
If you have too many links to different locations on your site, you may be distracting visitors from your call to action. If you offer 20 products on your site but there is one in particular you want visitors to check out, only include that one product on your main page.

Consistency
Ideally, your visitor should see the same wording in your advertising, on your landing page, and on the submit button to complete your call to action. Studies show that tying a landing page with a single product, service, or keyword, is the most effective way to improve conversions.