As any aspiring internet marketer is only too aware, your conversion rate is the be all and end all of making a profit. No matter how much work you put into your site, no matter how good you are at driving traffic to your site, if you can't convert those visitors into buyers then it's all a wasted effort. Sure, you can just go after ever more traffic - working on a law of averages someone will buy something eventually! But that's a fools game - you need to get the most out of every single visitor.
So, firstly let's just clarify exactly what a conversion rate is: a simple definition would be the percentage of visitors to your website that go on to buy something from you, or one of the merchants you're promoting on your site. That's fairly clear - what's less clear is what constitutes a good conversion rate. Firstly, anything less than one percent would generally be considered poor, but beyond that it really depends on what your promoting and how much commission you will earn per sale. For example, if you're earning $500 per sale a one percent rate may seem quite good, whereas if you only earn $2 per sale it would be quite a poor return.
In the early days of the internet, when internet marketing was a new phenomenon average conversion rates could be very high - buyers were drawn to fancy banner ads and quick to follow recommended links. As the worldwide web has matured users have become more astute and it's now a lot more difficult to get sales online - buyers will generally shop around a great deal before making a final purchase, meaning getting sales has become harder and harder - webmasters have to offer a lot more value and build a great deal more trust in order to convince visitors to buy from them, rather than someone else.
Now internet marketers have to work a lot harder to achieve a good conversion rate, there are lots of factors they must take into account to get the most value from their efforts. However, it's well worth the effort because simply increasing your conversion rate from one to two percent effectively doubles your profit, without any extra traffic. Many internet marketers are turning to software, like Conversion Prophet 2 that can help them to refine their online campaigns to deliver the best possible number of sales, to get the most possible value from their hard-won traffic.
In the next article in this series I'll be discussing the factors that can impact on conversion rates, and how you can carefully construct your campaigns to offer the highest possible returns.
About the Author:To find out more about Conversion Prophet 2 check out my Conversion Prophet 2 review.
