I was asked by a coworker for any information about Conversion rates I might have today - and sent her over to Avinash Kaushik's blog because he's written some really neat stuff on measuring conversions lately. Today Gary Angel also wrote an article about measuring conversions, and as I was just asked for information about it - it's worth taking a closer look at Gary's article. I will quote some of the parts of Gary Angel's article that struck me and enter any comments in blue.
"In the bad old days, web site effectiveness was measured by hits. Then by page views. Then by visitors. None of which meant a darn thing when it came to meaningful business results. So it wasn’t all that long before people finally agreed – it’s conversion that matters. You measure your website the way you measure the rest of your business – by its contribution to the bottom line. In no time at all, this became a mantra for good measurement. Are you measuring to conversion? No – that’s bad. Yes – that’s good."
"........It turns out there are a whole bunch of ways in which measurement to conversion can result in seriously misleading information. I’ve covered some of these in previous articles – especially Organic Cannibalization – where PPC programs “borrow” clicks from organic listings – potentially inflating conversions and understating the true cost per lead or acquisition by a significant amount."
".......Surprisingly, perhaps, not only can different channels cannibalize each other, but the same channel can cannibalize itself. This is quite common in PPC programs (and, to a lesser extent with SEO) – cases where visitors frequently source from different search terms to the same site in one or more sessions. Since campaign tracking in PPC generally gives credit to the last campaign that drove a lead, one PPC campaign can cannibalize another. This is especially common with “brand” terms, and tracking conversion in this way can significantly mis-represent actual conversion performance.
Actually, that can be an explanation for some of the results I observed in my architectural house plans clients, including the one I'm still working with. Keyword Max has some nice features (though it could be improved a bit still) and it shows the last place someone comes from when they convert - but it does not show the first place they came from when they first found your site - unless they converted from that pathway. In many cases, when I observed Keyword Max reports closely, I saw the kind of cannibalization between channels that Gary Angel mentions above.
" Just as online channels compete and cannibalize, your web channel may compete and contribute with other channels. This can make your website look much better or worse than it otherwise might."
I think this could be true of my big corporate clients - but its very hard to measure because the data is spread across organizations and no in any one person's hand. That's one of the reason's it's really hard to see the big picture with large sites - there's a lot of politics in even finding out who has the data - not to mention getting it. Often that data is in a form that requires additional work to match it up and develop a channel diagram which might show you if one channel is getting cannibalized due to another.
"Few websites are directed only to conversion goals. When you don’t factor out traffic that has other intentions than purchase, you unfairly penalize a website and you may commit a series of optimization mistakes."
"The effectiveness of a web site is heavily influenced by the mix of visitor sources you drive – so measuring effectiveness without regard to source efficiency can radically skew your perception of how well your site is doing."
Two points here. First, a corporate B2B site might be going after a much smaller audience that can purchase big ticket items. When I produce heatmaps of promotions the numbers are often not that staggering - but what we're looking for is conversions and a measure of interest in the marketing material from an audience that's targeted to be CIO's, or something similar (and it may vary from week to week).
Second, with architects, I found we were missing a huge segment of potential buyers because "home builders" were being left out. I was one of the first, if not the first, to bring that to the attention of one of my clients - none of the house plans sites (IE: coolhouseplans, global, houseplanguys, eplans, etc) had been looking there- they focused rather on dream home buyers - forgetting that most of these types only by one plan for life while home builders can buy many plans, over and over, and they build and flip houses day in and day out.
I even mentioned as much in my recent podcast when I talked about the 27,000 subscriber list of one client who our tracking found had an audience the client had not been addressing - females in the Midwest who where interested in Fabulous Kitchen Plans - I talk about it here. The client had expectations that were not being met but they were not even focused on the right audiences in many cases - so whatever their perception of success was - it was skewed by their own expectations.
"Many visitors may show up at a website “ready to convert.” Giving your website credit for these conversions is fine operationally, but it can hide significant problems in the ability of your website to actually convince prospects."
Without good analytics and some thought in setting up points to measure how people convert and when they convert - it's hard to qualify all the problems a site might have - and those problems are not always the ones' the client thinks they are - it's about what your customers think.
"For almost any multi-channel business, it will be essential to come to some understanding of how important the Web is to supporting other channels. This is rarely a simple answer to come by, but once arrived at it can greatly shape your thinking about how to measure the Web. You may need to find website points that correlate to purchase interest and measure engagement to those points instead of measuring to actual conversion."
I try to get all my clients to map out their channels so we can figure out how we might track them. Most of the time - I'm looking for cross channel conversions - like a magazine article that leads to a phone call where the customer buys on the phone (but the magazine article was what got the person to call in the first place). If we don't find a way to track that - we'll never know how customers really decide to come in the first place and we won't be spending money in the right places.
".....The more functions your web site is being asked to perform, the less relevant conversion rates are as a measure and the more they will be distorted by outside factors if you try to trend them."
True, but if that's the case .... what are going to use to gauge success?
"Fortunately, you can often segment visitors based on high-level cues from their behavior. So you can create a segment of visitors who view support information and subtract them from your total visitor counts. The more non-purchase segments you can identify and eliminate, the more meaningful and accurate your conversion rates are going to be."
So Gary thinks the answer is segmenting your audience so you can measure only those visitors who are actually looking to purchase (vs. support). While Google Analytics is a pretty good free tool for this - most of the best segmenation happens only in the high end tools that cost a fortune (now you know why they cost a fortune).
".......It is sometimes easier to find pages that indicate a visitor is an interested prospect. By tracking conversion versus interest, you lose part of the funnel of your website (not all prospects may make it to the “interested” pages) but you have a measure that’s likely to be significantly more representative."
This is what I have been asked to do for some of my corporate projects.
"Our third bullet deals with the relationship between source and site efficiency. If you are trying to determine the effectiveness of your website or its “convincing” content, then you need to recognize that the level of qualification of prospects is going to be a significant factor in real-world performance."
This is exactly what is happening with one client right now. A analysis of all conversions for August showed that most came from visitors that already knew the architect - esp those that were from search engines - they all just typed in the architects name - not the style of plan or a more general term.
What that means is that a house plan is a considered purchase - and it takes time to qualify a visitor - your search traffic, while it may improve, can drop conversion rates because the visitors might still not made any decision about the site yet or even made up their mind about anything.
".....A significant percentage of your web site conversion is quite likely to be purely operational – because the visitor showed up on your web site fully intending to buy. How can you know this. You can’t always."
I remember a story I often tell. I walked by a shop 99 times and never walked in - and then one time, the 100th time, I suddenly decided I was ready to walk in and buy something. How does the store owner know I walked by 99 times (unless they watched me walk by...they'd never know). You may never know how, 100%, effective your site really is.
In another sitauation, someone who was considering backruptcy heard a TV spot for We The People and decided, at that moment, to set up an appointment with that service. Does that mean the advertising was effective or does it just happen that the advertising (good or bad) happened to reach a person who was receptive at that moment). We'll probably never know for sure how much of our conversions are based on effective marketing vs. people who just happen to be ready to buy what you sell.
"But if your sales cycle is typically fairly long and the median conversion for visitors is 3 or more visits, then it’s a pretty good bet that any visitors who converted in their first session were fully intending to buy when they showed up. That means if you really want to measure the “convincing” performance of your site, you need to remove the visitors who’d already decided to buy just like you removed the visitors who aren’t prospects at all!"
That's really hard to do....only the best segmentation tools plus good planning would allow for this to be possible.
Comment Preview