The Bigger Picture - Beyond Conversion Rates

In the past couple of weeks I have had multiple conversations with some amazing people that all stem back to the same theme. That no one thing happens in isolation. This means that you can’t look at one thing and alter it or use it as guidance in isolation.

Let’s take something as simple as your website’s conversion rate. In isolation this is just a number, one that seemingly has the power to make or break an eCommerce store, trust me on it’s own it won’t (yes in eCommerce circles this is an unpopular opinion, but I’ve said it and I stand by it!). Your websites conversion rate is only a single part of the story. It measures one thing – the percentage of the number people that have placed an order (converted) out of the number of people that have visited your site. That’s it. That is all it tells you. Yes, it can be an indicator of store health but again, not in isolation.

What doesn’t it tell you? So much!

It won’t tell you how many site visitors you have had over the same period. It won’t tell you the quality of that traffic (is it warm, just cold or completely irrelevant?). It won’t tell you the average price of the items on your eCommerce store. It won’t tell you your online stores average order value.

It is simply one indicator that you should be using along with other indicators like average order value, the type of traffic you are receiving and so much more. Together all these things can help you determine the health of your store and together these things will make or break your eCommerce store but none of these in isolation will.

A great example of this is in the past couple of weeks we have worked with a couple of clients to refocus their advertising. Prior to the reconfiguration both websites had what would traditionally be considered a low conversion rate. After we tweaked the ad accounts and the strategy of the advertising the conversion rate has increased to what is generally considered a great to high conversion rate. What did we change? The traffic source and profile. That’s it.

What has the conversion rate told us here? Not that the site was under performing or over performing but that the profile of the traffic that is now being sent to the sites is “better” and more likely to convert.

We have further increased the conversion rate on one of the stores by making small tweaks to their product pages and site layout to further optimsie the website for conversions, again giving a more favorable conversion rate overall.

Just like the mythical 3% conversion rate that seems to get branded about like a badge of honour things are not always what they seem, and they should never be viewed in isolation. If your store was the magical mythical unicorn with a 3% conversion rate but you were only getting 25 site visitors a day and your average order value was sitting around $25 then I would say this isn’t a true representation of how successful, the store is, and I would even go so far as to say that conversion rate seems really low for that price point and number os site visitors. As normally that number of visitors would indicate really warm traffic (meaning more likely to buy). Again you can’t just look at this “stat” in isolation. On it’s own it’s just a number.

On the flip side, if your site has a conversion rate of 3% an average order value of say $85 and around 1000 visitors a day I would say that’s a really healthy conversion rate.

What’s the take away – don’t just look at this stat, figure, number, measure – or in fact any data on your site, in isolation. You always need to look at the full spectrum of data to get the full story.

Remember if you need help with any of this just reach out – I love digging into these things!

Sa

Chief Unicorn Motivator @ Site Unicorn