A very important term in the internet marketing world is conversion. Most people consider a conversion to be when someone makes a purchase or completes the payment process.  But it can also be someone opt’ing into your email subscriber list or making a phone call.  Put simply, a conversion occurs when you turn a click on your webpage into a paying customer or you get them to click your affiliate ads or take the needed action. Learning more about what a conversion actually is can be a great way to increase the conversion rate of your website, which is ultimately your goal as an internet marketer or business owner.

The marketer’s dictionary definition for conversion rate is the ration of visitors who convert from content viewers into desired actions. This conversion can actually be many different things. While on retail pages, a conversion would be a sale, on other pages it may be something as simple as signing up for a mailing list or clicking on a banner ad.

The conversion rate is calculated with a very simple formula, which is number of goal achievements divided by the total number of visits. However, once you have the conversion rate, what good does it do you as an internet marketer or business owner? By itself, it is not very useful. This is because every type of website is going to have a different target conversion rate.  But now you can test, test, and test again to get the optimum conversion rate.  This is a key element to any business.

It is often much easier to get someone to click a banner than to make a purchase. In turn it is easier to make a small sale than a large one. So, these rates are really only useful when compared among themselves or among similar websites.
Most business owners are not aware of this type of jargon so next time you hear the term conversion rate, you will know exactly what it is they are talking about.

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One term you may have come across in your time as an internet marketer or website owner is “bounce rate.” This is a commonly used word that basically describes people who enter your website and then immediately leave, instead of browsing around and hopefully viewing other pages on your site.
Bounce rate is something you are striving to keep down. You want visitors to check out many different pages on your site so they get the full effect of your page and also to give them more chances to click your banner ads and possibly even purchase a product from you.

How is bounce rate figured?

An actual “bounce” occurs when one of your website visitors only views one single page, the landing page, and then leaves before clicking anything else. There is not a set time that the visitor must stay or not stay on a page for it to count as a bounce, so someone could conceivably spend quite a bit of time on the webpage, but still be considered a bounce because they did not click through to another page.

The bounce rate for a webpage is the number of people who “bounce” divided by the total number of people who entered that website. Figuring out this number is a good way for website owners to determine how effective their entry or landing page is at turning customers into conversions.

Bounce rate and the Big G

A specialist at Google Analytics, Avinash Kaushik, has said that it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20% and that anything over 50% is worrying. So if you are hitting the numbers between 20 and 50 percent you are on target, anything outside those numbers is really when you should look at what you are or aren’t doing right.  Although nobody knows exactly how Google’s Algorithm is configured what thing I do know because I follow the industry very close and watch the industry forum and blog, is that the Big G is watching user behavior and that does include how a visitor acts on your website.

If you have a website with a bounce rate of 80% then that tells Big G that users do not like your site, it is not providing a good user experience and so therefore should not bee ranked higher.  They want to deliver the best user experience and provide the most relevant content to people using their search engine, so this makes sense.  If you have a bounce rate above 50% you should try some different layouts or contact a Sacramento SEO professional to help you increase it’s performance.  Hope this was helpful!

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