If your website is getting visitors, but you are not getting sales - then your website is not doing it's one and only job - convincing those visitors to buy your product or service, to become paying customers.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) - not to be confused with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - is a process of testing, measuring and applying changes to your web pages to increase the number of sales you get from a set number of visitors to that page, from a specific source of visitor traffic.

Here is a simplified step by step CRO process that any business can follow.

What exactly are your visitors looking for when the arrive at your website or web page? The most obvious and simple way to get sales (and improve your conversion rate) is this: give your customers what they are asking for. Simple really, but surprisingly complicated to figure out - if you don't ask your customers what they want. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to ask your customers (or prospective customers) what they want. If you have a problem figuring it out, please ask - I'll answer in a future article in this series, or respond to you directly in the comments section below.

There are 3 crucial measurements in Conversion Rate Optimization:

1) The source of the visitors to a particular web page

There are 3 sources of visitors on the internet - Search Engine traffic, Referrals, and Direct Traffic. I'll discuss each of these in depth in Part 2 of this series of articles. If you are not measuring the source of traffic to your web pages, and you are spending money on advertising (online or offline) then you are probably wasting most of your money. I can say this with almost complete confidence. I have looked at traffic statistics for websites from multiple, varied industries, and have yet to see advertising revenue that cannot be beaten (often by a facto of 10 or more) by free traffic - in terms of conversion to paying customers.

2) the number of visitors to that web pages

This is the one metric that most websites do have available. Boasting about the number of visitors, or the increase in visitors is a tactic often employed by SEO experts to sell their services. If the increase in visitors is not accompanied by an increase in sales, then you have achieved nothing. On it's own, the number of visitors to a web page is meaningless (for understanding how to sell more) - it is only useful in the context of the number of visitors from each traffic source, and subsequent sales to each segment of those visitors.

3) the number of sales made from that web page

Note that you are measuring sales in number three - not opt-ins. Sales are what pay the bills, keep the wolf from the door, put dinner on the table and a roof over your head. Having a big list of subscribers, or being great at getting people to download a free product may lead to profits, and if they do (if you have measured and know that they do) then you should be measuring and trying to improve your opt-in rate. But until you do know what is working, focus your attention and efforts on understanding what it is that gets sales.

You need to have all three of these metrics in place to be able to compare the quality of traffic arriving at your page, and the quality of the page.

It is also important to understand that the quality of the traffic source is magnified by the quality of the page. I often see that traffic from one source will convert at multiples of traffic from a different source. 10 or 20 times the conversion rate between sources is not uncommon. Also, the same traffic source will convert at different rates depending on the page that the visitor lands on when they first arrive at your website, with similarly spectacular differences not being uncommon.

In part two I'll discuss the 3 sources of traffic to a web page and how to measure them properly.

If you have a question about Conversion Rate Optimization, or anything else discussed in this article, please ask in the comments section below. If you'd like to be notified as soon as part 2 of this series is published, please subscribe to my mailing list or RSS feed via the links on this page.