By Mats Carduner
An average of 55% of people who enter a physical store will make a purchase before they walk out the door. On the web, this conversion rate drops below 2%.
Why such a gap? There is often an absence of a broad-based management sponsorship of a fact-based, data driven, testing and learning culture.
The exponential growth of Internet-users engendered a fierce race for audience. We are now entering into the conversion era where the primary goal of a website is to convert.
We define Conversion as the accomplishment of a predefined and measurable act by a user to turn your Internet properties into a genuine business driver. It includes consulting specific content, carrying out a purchase, or deepening the customer relationship.
How to increase your web site’s conversion rate:
a. Weatherproof your web analytics: It is crucial to define goals for your web properties, and measure everything happening on your site according to what it is supposed to achieve. It is now easy and often free to implement customized web analytics to collect and aggregate the data according to your business goals.
b. Understand the data: Information is useless if you can’t react upon it and drive tactical or strategic actions. CEOs or CMOs are often either drowned by an over-abundance of data, or simply miss the basic important indicators. View analytics in a dashboard, which can customize your incoming information to make the most relevant data the most visible and actionnable.
c.  Find what’s going wrong: By reviewing your dashboard and interpreting the metrics, you will be able to identify pain points and abandonment points on your site, which drive low conversion rate. A web analysis and usability audit will enable design, funnels, and functionalities which drive higher performance.
d. Test, measure, implement and iterate… In today’s digital business world, every new option can be easily tested and implemented with statistically significant results. You can start humbly, do it on the go and in real time.
Under fierce competition for a user’s attention, alternate choices are only ever a click away. By listening to their users and consulting the data, companies can turn analytics into a competitive advantage.
Mats Carduner is President at fifty-five.com, a company specialized in Business Analytics. Â Previously, he was Managing Director, Southern Europe at Google.
