Let's pick apart three powerful conversion rates that I have been using web analytics to do deep dives with one of my customers.Avinish Kaushik, years ago, shared his views on how to consider conversion rates and what not to do.  From his position these metrics may be too granular, but for my customer and me they are invaluable in learning more about how the website is used and what works for the visitors.

You are more than welcome to disagree, but that’s doesn’t mean they aren't valuable!

Assumption: You have goals defined in your web analytics tool.  I use Google Analytics for this customer because they weren’t able to invest in Omniture’s SiteCatalyst.

I have micro-goals (7.0 Pages per Visit and 4.0 Minutes per Visit) as well as harder, more traditional goals (Form completions and Dynamic Phone Number Tracking) since my customer works in a B2C lead generation model where the sale is completed over the phone.So here they are.  My 3 Powerful Conversion Rates

Blog visitor conversion rates

Using Google Analytics' Advanced Segmentation I pulled out those visitors whose first page on their visit to our website (Content – Landing Pages in the Google Analytics world) was within our website’s blog section.   I’m showing their source/medium here for additional insight since many readers do not often get to peak into any firm’s web analytics data.

These folks are interesting because the content of the blog is not lead generation material, but rather thought leadership and subject matter expertise in nature.And as you might expect, they've done well on the soft goals over the past 3 months, but their conversion rate on the more important hard goals of form completions are near zero.

Keyword conversion rates

Here we are back to looking at the entire visitor population at large via web analytics.What’s interesting here is the comparison of the soft goal conversion rates compared with the earlier example of blog visitors. You’ll notice the blog visitors were much more inclined to visit more pages and spend more time on the site than some of the search-based keyword visitors.  Note that we had no paid search going on during this window, so we are only considering organic searchers.But you will notice that the hard conversion rates jump significantly for a handful of keywords.    It’s worth noting that 3 of the top keywords that have been blurred out are branded keywords and have higher conversion rates as expected.That would be worth another look to see how your branded keywords perform against your non-branded keywords.  Through segmentation you could easily put those two groups side-by-side.

Mobile device conversion rates

With the recent launch of the iPad I personally like to track this conversion rate to see how it measures up against the others.Since this customer’s site has not yet been converted/adapted for the mobile devices you can see that overall it is performing miserably with them.  Aside from the iPad and Samsung, our soft goals are near zero.An interesting side note on these data points, those two operating systems had screen resolutions of 768x1024 and 231x264, respectively.  I find it odd that such a small resolution on the Samsung would generate high soft conversion rates.  To investigate another day.

The Missing Power Conversion Rates

I, personally, dissect conversion rates many different ways with a majority of them proving useless.  It’s not until you find that handful of enlightening views, which always differ by customer, that you take a leap forward in improving their visitor experience while also providing that conversion rate lift that your customer is constantly seeking.But if you’re into that level of detail, combined with knowing what affects the business, you’ll get closer to that elusive title of digital strategist, marketing technologist or just plain online marketing fanatic.