Know Your Conversion Rate

Marketing your products entails cost, regardless of where you market them. Online, companies spend tens and hundreds of thousands a year just to gain or keep their competitive advantage online. But just like in any financial investments, we must always be sure that we are reaping a good return, or else we’re going to lose money. This is why it is important to measure your marketing conversion rate.

By conversion rate, we are talking about the actual number of people who avail of your products and services from the number of people who learned about your services. Meaning, how many people know you and how many from the same people decided to avail. High conversion rates would mean that your strategies are effective — from your target market down to the actual market. If the conversion rate is poor, then it’s probably time to adjust a few things. Here are practical ways on how to measure how effective your online marketing tools are in generating sales:

Interview

There’s no better way in measuring your conversion rate than asking your customer themselves which of your marketing platform convinced them to avail of your product/service. This way, not only are you able to gather the conversion rate, but also get feedbacks that can help your company improve. It’s also a good idea to profile them in your interview so you can compare your target market to your actual market. If you see that there is a huge difference (like targeting professional women, but receiving more college students instead), then decide whether to adjust your marketing strategies to match your target market, or adjust your product designs to match your actual market.

Interviewing is simple for SMEs as interviewing their small number of clients is manageable. For companies that receive a large volume of customers in a day, you do not have to interview all of your customers. Set a sample size and make your general assumptions based on the results from that sample. A good tip I can offer you for this is to set a small sample size at least one for the morning and another in the afternoon, daily. This will help you find patterns on what type of customers visit you at the time of the day and what time generates more visitors.

Website rankings

Keywords are what search engines like Google use to trace websites, and only the most relevant and high traffic will appear on the first page of the search results. Why does the first page matter? Because no one really goes to the next page of the results. Use website traffic-checking tools online such as “Alexa” to gauge the volume of people accessing your website, the “bounce rate” or the number of people who entered your website but immediately left most probably due to your site not being related to the intended search result, and the traffic rate.

If your website is not appearing in the first page of the results no matter what relevant keyword you use, it is now time to study and strategically implement techniques that will accomplish this. The general concept is easy to grasp — your contents must be directly, or at least close to the keywords the general public use to search for businesses in your industry (“laundry shop” for laundry businesses, you get the idea), and provide interesting or relevant posts for your viewers. However, there are a lot of technical aspects you need to understand aside from using the keywords in the contents.

Social media insights

On Facebook, page owners have access to an “insights” feature they can click from their home page to see a detailed statistics on the page performance. Included in those statistics are data that can help make decisions involving your Facebook page. You can even view which devices were used by your audience. Does the majority use cellphones in browsing, or desktops? If it happened to be cellphones, then you may want to rethink about the image dimensions and file size of uploads you make in order to optimize the loading speed in smartphones. At what day of the week and time of the day are your viewers most active? By knowing when, you can schedule when to boost your post to maximize efficiency.

Make sure to regularly record critical data such as the peak traffic time. Write them down every day for at least one month so you can discover consistent patterns. These patterns could show you which type of posts gain more attention than the others, which gender prefers your brand, and what time generates more interaction.

There are many other areas where it is more difficult to measure your conversion rate, like expenditures on branding. However, realize that having a rough estimate is far better than having no idea what is going on. Being better informed about the returns from your investment will enable you to improve the allocation of your budget and boost your bottom line.

*Originally published by the Manila Bulletin, C-4, Sunday, February 5, 2017. Written by Ruben Anlacan, Jr. (President, BusinessCoach, Inc.) All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or copied without express written permission of the copyright holders.