Conversion Tracking You Can Do Yourself, Cheap

This is a follow-up to Is your business converting as well as it could?.

To figure out your conversion rate you need two numbers.  You need to know how many total times you had the opportunity to make a conversion – e.g. website visitors, phone calls, or walk-in customers.  I’ll refer to this number as impressions for the sake of clarity.  You also need to know the number of successful conversions.

Note: Be sure to measure these over the same time period!

Then there’s a little math.  Don’t worry, I’m a professional.  Whip out your calculator and key in:

That will give you your conversion rate.  Bump the decimal place to the right two spaces and you’ll have it as a percentage.

Example: Your website got 328 visits and you made 16 sales.  16 divided by 328 equals 0.04878.  Bump the decimal over and you have a 4.878% conversion rate.

Okay, that’s the math.  What about getting those numbers?  Obviously, if you have an ecommerce site it’s pretty easy to figure out the number of visitors and the number of sales.  It’s a little trickier if customers visit your website, then call in an order or visit the store.

The answer here is training.  Train your staff to ask callers how they found you.  Train your clerks to ask while they ring someone up.  You can keep a clipboard by the register and the phone where your staff can mark down the answers.  Heck, you could even use a fancy spreadsheet.

Spend some time figuring out how to phrase your question.  Be specific.  You probably don’t want to ask your regulars “How did you hear about us?”  You’ll do better with “How did you find us today?”

If you’re tracking phone conversions be sure to tally how many total calls there were in addition to the number of sales made on the phone and how people found your number.

Another option is to get an 800 number that forwards to your main line.  Then put that number on your website instead of your regular number.  Now you can track the number of calls that came from your website.  Of course, that’s another monthly expense.

Now, on the web there are a lot of ways to track conversions.  For instance, you can define goals and funnels in Google Analytics or use Google Conversion Tracking. There are great click-tracking systems you can install like Crazy Egg or ClickTale. That’s a separate article though.

This post first appeared in my e-mail newsletter.