We regularly have people ask us why they haven’t made a sale yet. They say they have had visitors to their site or lens, but no sales.  This is where we have to get into talking about conversion rate, and where some people get kind of confused, so let’s try to demistify conversion rate today.

Conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who take a desired action.

Well that’s all fine and good, but when it comes to actually making a sale there are a couple conversion rates you have to look at ~ because there are a couple different desired actions, depending where they are at in the process.

Click through rate:

The first conversion rate to look at is the click through rate . To review, the click through rate is the amount of people clicking on the link to your product sales page/opt in page ~ whever you are trying to get them to go from that  page.

The click through rate is an important conversion rate to look at becuase it is a conversion rate you have some control over. If you find you are getting tons of traffic and no one is clicking out on your links you can change the content, change link placement, there are a lot of things you can try to improve this conversion rate.

Sales Conversion rate:

The second conversion rate to look at when you don’t think you are making sales fast enough is the sales conversion rate. On average the conversion rate (once people have clicked through to the sales page is 1 to 2 %) Which means for every 100 to 200 people who click through to the sales page you will get a sale. Now this number can vary widely depending on the product, the sales page and some other factors. Unless it is your product you’re sending people to you don’t have a lot of control over this conversion rate because you don’t have access to change things that might help.

Example:

I promote a vision board product. When I first started sending traffic to the site I was consistently making a sale about 1 out of every 80 people, which was awesome.  They made some changes to the program, increased the price, changed the sales letter and now, using the same traffic sources I did before I am having to send 2 or 3 HUNDRED people there to make 1 sale.

This product sales conversion rate has gone so much higher and now it takes much more traffic for me to get a sale. I’ve done things on my end to try to increase the people on my page clicking on the link ~ including getting the product, testing it out, and writing from personal experience. This has increased my clickthrough rate, but the sales converion rate is so high that I’m still making about the same amount of sales I made before the changes, instead of even more with the increased amount of traffic I’m sending to the sales page.

How do I know when I should be making sales?

Before you start to complain that you aren’t making any sales you need to check your stats. You may have had 200 people come to your site, but that’s not the number you need to look at. You need to look at the number of people who have clicked through to the sales page.

What’s that number? Until that number is at least 200 you aren’t at a point where you can make any decisions about the product, your copy or your sales conversion rate.

How do I know if I should stick with a product?

If you find you are sending 3 or 4 hundred people to the sales page and it is not converting (you aren’t making sales) there are a couple easy things you can do before you decide to pick a different product to promote.

1. Is your landing page (website talking about this product) directly relevant and related to the product?

2. Are the keywords you are pulling traffic with directly related and relevant to the product?

Example:

Let’s say you find a great keyword like “hoodia to lose weight”. It has high search volume and low competition (this is JUST an example I have not looked at the keyword for these numbers). You decide to do a lens optimized for this keyword. From your lens people are clicking out looking for information on hoodia to lose weight. You’ve decided you really love the program “strip the fat” so you send them to that site because you believe in the product and you think it works.

Here’s the problem with that ~ maybe Strip the fat does work, and maybe it IS a great product ~ however, the traffic you are driving is looking for information about losing weight with hoodia, and the last time I checked strip the fat is NOTHING like that.

Your keywords and product are not relevant or related. You can send 5000 people to that the strip the fat website from your “hoodia”  lens and you probably won’t make 1 sale, because it’s just not what they are looking for.

So what do I do?

You have 2 choices ~ and you could actually implement both.

1. If you’re dead set on working with the hoodia keywords ~ find a hoodia product to send them to.

2. If you’re dead set on recommending stip the fat ~ find keywords that are directly related and relevant to that program.

There are a lot of things you can control about your conversion rates, the relevancy of your product and keywords is probably the biggest thing. If you create a page that is highly relevant to the product you are sending them to you are likely to see much higher conversion rates. The same holds true if the traffic you are getting to your page is looking specifically for what you are offering.

So just remember the “magic” number isn’t 200 visitors to your site, but 200 click throughs to the sales page. If you aren’t seeing a sale by that time then take a look at your content, your keywords and the relevancy of  the product to both of those things. If everything is relevant and still not converting it may be something out of your control and then may be the time to look at testing another related and relevant product.

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