How To Define Your Online Conversion Goals
You may well hear us talk a lot about conversions here at 21 Digital – especially when it comes to our Digital Marketing services like SEO, PPC or CRO – but it’s not a term that you might necessarily know offhand. That’s nothing to worry about; that’s why this week, we’ve dedicated our blog to explaining exactly what a conversion is, and why they’re so important to your digital presence.
What Is A Conversion Goal?
At 21 Digital, we use our unique process of Define, Design and Refine to achieve our clients’ goals and objectives. In this section, we’re mainly going to be talking about what happens at the Define stage. Before we begin fully mapping out any digital strategy – whether it’s a search marketing (SEO), paid search (PPC), or social media campaign – we first have to establish your conversion goals.
Put simply, a conversion goal is defined as what action you want your website visitors to perform. Its name refers to the act of your web traffic being ‘converted’ into tangible results – e.g., a new website visitor being converted into a final sale, or successfully visiting a key page on your site. Above all, conversion goals need to be clear and measurable so that you know you’re getting a good ROI from your marketing budget.
Conversion goals can vary greatly between different businesses and industries, which is another reason why we always take care to have them sorted well in advance before we move onto the Design stage. A successful search marketing (SEO) campaign will drive potential customers to your website, but it doesn’t automatically mean they’ll perform desirable actions. The conversion goal of an ecommerce site would be to transform that traffic into sales, whereas a medical practice might want those visitors to book an appointment to see one of their experts. These are just a couple of examples!
Other Examples Of Conversions
For many online businesses, their main conversion goals are often simply the number of completed sales of their products or services. However, as we’ve just shown you, this is far from the only option on the table. If you’re in retail, for example, a successful website conversion might be to bring more footflow into your physical premises in the city or on the high street. Conversion goals for a lead generation site often focus on bringing in more phonecalls and enquiries, while other sites might just want to increase visibility of specific key pages.
Here are a couple of examples of other potential conversion goals:
- A subscription to your ongoing services
- An email or newsletter signup
- Guarantees of attendance to social or networking events (such as downloaded tickets)
- Specific form submissions – such as those for booking home visits or in-house appointments
- Completed customer reviews or ratings
- Clicking a button or an important call-to-action on your site
Conversion goals don’t necessarily have to apply to your entire site either – it might be the case that they only apply to certain specific pages. One long-term client of ours approached us for help in getting their customers to fill in a specific form; a great example of a specific, targeted conversion goal, which our experts at 21 Digital achieved using our very own Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) service.
Get More Out of Your Website Visitors
Our Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) service is specifically designed to help your website boost its success in achieving these conversion goals, whatever your specific ones might happen to be. We’ve already explained in a previous article how it complements our existing SEO services – you can read it in its entirety here, but essentially it’s the same as we’ve been saying above. SEO brings greater web traffic to your site, and CRO converts it into tangible results for your business.
Of course, this all underlines a universal truth; establishing firm conversion goals is an all-important task for any company website. There’s no two ways about it! If your website doesn’t have clear aims and a clear direction, then by definition it’s not helping your business as effectively as it should be.
Now that you’re all clued up on exactly what conversions are, why not click here to find out more about our CRO service? Or, if you still have any questions, you can always give us a call on 01254 660 560, to find out how we can help your business to make it on the web!
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Sam Fletcher heads up the agency. With over 15 years of digital experience, he manages the delivery and client relationships for campaigns across a wide range of sectors. Using his unique business insight and expertise, he’s constantly looking to improve even further on 21 Digital’s results-focused, all under one roof service offering.