Every day you get tens, hundreds or thousands of visits to your website. You work hard on social media marketing, guest posting, and maybe even paid advertising to increase those numbers month after month. “Get in front of more eyeballs” is a basic principle we’re taught from Day One of building our online businesses.
I’m not going to say that getting more traffic is easy, but it’s certainly do-able. If all you want is clicks to your website, Facebook ads can actually be really cheap.
But that’s not what I want for you. The truth is that traffic alone doesn’t matter, regardless of how targeted it is. You should be far more concerned with what those people visiting your site are doing. Are they converting to subscribers or customers?
Because THAT’S what I want for you: more conversions.
“What’s a conversion?”
This is a little tricky to define, but as soon as you start looking for the conversions in your business, you’ll see them. “Conversion” just means any important action that someone can take related to you and the products or services you offer.
So that can be adding a product to my cart on your e-commerce site; completing an application for your mastermind program; or booking a discovery call with you.
But for the purposes of my work, I focus on two kinds of conversions:
- sign-ups for free content (like my free guide or your webinar or video series), and
- monetary transactions (like you purchasing my Facebook ads handbook, someone paying for their first month in your membership program or booking 4 coaching sessions with you).
The Average Sales Conversion Rate is Ridiculously Low
You’ve probably heard about the average sales conversion rate by now: supposedly you should estimate that 1-3% of your list will purchase your product or service by the end of a launch. And if you’re selling evergreen products, that same estimate can be a baseline for the success of your sales over time (approximately 1-3% of the people who see your sales page should convert to customers).
So this is the primary motive for list building: since you’re not likely to convert more than 3% of the people on your list, you gotta get more people to give you their email addresses!
This is why it’s so important to have a landing page that’s optimized to get more conversions (in this case, sign ups). All the traffic in the world doesn’t matter if people visit your landing page, take a look at what you have to offer, and think, “Meh,” closing that tab without signing up.
Here’s an example to help you understand the importance of conversion optimization:
You get 100 organic, non-Facebook-ad visits to your landing page per month over 6 months. Your current conversion rate is 15%. That means you get 15 new subscribers every month. In 6 months, you’ve grown your list by 90 people.
But what if your conversion rate on that page was 45%? You would have tripled that number of new subscribers without doing anything. The only extra work involved would have been an initial time investment of working hard on your landing page. I’m sure you busted your butt on your current landing page, you just didn’t know how to create one that was optimized for conversions.
Let’s look at what happens when you increase your traffic by paying for Facebook ads: now you’re getting 100 visits per week. With a 15% conversion rate, you get 60 new subscribers in one month.
But if your landing page converted at 45%, the same money you were spending to get 60 subscribers would net you 180 new people on your list.
Another way to look at this? You could get a $6 cost per lead from Facebook ads down to $2 just by increasing your conversion rate from 15% to 45%.
(Quick heads up: even if each new lead cost you $2, you’d still be paying $360 for those 180 leads. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that this stuff comes cheap, especially since ad prices seem to be going up and up. But your landing page has a LOT to do with your cost per lead. Just sayin’.)
So what’s the secret to an optimized landing page?
This is the first in a series of blog posts that will help you discover how to increase the conversion rate on your landing page. Before you go any further, however, you need to make sure you know how your page is currently converting. Stop right now and make sure you’ve got a Goal set up in Google Analytics for each piece of free opt-in content you have on your site.
Want to calculate your landing page’s conversion rate using past data in Google Analytics?
- Set the dates in your Google Analytics account to show the past three months.
- Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
- Find your opt-in page in that list. Make a note of how many sessions that page got in the last three months. Mark this number as (A).
- Now go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Make a note of how many unique visits your “thank you” page (or the page I see after I sign up on your landing page) got in the same period of time. Mark this number as (B).
- Divide (B) by (A) and move the decimal point over to the right two spaces. That’s your conversion rate.
If you don’t have Google Analytics set up yet, get super simple instructions right here.
Ready to start optimizing your landing page to get a LOT more sign-ups? It’s not terribly difficult to go from 15% to 45% so long as you know the key elements of a killer landing page. To discover the most important one of all, click here to read Part II of this series, Landing Pages that Convert: It All Starts with an Aspirin.
Hi Claire, I’m a little confused about my conversation rate.
According to the method you described above my conversion rate is 44%.
However, I also set up a goal in GA a few weeks ago (also according to your instructions) and that report tells me my goal conversion rate is 2, 67%.
Which one is the right one and what’s the difference?
Thank you for everything you are teaching here, I read and implement all of it!
You might be referring to the conversion rate of ALL visitors to your site, not just people who visit your landing page. Do you mean the % you see at the top of your Acquisition report? Upload a screenshot of that number for me.
Here is the screenshot. I found this number by clicking on Conversion > Goals > Overview. And yes, it’s probably my conversion rate of all visitors.
You just totally made my day! I was so frustrated because my CR was so low and everyone keeps telling me it should be at least 30%.
And thanks to you I find out it’s actually 44%! I clearly need to learn more about Google Analytics!
Hi Claire, I was going to email you about this but then saw this post so thought I’d ask it here in case other people are wondering. I’ve found an Opt-In that’s working for me and an Ad that’s sending traffic to my site. I’m getting about a 20% conversion rate from the ad – so out of 100 people that click over to my landing page, 20 of them go on to grab the opt-in. This feels solid (and is costing me just under $2 per lead) but also like I could be doing a whole lot better…maybe? So my question is, what % conversion rate do you think is normal/good to be aiming for? (At the moment I am using a stand-alone page on my site and yep, have read your post about landing pages that convert and taken on that advice). I plan to try the same add out using a leadpages landing page to see if there’s a difference but would still be great to know what’s good when it comes to conversions.
Hi Claire, I was going to email you about this but then saw this post so thought I’d ask it here in case other people are wondering. I’ve found an Opt-In that’s working for me and an Ad that’s sending traffic to my site. I’m getting about a 20% conversion rate from the ad – so out of 100 people that click over to my landing page, 20 of them go on to get the opt-in. This feels solid (and is costing me just under $2 per lead) but also like I could be doing a whole lot better…maybe? So my question is, what % conversion rate do you think is normal/good to be aiming for? (At the moment I am using a stand-alone page on my site and yep, have read your post about landing pages that convert and taken on that advice). I plan to try the same add out using a leadpages landing page to see if there’s a difference but would still be great to know what’s good when it comes to conversions.
Hey Louisa, glad to hear about that campaign that’s working!
So here’s the deal: I aim for a conversion rate that’s above 40%. But I know that can be very difficult when dealing with completely cold traffic like you get from Facebook ads. What my clients and I have seen is that high conversion rates tend to happen due to a combination of a great ad that does a lot of the “heaving lifting” or convincing before the people click, and then a well designed, well written landing page with a great offering.
All my blog posts for the last 4 or 5 weeks are devoted to tackling the landing page issue, so definitely check out some of the other ones to see what else you can do to improve your conversion rate!
Dear Claire, I promised to let you know how much my conversion rate went up with your help. Well, I just checked and before I found your site it was 10% and now it’s 46% . Yipee! Thank you soooo much for all the awesome info you share with your readers!!! :)
Yo that’s AMAZING!!!! Congratulations Yamile! Seriously, I am so freakin’ proud of you. :D