Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

CONVERSION RATES

Businesses are finally starting to break out conversion rates from search. But too many of them start and end there. At a tech event in Seattle, Glenn Kelman, the chief executive officer (CEO) from Redfin noted that Redfin’s conversion rate from search is low.1 But “from search” is like calculating a conversion rate from TV ads with no interest in whether the commercials aired during a Friday night monster truck rally or a Saturday morning cartoon or tracking only the conversion rate for “advertising,” when that might include TV, radio, print, and online.

Conversion rate is absolutely important to understanding how well a site is performing, but it’s much more actionable when viewed by acquisition segment. Even better is if you can tie visitors to future behavior. Do visitors who come in through message boards talking about eco-friendly materials read an average of three articles on the site, share those links on two social media sites, which in turn bring in 12 visitors who convert?

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist and author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, suggests rolling all conversion data into one metric: task completion rate by primary purpose.2

He suggests finding out the core reasons why visitors come to your site. One way is to display an optional survey that asks, “Why are you visiting the site today?” and then determining whether each visitor segment ...