Sage Blog

Acquiring, engaging with and converting customers online is essential for any business these days. Here in Online Retail at Sage it’s no different.  We spend a huge amount of time measuring conversion through the Sage Store – how many people visit the site, what business software and services they look at, what they buy… and what they choose not buy!

It’s vital for us that our customers have the best possible experience when visiting the Sage Store, so looking into the reasons why people choose to leave the site without buying is key.  Measuring conversion allows you to fine-tune your website to maximise the number of visitors that convert – whether it’s downloading a file, accessing useful information, capturing data, an online sale or calling a number.

When looking at conversion, start with your web analytics.  Conversion rate is the % of visitors that complete the ‘goal’ of your website.

Here at Sage we use Google Analytics, but most web analytics tools will allow you to measure conversion.

Setting up conversion goals

Firstly, identify the objective of your website – what do you want your visitors to do, and what experience do you want them to have?  Is it to provide your customers with helpful information, generate leads, capture data, or sell your products?  This is your conversion goal, and your website might have more than one.

Secondly, identify the steps in your website that a person has to take to complete a goal.  It’s likely to be a series of web pages in your site, so make a note of the URL (web address) of each page. These URLs form your conversion path. For example, your conversion path could be:

Home page - Contact Us - Data Capture form - Form submitted

Once you have identified these steps set up your conversion goal by entering the URLs of each page of your conversion path into your web analytics tool.  The ‘goal’ itself will be the final page of your conversion path.

Once the URLs for each stage are assembled data will be start to be collected, and after a week or so you’ll be able to see your conversion rate.  This data will also form a conversion funnel, which allows you to visualise which pages people are ‘drop out’ of before converting.

Google Analytics Conversion Funnel

This is where the real work begins! The funnel lets you see areas of weakness in your conversion path, where potentially huge opportunities lie to convert more people.  If you address these weaknesses you can reduce drop-out from your website and convert more people.

What should I look out for?

The obvious sign is high exit rates from pages in your conversion path.  Exit rate is the % visitors that decided to leave your website from that page, and will be visible in your conversion funnel with [exit].  What’s causing them to leave the page?  Poor usability? Unclear calls to action? Confusing information? Distracting links to other pages? Closely examine the page in question and look for potential causes.

Another sign could be high time on page.  Why are people spending so long on a page?  Unclear next steps?  Confusing information? Asking them to fill in too much information?  Have a close look at the pages.

Visitors navigating to other pages on your website can also be a distraction and reduce conversion.  Are you presenting them with a whole host of links when there is only one or two you actually want them to follow?  Take a look.

How can I improve conversion?

Once you’ve identified potential problem areas in your site try make some changes and then measure the impact they have.  Try tweaking copy, images, navigation, page layout, calls to action – and closely monitor the results in your conversion funnel.

For example, we removed the navigation from the later stages of the Sage Store checkout to reduce the number of links away from the checkout.  The outcome? We reduced drop-out by about 5%.

An excellent tool to help test changes you make to your site is Google Website Optimiser. It’s completely free, and lets you measure the effect of changes you make to pages in your website.

First, create different versions of the pages in your conversion path (with some of the changes above made), then make them live, add some code, and enter their URLs into Website Optimiser.  It then randomly serves up the different versions to visitors, and over time analyses the results for each page version. You can then see which version of your page converts best.  It’s quite technical stuff but your web developers should be able to help! Find out more.

However, don’t stop at that – constantly tweak, test and optimise your website to get the best results.  Give it a try and see if you can improve conversion through your website.

Iain Ramsay, Marketing & Operations Manager, Sage UK Online Retail