Search Engine Marketing Series: Goal Setting
by Daniel Shortell, Search Marketing Analyst
10/27/2006
The Path to Conversion
Web sites are like religions - they need converts. On the web, a conversion occurs when a visitor to a web site takes an action that you, as the marketer, wanted them to take. Traditionally, this is the point of sale. However, a conversion can be the submission of a form, signing up for a newsletter, the download of a white paper, or any action that constitutes an end goal - an achievement of a purpose of the web site.
People vs. Profit
Conversions can be tracked per event or by monetary value (i.e. revenue). Often non-monetary events are given monetary values for comparison purposes. For example, if the ratio of newsletter signups to Contact form submissions is 5 to one, the newsletter signup may be given the value of $10 while the submission of a Contact form is given the value of $50. A representative monetary goal may then be set. However, conversions that are less quantifiable in monetary terms are often better tracked as the number of events (transactions, sign-ups, etc).
Determine points of conversion
Locate all page visits or actions a visitor may perform on your website that would qualify as a conversion, a successful completion of a desired action. The list is not limited to the following:
- Online purchases
- Submission of a "Contact Us" form
- File download (White paper, product information, etc)
- Newsletter signup
- Account creations (user group, dealer, etc)
- Customer login to existing account (repeat visits indicate value to visitors)
Do Your Homework
When knowledge of demographics for your online market is fuzzy, there will be a tendency to not set specific goals and simply hope for the best, or to adopt a more aggressive but equally imprecise "as much as possible" attitude. Both approaches ignore the lack of market understanding and may result in a large gap between actual and potential performance.
You'll need to do your homework to obtain accurate understanding of your market's online audience. If you serve an industry niche and/or are not focused on commerce, market data may not be readily available. It may be necessary to deduce it from other measurable factors.
Setting Conversion Goals
Once the size and key features of the online market are known, goal setting becomes more meaningful and the implications of performance are more evident. Depending upon your industry and position within it, it may be appropriate to pursue a specific share of the online market. Or, it may be based upon another metric. In any case, knowing the market boundaries allow a clearer view of growth potential, market capacity, and other opportunities and obstacles.
Work Backward
Once conversion goals are set, work backward to determine the qualified site traffic required to meet the goal. In the B2C online sales arena, customer conversion rates of 1-2% are common, so that's a good figure to start with. When conversions do not result in sales, but rather in sign-ups, downloads, etc., it may be harder to anticipate the actual conversion rates. In such cases, you'll need to take your best educated guess and monitor traffic to detect the actual conversion for website.
Divide your conversion goal by the estimated conversion rate to determine the volume of qualified traffic needed to reach the goal. For example, 100 conversions / .02 (that's 2%) = 5,000. So, with a conversion rate of 2%, you'll need about 5,000 visitors to reach your goal.
Take this one step further to estimate the number of visitor exposures to your brand, products, or services necessary to attract the volume of visitors necessary to meet conversion goals. Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) will vary with the location of the link to your site within search results, search term, and many other factors, but a good starting assumption again is 1-2% for links to your site appearing on the first page of search engine results.
So, 5,000 visits / .02 = 250,000 ‘exposures' to potential and qualified site visitors! Natural search results, pay-per-click advertisements, product reviews, newsgroup posts, and industry links all server to increase site visibility and draw visitors to you site. The challenge is to find qualified viewers and entice them to visit your site...enough times!
Practice Makes Better
Through traffic monitoring tools you'll learn which marketing efforts are most effective, and how improvement can be made. You'll be able to adapt and refine your marketing efforts and web site content to product an efficient and effective web site. But this cannot be achieved if your goal setting takes place in a void, disconnected from market realities. Understand the market. Do your homework.
Web traffic tracking and analytics are an important element of search engine optimization & search marketing, and will be the focus of future articles. Subscribe to the news list to receive future articles automatically.
