One word editing can make a big difference

My company has a customer company called Klikcard, which business idea is to sell gift vouchers of different kind of vendors through their website. For me, as I'm a lazy ass gift shopper, this has been a very excellent idea from the start. We have used Google Analytics for counting conversions and analyzing the web-sales process.

When I was in my summer vacation, my client studied the process very carefully. Earlier we found out that too many people abandoned the shopping cart in the first stage. We made a small change and just for one word. But the word seemed to be very important. In the shopping cart we changed "preview" to "sample" (in Finnish language the difference is not so obvious) and it worked out pretty well.

And of course, we checked out the numbers. During the two first weeks of July, approximately 25 % of visitors went forward in the sales process. After the change, during the last two weeks of July, about 38 % of visitors kept on going. Just one small change to one single word and we improved visitor behavor closer to conversion up to 49 %!

How to count and improve web conversions

We have done the right things: defining the goals of our website and getting some traffic too. The next step is to make it numeral, let's count the conversions of your site.

In our case (Naviatech), the macro goal of the site is sales & marketing. The micro goal of the sales is a contact request, so we count them whether they come from website's contact form or by phone (you have to have special phone number or you have to ask how did they find you).

Conversion = total number of contacts devided by the total number of website visitors. Our conversion rate was 0,33 % (5 contact requests / 1,476 visitors) in June '07.

Pretty easy, isn't it? And how can you improve the conversion?

1. Get more visitors (while your conversion rate stays about the same)
2. Get more conversions. Redesign or make smaller changes to your site (while your traffic stays about the same)

Or do them both. If we could get 2,200 visitors per month in the future, but our conversion rate remains the same, we would still get 7 contact requests.

If we could make some changes and get our conversion rate up to 0,5 %, we would get same 7 contact requests with same traffic.

If we could do them both, we could get 11 contact requests (2,200 x 0,005), which means growth of 120 %...

How much would this cost and how much would we get more revenue? If you don't know how to count visitors of your website, try to google e.g. "web analytics software" or ask me a hint.