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.