Website Conversion Blog
It’s not often that you get totally surprised in business. The majority of ecommerce marketers don’t understand what it takes to drive website conversion.
We’ve just completed a piece of research on the top ten converting websites. Using Nielsen data as a starting point, we set out to understand what makes these sites different.
While most websites convert two or three percent of their visitors to a purchase in the same session, some sites are able to achieve much higher levels. In this study, the top ten converting websites averaged twenty-three percent, with a range between eighteen and forty-two percent.
So what makes the difference between a site that converts two percent and one that converts forty-two percent? What do they do differently, and what can the ecommerce sector learn as a result?
It’s not what we expected to find when we set out to study these websites. We expected conventional wisdom to apply.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that these websites would be tuned to make purchases intuitive and simple, to speed the buyer through the process.
But this is not so.
Some of the websites are far from intuitive, lack clear calls to action, and have lengthy shopping cart processes that would deter all but the most determined. So, how widely held is conventional wisdom on website conversion?
In parallel with doing this research, we conducted a poll in February 2010 asking ecommerce marketers what they thought the top ten converting websites would do to optimize their conversion rate. In total, we asked 663 marketers, and sixty percent said that they expected the top ten sites to offer free shipping. However, only one of the top ten converting websites offers free shipping, and they do so for only a couple of categories.
Fifty-two percent expected the top ten converting websites to offer a guest checkout. In fact, four out of the top five, and six out of the top ten force a full account creation before you can make a first purchase. Forty-six percent and forty percent, respectively, expected the top ten sites to have a streamlined checkout and short checkout process. But most sites had lengthy checkout processes that were far from optimal.
What’s so surprising here is that conventional wisdom about what it takes to build a high converting ecommerce website can be so wrong.
The report itself, titled “Lessons Learned from the Top Ten Converting Websites,” will be published on April 19. You can register in advance for your copy here, and we’ll make sure you are one of the first to get your copy.
Tags: top ten converting websites conventional wisdom ecommerce
Well, it’s perhaps not that surprising, as Conversion Rate is actually a pretty meaningless statistic.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in love with Conversion Rate for 12 years, but like many marketers I’ve started to realise it has severe limitations.
Without knowing what their average order value is, what it cost them to get an actual customer/sale, how they actually measure conversion rate and even what type of analytics package they use, such comparisons are really meaningless.
We all know that different analytics packages all have their own different ways of counting visitors, unique visitors and absolute unique visitors, so unless they all use the same package, the figures are already flawed.
And, depending on what your selling, average order values could range from $5 to $5,000. And on that basis a site with a 2% conversion rate could still be 10 or even a hundred times more effective than one with a 20% conversion rate.
Plus are they measuring sales they got offline that were generated by the site, plus sales online that were generated by offline means?
There’s just far too many variables for us to keep using conversion rate as a means of comparing our sites against other sites.
By all means use it to measure your own sites performance and try and improve it, but to use it as any form of outside comparison is ultimately useless.
Hi Mark
Thanks for your comments.
In this case the source of the data was from Nielsen Online, so it’s based on consumer panels and not different web analytics tools.
While panels are not perfect, the results are directly comparable. So what we can say with confidence is that these sites are top converting websites. Whether the percentage numbers are correct is somewhat academic: this is about ranking.
Rankling the top sites using the same methodology against other sites is inherently useful for marketers simply because they want to know which the top converting websites are. We all look to learn from what other sites do well, so it’s natural to want to know which the top converting sites are.
This research was primarily about the techniques used by the top converting sites, highlighting examples that online marketers can learn from. Get the free ebook and you’ll see this.
In a previous blog I have cautioned against using the conversion rate for benchmarking . It fluctuates wildly based on seasonal factors, promotions and a host of other factors. For this reason the most valuable way to think about a websites conversion rate, is to look at it over time, comparing it to part performance in the context of promotions, seasons, launches and changes to the website itself.