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Website visitors follow many different paths before, eventually, a frustratingly small percentage will go on to become customers. These paths are hard to visualize, because they rarely represent linear journeys. Many visitors will visit a website several times before making a purchase, probably looping back and forth between pages in what seems, to the website designer at least, a totally illogical pattern.

When shopping, like many activities in life, people are not logical; they are complex bundles of emotions wrapped up in an outer veneer of calm. For many, shopping is an exquisite pleasure to be relished, drawing perhaps from our primeval hunter-gatherer roots as we savor the chase and secure our purchases, returning triumphant.

While emotion is involved in most purchases, it is just one of the elements that makes website conversion optimization so challenging. Most website design is based on logical principles, hard data, gut feel and analytics.

The analytics summarize and group herd behavior into something intelligible, something measurable and logical. A long way from the emotion of a purchase.

So the challenge of optimizing a website’s conversion rate is not straightforward. Web analytics show only an aggregate level view and little of the individual journeys that customers make to get to the sale, or more frequently, to an abandonment and no sale.

Conversion rate optimization invariably focuses on one element of the conversion mix: SEO, Landing Pages, the shopping cart process, email, or shopping cart recovery. It’s rare indeed that you can look at the problem end to end.

That’s exactly what the Conversion Leaders Summit is all about: We’ve collected an awesome group of conversion experts in one place to debate the problem end to end:

• SEO – SEOmoz.org, SEO specialist, Danny Dover
• Website and Landing Page Optimization – SiteTuners.com, CEO, Tim Ash
• Email Marketing – Silverpop, VP of industry relations, Loren McDonald
• Web Conversion and Shopping Cart Recovery – SeeWhy, founder and chief strategy officer, Charles Nicholls

Each will present in just five minutes their ‘pearls of conversion wisdom,’ and then we’ll debate—live, led by questions from the audience—about how it all fits together. Sounds like a lot of fun! With four big egos on the panel, it promises to be lively—with some fireworks, disagreements, and hopefully at the end, some consensus. Whatever happens, you’re guaranteed to come away entertained, with at least four compelling new ideas about how to maximize your conversion rate, end to end.

So join us, and join in—and participate in the Great Conversion Debate. This is one not to miss; July 27, 2010 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern time; http://bit.ly/aCWrU9