Over the past seven years of growth in search engine use by consumers and B2B buyers, much of the focus for website design was on increasing traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). As the industry matured, online marketers began to focus on increasing the number of web visitors who succeed in performing a desired online result, such as completing a sales transaction or downloading information. The challenge was to convert and the metric was called the conversion rate.
Conversions are affected by many external and internal variables but conversion rates of 0.5 percent or less are typical for many websites. A conversion rate of 2 percent is considered quite good. The pursuit of increasing conversions is called conversion optimization since it requires no increase in traffic for success.
