In the early days of the dot com’s everything was measured in eyeballs. Website owners would boast that they had a million eyeballs view their website. This number, as everyone found out when the bubble burst, is really an empty number with no real substance. So many ad buyers were enamored with the idea of advertising their own website to millions of eyeballs for just one low price.
The problem with this strategy for advertising is no one really knew if these were real people. If they were real people, no one really knew whether those people had any real interest in browsing the content of the website. Worse yet, no one knew if the eyeballs that saw the ad ever turned into paying customers.
This problem is addressed today with what’s called conversion rate optimization. Online marketing companies can look at where a website owner is advertising and attach tracking links to the ads. They can then carefully monitor whether that click through converts for the website owner. This could mean converting into a sale, lead, or simply just a newsletter sign up.
Better Understanding Translates to Increased Profits
Understanding whether an ad is effective or not through conversion rate optimization can end up saving a website owner a lot of money. They can now look at real time data and track a potential customer or lead from ad click all the way through the conversion. If the customer is lost along the way, the website owner can see precisely where the customer was lost and make a determination on what they can do to not lose the potential customer or lead in the future.
This is not just a onetime process either. It is actually a continuous process. A website owner must look at what is causing the poor conversions. Once they have identified what could be the culprit they can make one change and then measure the results again. The process then needs to be repeated over and over again, each time locating the next problem area for poor conversions.
Staying on top of the problem areas can be difficult. Thankfully there are sources to pull from that can help a website owner keep better track of conversions. With the right tools, any webmaster can succeed.
