Why You Can’t Have A 10% Conversion Rate February 2nd, 2008 by Craig Danuloff The top 10 conversion rates by online retailers in January ranged from 9.6% (Amazon.com) to 14.1% (proflowers.com), according to Nielsen/NetRating (insert huge grain of salt here). Depending on your disposition, this is either encouraging or disheartening news. Does it mean that 10-15% conversion rates are a goal you should work towards? Does it mean your 2.4% conversion rate is a terrible embarrassment? I don’t think it means either. Let’s take a closer look at who made this list and how they did it. Three firms sell flowers. Who comparison shops flowers? What would you compare? If you just did something stupid, or tomorrow is ‘the day’ and you just remembered that, you buy the flowers. Tickets.com. Everyone must know by now that every ticket seller on the internet sells from one database (ebay, stubhub, and craigslist excepted.). There is no point in comparison shopping. You want tickets, you buy them. QVC. What’s their conversion rate for TV viewers? Their website is functionally a cart, so it could be argued that they’ve got 86.2% cart abandonment. Coldwater Creek and Lands’ End. Huge catalog mailers. Again, many many visitors coming just to place orders considered offline. If your site dropped 4M catalogs, your conversion rates would zoom too. OfficeDepot.com. Many no-point-in-comparing products and I assume lots of business orders from people who have accounts and replenish online frequently. eBay and Amazon. These are impressive - but they’re ebay and amazon. Comparing them to almost anyone isn’t fair or informative. The message it seems is that if you need to deliver an overall conversion rate of 10% or greater, you need 30M registered users who buy from you 3-5 times per year, a 24-hour television channel, a pattern of inflicting back pain on innocent mailmen 3-4 times each year, or to sell products which are purchased as a result of some ages-old game of emotional blackmail. Yet for many, those methods may not be practical. That doesn’t mean you have to simply accept the shop.org and FireClick reported broad averages of 2-3% range. There are many things most sites can do to dramatically improve conversion rates. There are also much smarter ways to measure and consider conversion rates than the overall site average. While that may be an interesting for conference-room conversation, it’s a lot Follow

If you aren’t familiar with the term Geo Targeting, it’s the method used by search engines to determine where you’re searching from, so they can provide you with (what they think) are the best search results or ads based on your location (ie. country, region/state, city, post/zip code etc.) How do they do this? By looking at a number of factors, such as: Country-specific domain name - eg. .com or .com.au or .co.uk etc. etc. Where your site is hosted - be careful with this as a lot of hosting providers may have their offices in one country, but use servers and equipment based overseas Language used in your website content - even things like UK English vs. US English can make a difference due to spelling and colloquialisms Inbound Links to your site - are they mainly from other Australian websites, US sites, UK sites etc. Listing of your address / location / phone number on your website Location of people who look at your site - if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com 7 Simple Geo Targeting Tips for Your Site Knowing the above information makes it a lot easier to perform a Geo Targeting audit on your site. Here are the things I would do: If you run an Australian website and your main customers / clients are other Australians, spend the few extra dollars and buy a .com.au domain name. If you’re targeting clients in the UK, buy a .co.uk. etc. etc. Apply the same logic (as above) to the web hosting - spend a few extra dollars to have your website hosted in the country that you are targeting.Be sure to check that your hosting provider uses equipment based in your country too. If you still aren’t certain you can check their IP’s using SEOmoz’s IP Location Tool. Take the time to check your spelling and use the type of wording your clients will understand and are familiar with.For example the term swimwear, swimsuit, beachwear, cozzies, bathers and togs all mean the same thing but people in Queensland, Australia (where I’m from) rarely use the term bathers or cozzies - we wear ‘togs’. An inbound link is like a personal referral or testimonial for your website. Having links from other relevant local sites will be far more valuable with Geo Targeting than having lots of inbound links from overseas sites. Submit your site to local business and local search directories - this can often be one of the easiest Follow