Explaining conversion rate (CR)

First of all we have to let you know that we are talking about online conversion rate (CR), a term very often mentioned in the internet marketing world. It is actually a numeric value which is representing the percentage of unique visitors of a website who have clicked on a desirable item which can be either a subscription to a newsletter, a sales or downloading some documents or software programmes.

You can also check conversion rate definition on Wikipedia.

As a potential customer of our SEO services we found it useful to write more about what conversion rate (CR) actually means since it is mentioned several times throughout describing our search engine optimization services.

The most generally accepted conversion rate (CR) formula:

Conversion Rate (CR) = Unique Actions (UA) / Unique Exposures (UE)

Let's define more accurately each element included in this simple formula. As you can see we are using 'Unique' in our formula which is supposed to be unique. Why we say supposed to be is because there is actually no way to measure it exactly as being unique either we mean a unique visitor or a unique action. This is because a unique visitor can access a website from two different places, from his office and from his home as well and it is measured as two unique.

Now let's go forward and explain each element. Any website has a certain number of daily traffic which can be categorized several ways depending on the statistics we are interested in. From the total number of daily visitors (TDV) we can separate the unique visitors (UV) which is logically less than TDV. Now as we have reached to the unique visitors (UV) we are interested in those visitors which have taken a desired action on our website also known as call-to-action (CTA) and we get to 'Unique Actions' (UA) found in our formula.

As you can see the formula contains an element called 'Unique Exposures' (UE), this is because our CTA can be exposed several ways, first on our website, in our sent out newsletters or on other means of ads on other websites or in the sponsored search engine listings.

As you can see the formula mentioned above is reflecting the overall conversion rate which can be divided in more categories like the sales conversion rate of our Newsletters, basically there is a countless number of combinations depending on what we as online marketers are interested in getting results. Besides all this there is also the offline conversion rate which is much more difficult to track like TV commercials, Newspaper ads etc.

The main scope of conversion rate (CR):

The only and single main scope of conversion rate (CR) is to be able to measure the efficiency of your online business which helps you make the necessary measures to increase one of the conversion rates which do not show acceptable results like your Newsletter's conversion rate.