The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below - look at the bottom of each post for the link to all posts.

Low Cost Web Design Secret Number Two: Raw Traffic Numbers are Misleading. Base Your Traffic Goals on Sales

One million visitors to your site every month would be grand if all one million of those people were to take your most desired action. However, on the Internet, this is almost never the case. In fact, there isn’t a single documented case of a site getting one million visitors in the space of a month and having all one million of those visitors make a purchase on their first visitors.

Now you know something your competitor doesn’t - the number of people who come to your site, in and of itself, is not the meaningful number. Here’s another thing that should be wide knowledge and isn’t - the number that matters, in terms of traffic, is the conversion rate.

What’s a conversion rate? That’s the number of people who visit your site, divided by the number of people who take action, or convert from visitor to member, subscriber, or buyer, depending on the situation. The average rate of conversion online is 1%, but there are ways to get that number higher.

Now, let’s see if you’re getting this concept. Think about the following question - is it better to have 5000 visitors a day to your ecommerce site who just browse your site, or 50 visitors a day who subscribe that day, and make a purchase later on that month, given the average rate of conversion online?

It’s a trick question. 1% of 5000 visitors is still 50 people.

But what if your conversion to subscribers was 30% and 90% of them resulted in a sale that month? You’d be able to make a lot more revenue, with a lot less traffic.

When you design your site, your goal should be to transform a few targeted visitors into sales, not to hope for a few sales from a sheer volume of visitors. Proper web design can help you reach that goal. We’ll talk more about this in the next installment.

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