Presidential Conversion Rates

Why do businesses have blogs? If it’s not to build awareness, then it’s to convert leads into buyers.  This can also be known as your conversion rates, which can be described in different outcomes, other than revenue gained.   According to Avinash Kaushik (2010), conversion rates are expressed as a percentage and defined as outcomes divided by unique visitors (or visits).  Some examples would be a percentage of website visitors who fill out a form, call your company, or purchase something from you online (Lavinsky, 2014). 

There are several ways to improve your rates, here are five examples of increasing your online conversion rates:

1. Social Proof: adding social proof, via customer testimonials and/or case studies, to your website virtually always increases conversions.
2. Clear Contact Information: clearly showing contact information, perhaps a phone number and/or live chat options, typically increases conversions by giving visitors confidence that your company is “real” and is there to answer any questions they have. 
3. Credibility: having “trust” seals, such as from the Better Business Bureau or from web security firms like Verisign, will nearly always conversions.
4. Guarantees: offering a guarantee gives customers more confidence in your offerings and thus generally increases conversion rates. 
5. Headlines: the headlines on your website pages are typically the first thing visitors read, and often compels them to read more of exit your site immediately.  The right headline could dramatically increase your conversion rate.  (Lavinsky, 2014)

So now that we understand what a conversion rate is, how do we know what makes a good conversion rate?  According to PPC optimization solution provider, Wordstream’s analysis of thousands of AdWords accounts with a combined $3 billion in annual spend, about ¼ of all accounts have conversion rates lower than 1% (Pruitt, 2014).  While the top 25% did much better with rates of 5.31% or greater and the top 10% of AdWords advertisers have an impressive rate of 11.45% (Pruitt, 2014).  So how does this translate to your business or blog? Is 3 – 5% a good conversion rate goal? This answer depends on what you spend to drive visitors to your site and how much each conversion is worth to your business (Pruitt, 2014). 

As we all know, political campaigns are an expensive endeavor and it takes money to keep them moving along.  Candidates use fundraisers, which can include a $10,000 per plate fundraisers, as a way to increase their campaign funds.  However, in 2008, the Obama campaign utilized social media and digital marketing as a way to increase campaign funds.  During 2007, Dan Siroker was director of analytics for then presidential candidate, Barack Obama.  Siroker’s job was to use data to help the campaign make better decisions (2010).  This idea started with just one simple experiment, which taught them that every visitor to the website was an opportunity and taking advantage of that opportunity through website optimization and A/B testing could help the campaign raise tens of millions of dollars (Siroker, 2010).

Source: Siroker, 2010

According to Siroker, the experiment was testing the media section and the Call-To-Action button of the splash page (2010).  Conversion rates can help tell if something is or isn't working with a CTA.  This can be as simple as placement and color or even the words used in the CTA.  Siroker and his team wound up testing four variations of the button: 

Source: Siroker, 2010

The metric used to measure success was sign-up rate, which was the number of people who signed up divided by the number of people who saw that particular variation.  Since there was a total of 310,382 visitors to the splash page during the experiment, this meant each variation was seen by roughly 13,000 people (Siroker, 2010).

Source: Siroker, 2010

This is data from the different version of the CTA buttons and the media used, for the splash page.  Keeping in mind the goal was to get higher sign-up rates, below was the stats for this goal. 

Source: Siroker, 2010

The Obama campaign clearly defined a simple goal, then used and tested different CTA's and media to figure out what was the most effective for sign-ups.  Using A/B testing they knew they had a winner for their splash page.

Source: Siroker, 2010

Siroker explains the best performing combination of button and media was "Combination 11," which was the "Learn More" button and the "Family" image (2010).  If the Obama campaign would not have tested and measured conversion rates, they would have had a conversation rate of 8.26%.  Instead the winning variation had a sign-up rate of 11.6% (Siroker, 2010).  

Conversion rates, while not the end all be all in measurements, can play a role in helping to determine what is working and what isn't working. 

References

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Lavinsky, D. (2014, March 18). How to increase conversion rates. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/davelavinsky/2014/03/18/how-to-increase-conversion-rates/

Pruitt, N. (2014, October 1). A look at best practice conversion rates. Retrieved from http://www.getsmartcontent.com/blog/2014/10/look-best-practice-conversion-rates/