Conversion Rate

I read this great post about Conversion Rate Metric on Avinash’s blog. What this got me thinking was how most of the people focus on the Business Obectives alone and not the individual Goals. Take for example an Ecommerce company like BestBuy. I would define their objectives and goal in the below manner

Objectives — Be the best commerce website which provides customers with consumer products at an affordable price.
Goal 1 — Sell and make money
Goal 2 — Be the one stop shop for information
Goal 3 — Provide customer value by providing service (Geek Squad, etc…)

If the company starts focusing only on the things it sells (Conversion rates) then there is no insight or value driven for goal#2 and 3.

Here is a list of items Avinash talks about regarding conversion:

7 : Start with overall site conversion rate. (Then promptly forget about it.) 
6 : Trend over time and don’t forget seasonality.
5 : Understand exactly what the acquisition strategy of your website / company is.
4 : Conversion rate by top five referring url’s. 
3 : Don’t measure conversion rate by page or link.
2 : Segment like crazy. Most websites convert in single digits (usually low single digits). 
1 : Always show revenue next to conversion rate.
0: Never measure conversion rate without a goal

In my mind every business needs to come up with some strategy to isolate the visits between “Visits with purchase intent and Visits with no purchase intent”. There is value in measuring #1 since it provides you with moola. However, there is a great value in measuring #2 coz this will provide you insights into areas which you might have not even thought about. i.e the value that your website provides other than the product itself.