Strategy

Why the conversion rate is critical to marketing

Conversion rate is the most important metric of a website or landing page, as it helps demonstrate the effectiveness of the applied digital marketing strategy. And in a high competitiveness market, as is the lead generation market, it is a priority to understand whether the conversion of your website is above or below [...]

May 07, 2023 · Gustavo Trentini · 11 min read

Why the conversion rate is critical to marketing

Conversion rate is the most important metric of a website or landing page, as it helps demonstrate the effectiveness of the applied digital marketing strategy. And in a high-competitive market, as it is the lead generation market, it is a priority to understand whether the conversion of your site is above or below the market average.

From a commercial point of view, you should know how many people are interested or buying from your company, product or service. Therefore, the conversion rate allows you to focus your efforts on the appropriate locations.

If you have a very high conversion rate, you should invest in more ads to reach a wider target audience. If you have a lot of traffic on the site but low conversion rates, it is convenient to invest in branding and marketing. Or maybe your website design needs to improve.

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When should you calculate the conversion rate?

The frequency with which the conversion rate should be calculated is completely different from business to business. There's no magic recipe that's good for anything. Many are content with a monthly calculation, but there are circumstances in which it may be necessary to calculate it more or less frequently.

Ideally, you have a short enough period so you can keep up with conversion at various times. You cannot calculate the conversion rate every six months if the entire measurement period is one year.

On the other hand, you can use a long enough period to get a precise measurement. There are unpredictable fluctuations in the market every year, and they can greatly affect conversion rate numbers if you don't give enough time to the entire monitoring and analysis period to balance.

More importantly, your conversion rate calculations should consider development cycles. If you have a commercial campaign every month, do not wait until the end of the quarter to calculate the conversion rate.

Each update can produce a different result and therefore a different conversion rate. Waiting until the period covers several important updates can be catastrophic for your conversion rate.

See also:

How to improve the conversion rate

Depending on your market, business model and your customers, there may be many ways to improve the conversion rate. However, focus your strategies on 2 actions that are efficient to increase your conversion rate numbers:

Think about what you're offering.

Keep in mind that not even the best digital advertising and marketing campaign in the world means much if your product offer is not good. Book extra time to consider what your product/service is and what you can offer your customers. If you create good offers with reasonable prices and solid quality, people will convert and buy them.

Optimize your website and capture pages

Whether we're talking about performance or site structure, optimizing is always a quick way to increase conversions. Consider CTA sites (calls for action), colors, designs, and even create some landing pages to test different methods.

As I said earlier, there are several ways to increase these conversion rates. What matters most, however, is that you offer something that people want and facilitate access.

Why follow the Conversion Rate ?

Conversion rate is the most important metric of a website, as it helps demonstrate the effectiveness of the marketing strategy. And in a high-competitive market, as it is the lead generation market, it is very important to understand whether the conversion of your site is above or below the market average.

Are your sales campaigns attracting the right people?

Is the site leading the user to take the desired action?

All of this can be revealed with the help of the conversion rate.

This comparison between its results and those of other companies in the same segment is not mere vanity. It is essential to get new insights, find improvement points and develop action plans.

Good conversions generate leads and sales

A study conducted in partnership between Leadster, Hubspot and Rock Content platforms mapped the lead generation panorama in Brazil, analyzing the behavior of millions of users in order to discover the best strategies for leading generation and serve as a guide to the digital and business environment.

The period analyzed was from January 1 to December 31, 2022 and impresses by the numbers, with analysis on 2,211 sites, 151 million accesses and 2.6 million leads generated.

The data used in this report were collected from Leadster's Chatbot of Conversational Marketing, which initiates proactive and personalized conversations with visitors to a site, improving conversion and qualification indexes. All data is anonymous to protect the privacy of customers.

This robust analysis, sponsored by recognized players in the market, can guide you and your company to the search for the best conversion rates, understanding where to focus the actions according to the insights revealed. Follow the main clippings below:

3.19% is the median conversion rate of leads accesses in Brazil

Following a global trend, the Lead Generation Panorama edition showed a decrease in site conversion rate, which increased from 3.81% to 3.19%. This fall is the reflection of an increasingly competitive and saturated market, which demands creative solutions in conversion optimization, also known as CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).

The goal of a conversion optimization strategy is to improve the user experience and generate more conversions, without necessarily increasing the investment or traffic volume that the site currently receives.

Tip: Approach your site visitors proactively and customisedly, increasing the volume of qualified leads by up to 3×.

The segment with the highest conversion rate is Legal, with 5.12%

The study showed that the Legal segment (composed mainly of law firms) has the highest conversion rates among all the companies analyzed. Following, with conversion rates very close, we have the segments of Services (4.02%) and Financial (4%).

The Real Estate segment, repeating the pattern of the last study, had the lowest result: 1.53% conversion. And this demands a huge challenge for the sector that increasingly becomes dependent on paid media strategies, because organic reach has also been falling a lot.

Do you need to announce? The answer is yes and for sure!

Meta Ads is the channel with the best conversion rate, 4.23%

Even with a high volume of conversions, a point of attention detected in the research is in relation to the intention of buying and maturity of leads, which are usually lower in social networks than in the search channels, increasing the level of difficulty in closing the sale.

Meta Ads (or Facebook Ads) stood out in this study as the channel with the best conversion rate, 4.23%. The result was mainly surprising compared to Panorama 2021, when the platform was ranked last, with a conversion of 2.26%.

Tip: Instagram currently has far more reach than Facebook, so try to use social network for targeted ads and reach your target audience, ensuring qualified leads in conversions. Facebook Leads Ads, where it is possible to capture and qualify leads through forms, should be taken into account for companies.

The most traffic-driven channels

Very calm when it comes to planning your actions for conversion. The organic channel is still the one that leads to more accesses to Brazilian companies' websites and represents 35.29% of the total accesses, according to Panorama.

This channel is the source of visits spontaneously, without the use of ads. It happens, for example, when you search “how to achieve digital marketing performance” on Google and can access related content that appears at the top of search results.

Then Google Ads appears with 26.66% of the hits, which came from paid campaigns created on the platform.

The direct channel appears third, with 12.93%, and represents accesses coming from social networks, offline files and from direct access itself, when the user types the site into the browser address bar.

Desktop conversion continues to overcome mobile, but difference decreases

It is not new that the conversion experience – and therefore conversion rates – is better on the desktop than on mobile devices. But this difference is shrinking, which can reveal a recent effort by companies to improve user experience.

Google Ads is the channel that most generated leads for Brazilian companies

Although the organic channel generates most of the accesses to Brazilian websites, when the issue is lead generation, Google Ads is ahead. The channel is responsible for 28.16% of the leads generated, against 19.20% of the organic and 10.33% of the Meta.

And speaking of Google, Chrome browser is the preferred user, far ahead of other options available on the web. You can focus your usability tests on Chrome and Android to ensure a good browsing experience for most of your visitors.

Conclusion

Brazilian companies are digitizing, digitally more mature. This fact becomes clear when we see investments in lead generation and the increase in online competition. But change happens at slow paces, and there is still a long way to go.

This issue of Panorama shows that only 43.85% of the accesses generated via Google and 52.74% of the accesses generated via Facebook have properly configured (parametrizadas) utms. That means half of the companies may have no idea where their accesses and conversions are coming from.

The process of selling that takes place after the lead generation also needs to professionalize.

Only 46.90% of 2211 companies surveyed have integrations with sales CRMs or marketing automation software.

What we can understand is that there is a big hole in the treatment, nutrition, distribution of these leads and, consequently, in the closing of businesses.

Gustavo Trentini · Nacionalvox

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