In my previous post, one of the things I mentioned is that you should be tracking conversion rates. In this post, I expand on the definition of conversion rate and what types of conversion metrics you can be tracking.
A conversion rate refers to an audience answering your calls to action (CTA).
It doesn’t matter if the action earns money or not, if your audience responded to your CTA, then you have converted. There are many different conversion rate metrics you should track to help improve conversions overall.
Let’s look at the various metrics you can track that affect conversion rates.
Opt-In Rates
An opt-in, no matter what type it is, is a conversion. 
Knowing your overall opt-in rates, how many visitors who come to your site answer your calls to action, is an important metric that can help you estimate earnings from a traffic drive.
Traffic Source Opt-in Rate
Now you want to break down your traffic sources to get more information when tracking conversion rates. For example, how much traffic came from direct URLs, search visitors, social, referral, affiliate, email, organic, paid, and other types of traffic? You should be able to break it down and track it all.
Open Rates
Sending out email messages is imperative because email marketing is probably your main money generator. Estimates are that most marketers make at least 38 dollars for every dollar they spend on email marketing. Checking your open rates helps you optimize your subject lines, messages, and CTAs.
Click-Through Rates
Whether in an email, or a blog post, knowing click through rates for links you provide for more information, a signup form, a download, or something else like a product, is a metric that is important to be noted. You can determine, along with the conversion rate, the effectiveness of your sales pages and CTAs.
Sales Conversions
Any metrics associated with sales are important conversion metrics. Knowing where the traffic came from that made the sale helps determine the effectiveness of your marketing methods and content.
New Visitor Conversion Rates
If you really want to know if your marketing is effective, checking how many of your brand-new site visitors go ahead and buy right now is a great way to find out. If you have a high conversion rate here, you’re in the money.
Return Visitor Conversion Rates
If you didn’t convert them the first time they visited, how much did it take to get them back and convert then? Understanding how many visitors return and what percentage convert the second time or third time is also great information. It can inform whether you should invest in remarketing via ads, for example.
Value Per Visit
Out of all the visitors to your site or landing page, what is the value of any one visitor to your website? Even if all don’t convert, you can average out the value per site visitors, which can inform how much you spend getting them to view it.
Cost Per Conversion
How much does the average conversion cost you? This is useful information to compile because it informs your advertising spending and other expenditures.
Exit Pages
Although it may not seem like you are tracking conversion rates, it is important to know what is happening on your exit pages. What is the last page that your audience sees before they exit? Is there a trend? Is something wrong with the exit page that makes them want to leave it, or is it a natural exit page that makes sense for them to see last?
Time on Site
How much time does the average visitor spend on your site? How does time spent affect conversions? This is a terrific metric to know because you can know how sticky your website is and how that stickiness affects sales.
Bounce Rates
While not a conversion understanding, your bounce rate helps improve conversions since bounces are indicative of poor audience targeting or inconsistencies in the information you offer them on the landing page versus the click-through page.
It is very important that when you set your goals, you’ll want to use SMART goals. The main reason is that the measure portion of the goal is what you’ll use to track the conversion.
If your audience answers your call to action tied to your measurable goal, then you’ve converted them. Be happy and proud of your accomplishments.
