This week I was amazed to read that the US Air force has more pilots training to fly Drones than regular piloted aircraft. Over the last 10 years they have gone from flying less than 50 unmanned aircraft to now having over 700 Drones in service.
Earlier in the month I picked up on the video of our own Kiwi Drone in action. This time it was a $500 device purchased from a High Street store that, when properly configured, was flown into a bent and buckled Christchurch church building to assess its damage. (If you’re interested in seeing the footage, you can find the link here: www.tinyurl.com/parrot-drone-chch)
Here at Permission we’ve been testing out some Drone-like technology ourselves. No, don’t fret. There’s no need to look skyward. This is not something that will hover overhead in a menacing way. Nope, it’s sitting nicely and quietly and innocently on a few customer websites we manage – just checking what their visitors do when they next drop by.
It’s part of our “Grow Conversions – Website Optimisation” module. This module is there to do one thing and one thing only – to increase the conversion rate of your website. In its current form it has been running for a few years now and has produced some sizable jumps in performance for those that have opted to “take it on”.
And I don’t use the term “taking it on” lightly. Because, when it comes to the number and types of changes that will need to be made to your website as a result of the findings from this module, there is no stone left unturned. Altered images, re-written content, restructured navigation, complete new landing pages, and even the grandaddy of them all – replacing a whole site design. Some or all of these together have been foisted upon clients.
Imagine if you could sit behind your prospect and peer over their shoulder as they move through your website, page by page. And by doing so, notice along the way what they click on, how far they scroll down your page or even which parts of your form they have trouble completing. Well, our small but very smart Drone does all this and captures the results, replaying them to us in a series of online recordings. It works just like magic.
One of the really smart things is that there’s nothing the visitor needs to download and install for all this to happen. Clients need to make a quick update to the HTML code on our their website and bingo, the recordings begin. Then all that’s left for us to do is sit back and try not to look at the recordings before we have enough to draw some sensible conclusions. That’s the hard bit. It can get a bit addictive – looking at what the last visitor did. Nevertheless, once a week or so has passed then we can dig in and see what we have.
Here’s just a few of the things that we frequently pick up during this stage.
People clicking on things that you didn’t expect them to. The technology tracks every mouse click and boy do some people click a lot. Fortunately, there’s a way we can look at this data in an aggregate form. Then we see the trends of people clicking on pictures, faces, headings and everything else that in most cases doesn’t have anything behind them. Pictures are a classic case. Small thumbnail photos that are repeatedly clicked on reveal the visitors’ simple attempts to make them bigger. So what do we do? We give them what they want and we make them bigger plus, if we are able to, we add a few more snaps in.
People struggling to fill in forms. It’s well known that the more information you ask people to provide the lower your conversion rate will be. But what bits can you leave out? To you every field is really necessary and none can be dropped off. Nevertheless, looking at the way people complete the form can provide some insight into the problems they grapple with here.
I’ve seen recordings where people struggle with an email address, or a time to call or even a phone number. As you watch their session you can almost hear them think, “Now which one is the best one to give them?” or “ What was our personal email address again?”. They type some details, then back space across it, then type some more in, backspace a bit more and then move away from the form – never to come back. So it pays to keep the fields you want down to a minimum.
Long pages with not enough emotional momentum gained at the top. One-page sales forms can be very effective. You take your visitor from the headline, right through to capturing the lead, without them having to leave your page. That’s the theory. For it to work you need to (a) capture your visitor’s attention with the headline, (b) transfer this attention into the early stages of your copy and finally, (c) have enough emotional pulling points in your words to ensure their attention moves through the complete length of your page. There’s a lot here that can go wrong.
The most common problem is the obvious one – people deciding not to scroll. I’ve seen recordings where the % of visitor attention plummets from 100% of visitor viewing at the top of the page to barely 10% after just one scroll length down. This points to a very poor connection between the headline and early copy. Even when the connection works you still see a drop – but nowhere as severe; plus, in the recordings you see people taking time to move down and back up the form as they read through in detail what you have written.
That’s just a few of the insights we have picked up over the last few months using this Drone-like technology. Yes, it takes some time to interpret the recordings. But the additional insight you gain from walking with your visitor as they move from page to page is truly something else.
Have a chat with us today if you would like to know more about this module.
I must admit to really enjoying what I do. I think it’s the combination of melding technology with selling, all the while helping our own clients achieve more.
Most of the technology required is quite detailed – think Google Analytics tagging codes, optimised Google AdWords ad groups and multiple search engine rankings.
For the first-time website owner all this can look like one confusing mass of Google technospeak. This means that when we kick off with someone new we avoid all this stuff like the plague and start them on something quite manageable – them completing a short survey. Yep, a dreaded survey! Most visibly shudder when I ask them to fill it in, but then go on to thank me once they have answered the questions it poses. These are questions not about technology but about their prospects and how they sell to them.
Once their response has arrived at our offices I hand parts of it over to Tom for him to tackle the detailed online marketing stuff. Bits like pulling apart their site’s analytics, paid advertising and search rankings. All the necessary side of assessing how well they are performing online when compared with their competitors. Once Tom’s results are in, we schedule to meet up so I can present to them what we have found and pose them a small selection of additional questions that they would never have answered if they were included in any prior survey.
These are the answers that really matter. There’s nothing deeply personal I’m digging to uncover here, no severe psychoanalysis underway – it’s just like I’m holding up a mirror and asking them to show me what I would see when first a prospect and then their best salesperson stared into it.
First, we talk about the reflections of their customers. Are they all the same type of people or are there easily recognisable different groups? In most cases, the former is presented when the latter better reflects reality. Very few businesses have the luxury of serving just one type of customer segment.
So for these customer groups I ask about ages, genders, and even the states of mind when buying (stressed, excited) – everything and anything I can find out about them so I can form a mental picture of the types of people who visit their pages. Then I look at their current website to see if this also acts like a mirror to this audience. For instance, does it show any images or words that “reflect” the people in these segments?
Frequently, I reference the website that the Auckland team Select Cleaning use to present their business. (You can find the site here www.selectcleaningauckland.com.) The image at the top and the intro text were all crafted with some great help by the site’s owners, Graeme and Sylvia Norton.
Currently, the image at the top is of a stressed woman wanting to pass the responsibility of cleaning her home onto someone else. When we began working with Graeme and Sylvia this image was a picture of a happy, smiling franchise owner in front of his van. We ran our tests and a stressed-looking woman was clearly the winner. All this while their competitors continue to show pictures of happy franchise people and even vacuum cleaners. (Personally I’ve never seen a household appliance browse the web let alone buy home services.)
Anyway, your business may have multiple groups you sell to so one picture may be too hard to achieve. But you can still place groups of images that reflect back the main customer profiles you sell to, which then take them to the parts of your site that are just for them.
OK, so next up we need to bring their best salesperson into the room and place my Permission Mirror in front of them so they can tell their story. Questions I pose to them include:
Then I look at their website again and see how the content reflects this discussion. A business that has been in operation for 32 years and doesn’t show any reference to this on their home page is missing the mark. Likewise, one that works with well known brands like Rolls Royce and Gucci but doesn’t talk about this anywhere on their home page – well, another opportunity goes begging.
Then the task is to fix the gaps that each of these two “website reflections” reveal. In the process, we are gradually optimising the client’s website for greater conversions. The time this takes depends on a number of factors. One of the main ones is the clarity the client can offer to the visions of their customers and the most effective sales process they follow. By knowing the attributes of these in very precise details then they are able to see what is missing on their website. However, fuzzy knowledge in these two areas just translates into fuzzy results later on.
The soccer season is well underway and my Saturdays until early afternoon are spent ferrying both girls (11 and 14 years old) to their respective grounds and shouting “encouragement” from the sidelines. Both are fortunate this season to have a great bunch of girls to play with and a coach who is keen and able to help them develop.
And so, with the super mild May weather we have been experiencing in Auckland, it’s been a very pleasant start to the weekend. Even better that it extracts both of them from whatever screen is capturing their attention so I can get them out onto the green playing fields of Auckland’s inner city suburbs.
Neither of them is at the stage where their positions on the field are locked in for the season. So they alternate between goal keeper, defender and the occasional flurry at the front as a striker. Ah, the front of the pack. The place where glory can be captured with the deft touch of the ball in the right direction. I must admit that girls’ soccer has a certain grace to it when compared with boys’.
Purposeful runs down the sidelines, which are then capitalised on by team mates being in the right place at the right time. Yes, they all love playing in these forward positions and positively grimace when asked to swap to be a defender, let alone the worst of it all – playing in goal. Now there’s an “opportunity” that requires some sterling selling by the coach.
Nevertheless, even I, with my limited soccer skills, can see that the games they win are nearly always won by the hard work that occurs from the back half of the field. Hard work put in by the goal keeper, defenders and mid-field players – all build to make the task of being a striker so much easier with an increased opportunity for basking in some future forward glory.
Yep, it’s those mucky, hard and rarely recognised positions that, when working well, make the rest of the field hum along quite nicely. And guess what – the reason why I bring all this up in your newsletter this month is that the content on your website works in a very similar way.
Just replace the vision of the football “strikers” with those of the glory pages on your website that are responsible for holding the last smidgen of attention of your visitor before they convert into a lead. Commonly referred to as landing pages – pages and pages of content has been written on how to improve these parts of your website to ensure they perform to the very best of their ability.
Nevertheless, before your visitors arrive on these pages they usually visit pages that represent the “mid-field”, “defenders”, and even “goal keeper” of your site. Those pages that all need to do some solid work to ensure your visitors actually decide to journey onwards to the site’s final landing page. Pages that cover topics such as “About Us”, “Our Services”, “Our Story” and even “Customer Successes”. Places like these that come up again and again in the tracking paths that Google Analytics tells us people follow before they end up converting into a lead.
Unfortunately, most website owners ignore these areas of their website. Perhaps they see them as just showing filler content. Something to complete the story but not necessarily tasked to convert the visitor. How wrong they are. Just imagine meeting a prospect for the first time and starting your conversation by asking for an order, opportunity to quote or receive your bid. Not a good look.
So we kick off by showing interest and then slowly but gradually covering bits and pieces of the back story on the company and what it does. Basic things like what the company does, and for whom, and the types of staff it employs. It’s the back story content like this, when it is on your website and working well, that can make the task of those star landing pages so much easier to achieve.
Better educated visitors are more likely to convert when compared with those who are unsure what you do, why you do it and what makes you so different from others in your category. So it makes sense for this content to be there. Now, how do you go about judging its effectiveness and then move to improve it? Especially when any conversions – think goals – are not going to occur directly on the page but possibly a few pages forward of them.
Here’s a few pointers to help get you going.
This month’s customer call was all about website analytics and what it takes to use this knowledge to push your website into the top 10% of conversion capability. During this session I covered the different levels of competence a website owner can achieve through their understanding of this part of online marketing strategy.
During the first level I mentioned a site’s bounce rate and the visitor’s time on site. Both of these measures – especially the first one – are great to track the effectiveness of your “back field” website pages. During the early part of the call I went through both of these in detail so everyone was aware of what they meant and how valuable they are.
For instance, it pays to track the percentage of visitors who exit your website directly from your “About Us” page instead of moving forward to the “Contact us” section of the site. This stat is the bounce rate of this page. Now, some basic tricks to reduce this stat (with bounce rate the lower the number the better) include things like: a) making the next step an easy and obvious one for visitors to take; and/or b) even including content within the page’s copy to drive them forward to take the next step. For example, “you can learn more about who we have worked with by visiting our testimonials page here”.
Our customer conference calls cover a fair bit. One a few month’s ago explained the importance of placing your good content above the virtual fold of your web page. That is the part they see BEFORE they have to scroll their browser to see more. Google has a great tool to help you here – it was covered during the April Conference call – contact the office if you need more details. By using this handy tool you can see what proportion of your page 90% of the browsing audience will see and if this actually includes the bits you want them to see. Basic I know but very, very worthwhile to test.
For example, last month we worked with a customer to tweak a few of their “back field” pages with the view of just moving the content further up the page. They had all the good stuff – nice images, great content, good information – all just below the fold. Simply by taking our advice and restructuring their content upwards they experienced a 44% drop in bounce rate and a 29% increase in time on the page. More importantly, their conversion rates really kicked upwards as their “striker” landing pages started to receive some more educated visitors.
For most of us the ideal website visitor is one who arrives after finding us in Google, then heads straight for the contact us page and quickly completes the form so our sales team can start “working” on them. And this may happen. But not that often. The majority will skip wildly from page to page around your site before deciding if they should even look for your contact page, let alone complete it.
Now this wild path will be wild if you don’t try and provide clear directions for them to follow. However, you need to realise that even with these in operation people will still go where they want to. Still, some will take your advice and follow the paths you suggest. Which makes it worthwhile to invest some time and energy to map out the ideal paths that site visitors should follow and then endeavour to present your words in the best way possible to ensure a high proportion remain on track.
For instance, you may want to place your “About Us” page next to the “Customer Testimonials” section in your site’s navigation options. And perhaps at the bottom of each page you include either some clear directions on where to locate your “Contact Us” page or, even better, a quick contact form they can complete there and then.
There’s a great report in Google Analytics that can help you see if these virtual paths are being used. It reveals the pages visitors travel through before ending up on your final landing pages. You can also set up goal tracking that includes a funnel that incorporates these “back field” pages to see how many people go through them in the order you planned.
So there you have it. Like most good teams it’s a complete effort from everyone on the field that ensures the right result in the end. And while the ones that touch the ball – or the visitor – just before they score – or convert – are frequently seen as the ones solely responsible for the achievement, rarely is this the case.
Way back at the start of the play – or the visitor session – is where you will locate some quality achievements by others that made that final result almost a formality. And for you as a website owner it’s those “back field” pages that can make all the difference. So this month give them their own focus and see how well the whole website performs as a result.
I have never come across a business that has achieved that nirvana moment of reliably converting 100% of their prospects into clients. Some have come close – a few I have met are in the high 80’s – but none have hit that magic 100%. It’s probably a near impossible act to reliably achieve.
Which makes it very surprising when I come across clients who fail to operate a prospect follow-up process in even the most basic of forms. For them the ones that don’t say “yes” are never followed up and fall into a big bag of lost opportunities.
I covered this during our monthly conference call, in which I mentioned how improving your follow-up processes is one of the five fixes to implement when turning around a low converting website. Yes, this was a fix that needed to take place away from the HTML and super nice graphics and to occur AFTER the sales lead had arrived by email.
Some view all this follow-up work as just too hard and complicated to set up, as well as being filled with what they see as nothing less than “pestering” their prospects to buy. On both counts they are far from the truth. The tools you need to build a credible follow-up process are not complicated at all and you are not “pestering” – you are showing “polite persistence”.
Now, this last point will require some explanation. To help, how about I list some of the many reasons prospects could decide not to say “yes” during the time frame you would normally expect?
Now, I realise that this isn’t a complete list but in nearly all of these cases some polite dialog is required between you and your prospect to move things ahead. When this is done properly, it adds value to your proposition. Like me, you have probably been on the receiving end of the few sales people that do this. Perhaps a phone call – or an email – or even a short note in the mail. All small details that show that they are keeping in touch after the quote has gone through. Only a really pushy sales person could make the act of practicing great follow-up into something that could actually reduce the likelihood of them making the sale.
So it needs to occur. Let’s work through the tools required to operate the most basic of follow-up systems. First, you need a place to store all your customers’ details. I’m a big advocate of using online-based CRM systems – I have written about them in previous newsletters. Permission uses Highrise from 37 Signals – some of our clients use Zoho or Sugar CRM – they all do a very similar thing and allow you to rent for a pittance all the functionality to store and manage your sales leads.
How you decide to follow them up depends on the length and complexity of the decision cycle your prospects go through. Usually a mix of phone, print and email is enough to keep the decision moving ahead. Obviously, the phone is the most direct of the options and email is the slight gentle nudge in comparison. If you are uncomfortable doing the direct work yourself then why not outsource it to others? There’s a mass of highly experienced telemarketers out there looking for work who would love the chance to follow up people on your behalf. Just find one that suits your needs.
When I’m describing the task of effective sales follow-up the image I use to illustrate my point is a big fat leaking bucket. Now I don’t expect you to plug all the holes and achieve that 100% conversion rate I mentioned at the start. Nevertheless, taking it from a struggling 50% to a credible 85% could just involve the judicious use of some smart lead collection methods and a series of carefully worded and implemented follow-up messages.
A few weeks ago I was convinced to cycle from Rotorua to Taupo with a few friends in what they loosely referred to as the “100k Flyer”. I had recently purchased a new bike – think commuter hybrid not shiny carbon road machine – and was secretly keen to see how we would go. So I was in.
My cycling buddy for the distance, Martin, is a piece of cycling human sinew. Last year he led a small team that cycled from Wellington to Auckland. Quite an amazing feat, which meant he was well used to traversing main municipal centres while I struggled to move between suburbs of Auckland.
Nevertheless, he assured me that he wasn’t the racing type and was looking forward to the scenery and some conversation along the way. Well, the good news was that he stuck to his word. We kept together for nearly 80 km, chatting away as the k’s rolled by. The bad news was that this all came to a stop when some mild discomfort in my back grew into a sharp pain that wouldn’t go away – forcing me to slow us both down while I stretched to relieve some of the strain.
I could sense Martin was itching to keep going so I wished him all the best and waved him on. He kept going at his steady methodical pace and gradually disappeared into the distance. At the end we met up again while I struggled to free myself from my bike – my lower back had slowly ground to a halt. I asked Martin if he felt any similar type of discomfort – nope, apparently nothing other than some general tiredness – his body was fine.
He pointed out that it was probably due to a bad fit between me and my bike. Later that evening he gave me the details of a guy who worked from his garage in Remuera who could help out.
The following week I found myself peddling away on a trainer in Karl’s garage on the same bike, while he stood in front of me shaking his head in disbelief. He was amazed I could cycle 5 km let alone 80 km without causing some serious long-term harm to my back. Once I hopped off my pain machine he dropped plumb lines from the tips of my knees, checked the angles of my legs with giant plastic protractors, and scribbled down a list of necessary adjustments.
Then he took his spanners to my machine and moved my seat backwards and upwards, attacked my handlebars with a hacksaw and even removed the cleats from my right shoe to add a spacer to stop it flexing too far inwards. All this took a good 45 minutes but the difference in fit was astounding. My back felt straighter, my position on the bike seemed a lot more comfortable and on the whole a lot more natural than before.
The first few rides “post fit” were a bit strange as I got used to my new position but yep – that dull back ache that had plagued me for months was gone. What a great feeling that was.
All this got me thinking about the work we do, especially when it comes to improving the conversion rate of our customers’ websites. This has been the subject of my recent customer coaching call and has featured in numerous articles before.
This work is very similar to Karl’s. The obvious differences are that first, we fit websites to people and, second, those involved are not you as a customer but your prospects. It’s that last point that makes the work a fair bit harder than Karl’s. I could tell Karl what hurt and exactly where, whereas rarely do your prospects tell you what’s wrong with your website.
Likewise, once Karl had done the job I could jump on and within a few minutes things felt much better. Oh, to find a group of prospects willing to share their unbiased views on the recent changes you put across your website. Nevertheless, having the mindset that the conversion optimisation process is really just a very special “fitting” process helps you to notice and avoid some of the common mistakes people make during this process.
Mistakes like deciding that a test isn’t worth running because someone in the management team doesn’t “think” it’s worthwhile. When really the “fitting” process is between the prospects and the website not the management team and your pages – so in a pure sense any opinions other than those of your prospects, while interesting, are not important.
This leads me nicely onto the next point. You need enough test feedback from your prospects to prove what does and doesn’t work. The most simple test is an AB split test. This is where you share your site’s traffic equally between two versions of your web page. Statistics tells us that there is a minimum number of actions required to occur across both versions before you can reliably predict all future interactions. So, even though your favourite page design of the two being tested may be responsible for the first eight of the twelve total conversions, this still may not be enough to cancel the test and announce it and yourself as the winner. Fortunately, Google makes calculating this a doddle with its Conversion Optimiser tool set.
And then there’s the realisation of what needs to change on your website to make the fit work. My back told me through the pain I experienced that there was no way it was going to mould itself nicely to fit my new bike. This left me with no choice but to get my bike altered to match my spine. Likewise, don’t expect your prospects to alter their behaviour and miraculously make your website work – you’re going to need to get down and dirty with some HTML changes to make any progress.
Which leads me to my final comment. These changes are going to be unique to you and your prospect audience. Now, I am an aging cyclist with a very average back and one leg that is longer than the other (which is apparently more common than you would imagine). This all meant that Karl had to make some rather unique adjustments to my bike to make it match my body.
The same logic will apply to your website. It too will need some unique changes and tweaks to fit your pages to your prospects. So don’t expect an alteration – or even a website design – that worked for one business selling to a different category or geographic location to work for you. It probably won’t.
So there you have it. The team here find the process of fitting a website to a prospect audience a really stimulating challenge. We don’t have the luxury of observing live prospects working through our client’s website – like Karl enjoys – but still, there’s something very satisfying in seeing the results of a test prove that those pages fit a bit better than they used to.
Unlike employees your website is best treated as a number.
So forget the nice graphics and the soft comfortable design influence, it’s time take your website and distil it down to the cold hard facts of a percentage conversion rate. (That is its ability to create prospect leads as a percentage of the total Internet traffic it receives.)
Hard clinical numbers tell you whether all the bright lights and fancy colours of web design are making a difference to convince those itinerant web browsers to start tapping away on their keyboards to become prospects of note.
Here are four points to help you begin to view your web site in this new light.
Firstly the old saying holds true online, you can only manage what you measure, so start to investigate what web tracking tools you have to see if they provide you with the numbers you need. Most will provide visits – hits and top pages. What you really want is a tool that shows you all this plus the ability to track actual visitor actions. If what you have comes up short, don’t worry. There’s no need to invest much to get what you need. Google even provides a tool free of charge in their Google Analytics package that does a basic but solid job of showing you what you need to know.
Second, once you know your stats you need to plan their improvement. You can do this by viewing your web site not as a publisher but as a prospect visitor. (Some tools can help you alter your perspective by showing you in real time the live paths people actually take as they click through your site.)
There will probably be a few different groups of prospects and customers that work through your site. Your task is to map out the characteristics and content demands of each group and then to see how your site performs.
For instance one of your predominant groups could be quite analytical in nature, arriving at your site on a fact finding mission whereas others could be more interested in the “feel” of the business – its owners and customers. Somehow your content will need to appeal to both of these quite different prospect groups.
Thirdly after matching the right content to the correct profile then you need to present it in the correct way. Just like a poorly tied fly can ruin a good day’s trout fishing – web content poorly presented will fail to trigger the registration response you desire.
For example Permission started working with a client’s web site that was converting just 2.5% of its web site traffic into prospect leads. By altering the way the exact same content was presented we managed to increase this to a credible 25%. (The industry conversion rate for offering free content is 10%.)
And finally by taking on the goal of wanting to view your web site as a number you need to know there is no finally. There are always ways to make some incremental improvement on what you have done before.
Even our customer experiencing a solid 25% conversion rate has us working away each month to tweak things further to crack the 30% barrier we have broken with others in different industries.
Unlike employees your web site is best treated as a number.
So forget the nice graphics and the soft comfortable design influence, it’s time take your web site and distil it down to the cold hard facts of a percentage conversion rate. (That is its ability to create prospect leads as a percentage of the total Internet traffic it receives.)
Hard clinical numbers tell you whether all the bright lights and fancy colours of web design are making a difference to convince those itinerant web browsers to start tapping away on their keyboards to become prospects of note.
Here are four points to help you begin to view your web site in this new light.
Firstly the old saying holds true online, you can only manage what you measure, so start to investigate what web tracking tools you have to see if they provide you with the numbers you need. Most will provide visits – hits and top pages. What you really want is a tool that shows you all this plus the ability to track actual visitor actions. If what you have comes up short, don’t worry. There’s no need to invest much to get what you need. Google even provides a tool free of charge in their Google Analytics package that does a basic but solid job of showing you what you need to know.
Second, once you know your stats you need to plan their improvement. You can do this by viewing your web site not as a publisher but as a prospect visitor. (Some tools can help you alter your perspective by showing you in real time the live paths people actually take as they click through your site.)
There will probably be a few different groups of prospects and customers that work through your site. Your task is to map out the characteristics and content demands of each group and then to see how your site performs.
For instance one of your predominant groups could be quite analytical in nature, arriving at your site on a fact finding mission whereas others could be more interested in the “feel” of the business – its owners and customers. Somehow your content will need to appeal to both of these quite different prospect groups.
Thirdly after matching the right content to the correct profile then you need to present it in the correct way. Just like a poorly tied fly can ruin a good day’s trout fishing – web content poorly presented will fail to trigger the registration response you desire.
For example Permission started working with a client’s web site that was converting just 2.5% of its web site traffic into prospect leads. By altering the way the exact same content was presented we managed to increase this to a credible 25%. (The industry conversion rate for offering free content is 10%.)
And finally by taking on the goal of wanting to view your web site as a number you need to know there is no finally. There are always ways to make some incremental improvement on what you have done before.
Even our customer experiencing a solid 25% conversion rate has us working away each month to tweak things further to crack the 30% barrier we have broken with others in different industries.