Conversion %

[Beekeeper]

What % of visitors to my site should I expect to result in new accounts? 1 in a hundred? 1 in 500? Can any experienced webmasters help me out here?

[Chatmaster]

This is a very general question although in your mind it was a simple question that should warrant a simple answer. The facts is that conversion rates has many variables. I will try to mention a few to help you see the factors that you might need to address to increase your own.

• Niche. Niche markets generally has a better conversion rate than more general markets. A portal should theoretically have a much lower conversion rate than a "blackjack strategies for land based casinos" sites.
• Source of traffic. there can be many sources of traffic for every site. If your marketing campaigns are generally well targeted in terms of the theme of your site you generally tend to have better conversions than with off-topic traffic sources. That is what makes SEO and SEM so successfully
• Marketing Material choices.With this I mean your choice of banners or maybe link text through which conversions are logged. If it is off topic and non targeted it may cause problems with your conversion rates.
• Position of marketing material on pages. There are certain choice areas on a web page where click through rates are higher than on others. Do a search for the eyetrack report on Google, that will be very interesting to you.
• Resourceful content and information that people find interesting and make them click deeper and deeper into the site.
• Retention and recency factors, for example you have a large amount of regular visitors and contributors to your sites

Now after all this hyped speech about conversion rates, My sites differ in between 3,4% and as high as 25%. Needless to say the 25% conversion rate is on a site that only get traffic from SEM campaigns on Google. The homepage requires the user to register to get some kind of secret report. Each registration is logged as a conversion. 75% of all visitors leaves the site immediately.