How many possible leads are lost due to a too long or poorly structured funnel? How many users leave your site or app for a poor user experience? And what can you do to get them to accomplish their (and your) goals? The magic word is conversion, but it is not so simple to design a UX that allows transforming the simple visitor into a user or a consumer.

A virtuous conversion rate optimization approach is based on 6 key moments:

• Define the conversion goals and metrics
• Analyze the user experience to formulate hypotheses on critical issues
• Plan the changes that can improve the design and performance
• Test the alternative design to measure its effectiveness and compare it with the original layout
• Analyze the results to understand whether to permanently implement the changes
• Repeat the process over and over again, with a view of constant improvement

In this article, we will focus on the first three steps of this process.

1. Define the conversion goals (and metrics)

The conversion rate is a simple but fundamental concept: it is the “queen” metric for any service that has a business goal: generating leads, selling, downloading an application, spreading its contents, expanding the audience of users. The best method for measuring the performance of a digital product is to evaluate the ability of a system to transform occasional visitors into users and consumers.

This is the purpose of the conversion rate, which is the indicator that expresses the percentage of conversions generated with respect to the total number of visits (or unique visitors).

Given the flexibility of the conversion idea, being applicable to multiple event categories (for example, the purchase on e-commerce, the subscription to a newsletter, the registration to a site just to name the most common), the conversion rate can be used to measure the performance of any purpose.

It is therefore essential to clearly define the objectives of the product or service whose performance is to be monitored. And the objectives can obviously vary based on the type of product and the reference market: if for e-commerce, the number of sales and the average value of purchases represent the key metrics, the reference indicator for a blog or a magazine is the number of subscribers.

Next to the conversion rate, it is appropriate to consider other KPIs, to keep an eye on and to measure during the optimization process: for example, the average time spent on the site or the bounce rate are other useful variables to evaluate the results of the changes made to the user experience of a product.

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