In last week’s post we tackled “What will my traffic/clicks be from my digital ad campaign?” and now we will cover the follow up question that advertisers usually have… “How many leads will I get from my digital ad campaign?” This question is basically asking, what ROI can I expect from my digital advertising?
Well, you need to have an idea of what your typical conversion rate is for the people who come to the website. (Remember a conversion is whatever you want a customer to do on the website – i.e., fill out a contact us form, download something, buy something, sign up for blog or newsletter, etc.)
If you typically convert 5% of your website traffic then your Website Conversion Rate is 5%. If you are expecting let’s say 500 people to go to your website from seeing your ad (see last week’s blog for how to calculate expected traffic) then you should expect to convert 25 leads (500 people x 5%=25 leads).
“But what if I don’t know my conversion rate for my website?” That’s usually the next question we are asked. If you don’t know, then you can use your Google Analytics to figure out your Website Conversion Rate.
Website Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors to a website that convert. The formula to calculate Website Conversion Rate is Number of Conversions (divided by) Total Traffic To Website (multiplied by) 100.
Step 1: What is the conversion you are looking for on your website? Let’s use Vici Media’s website as an example. A conversion for us is when someone fills out a “Contact Us” form. When someone does, it takes them to a thank you page with the URL you see in the graphic below. So to figure out our Website Conversion Rate I need to know how many people typically reach this page.
Step 2: Log-in to the Google Analytics for the website and go to Reporting>Behavior>Site Content>All Pages and you will see the graphic below. Enter in the time period you want to look at which should be at least a month. In the search bar in the middle of the page, type in the URL of your conversion page. In Vici’s example above it is /contact-success/. IMPORTANT: don’t type in the main URL of the website (i.e. www.vicimediainc.com) just the part of the URL that comes after it. Once you’ve typed in the URL click the search icon magnifying glass.
Step 3: Google Analytics will take you to a reporting page for just that specific conversion page. So you can see in the graphic below we had 105 people get to our “Contact Us” conversion page.
Step 4: Look at your total traffic to the website in Google Analytics. We now we know how many conversions we average (105) but we still need to know what is the total traffic in order to find our Website Conversion Rate percentage. To find total traffic go to Reporting>Audience>Overview and you will see the graph below. You need the number of “Sessions.”
Step 5: Calculate the Website Conversion Rate: Conversions (divided by) Total Traffic (multiplied by) 100. So in our example for Vici Media it is 105 conversions divided by 5,223 sessions (Total Traffic) x 100 = 2.0% Website Conversion Rate.
This means that if Vici Media were running an advertising campaign of 500,000 impressions we should expect to get 500 additional people to our website (Impressions x .1%) and of those 500 we should expect that 10 will fill out our “Contact Us” form (500 people x 2% website conversion rate = 10 conversions). By the way, average Website Conversion Rates are typically between 1-3% of total website traffic.
To recap…If you want to estimate how many people will come to the website due to clicking on or viewing the ad, multiply the number of impressions served by .1%. If you then want to know of those people that come to the website how many will convert, take that number and multiply it by the Website Conversion Rate percentage. Voila, you now have the answer to two of the most asked questions about digital advertising results.
