Clients and many others ask me how to figure their conversion rate to judge how their e-commerce website or Etsy shop performance is stacking up. Too many of them are more concerned with running ads than actually understanding and being able to work with their e-commerce performance first.
Putting it in perspective, you need to understand the vibes of your e-commerce operation first before running ads.
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to e-commerce operations, and this is the same whether it’s your e-commerce website or your Etsy shop.
Just a few of the major parts are as follows:
- Website branding – is it transparent? Comprehensive? Recognizable across the board?
- Content – are product descriptions and titles written accurately? With enough relevant keywords to gain the eyeballs?
- Product images – are they clear, closeup and give your prospective customers an excellent idea of what they will receive?
- SEO – is your venue, whether website or Etsy shop, search engine optimized to the max? Titles, tags, keywords, content?
- Promotion – are you promoting CORRECTLY through your blog, your business Facebook page, and your business Instagram page?
- And finally, you are getting sales. Do you understand your conversion rates? Do you even know how to figure them???
Here is how you figure your sales conversion rate for your website or Etsy shop:
# of sales per month divided by the number of visits each month
Multiply this by 100 to get the sales conversion rate percentage.
A sales conversion rate of 1 – 2 % is average. You can squeeze sales out of a 2% conversion rate, although it becomes easier, obviously, as the percentage goes up.
Now, how hard was that?
Still, many small business owners tend to skip over the basics, which is the list of moving parts above. They focus on “why am I not getting sales” instead of focusing on building up as strong a presence as possible,
Creating as strong and beefy a presence as possible should be a priority, which I have heard, from many, as “too much work”, and they feel they will get instant results just by running sales ads.
After all, if you have the product the people will come. Right?
You and thousands of other sellers have the product. Why should the people come to you unless you give them a good reason to?
The problem with that is if your presence isn’t strong first, your ads will naturally not be strong either, and your ads will also not be targeted towards the right audience.
And what will have happened? You will have spent money that did not bring in any sales.
So tell me, what was accomplished??
As a small business, I get it, it’s an uphill battle constantly. It is for all of us. Factor in the pandemic, factor in summertime, factor in dead time. I’m not oblivious to the obstacles that lie in wait.