Conversion Segmentation

Some visitors are looking for your product and others you have to reel in with a clever pitch.  So why do we treat their conversion rates the same?

I’ve long known that my snowmaking business is one that requires educating my market about the existence of my product.  A handful of people realize home snowmaking is possible and search me out, but a lot of my advertising is simply showing people that home snowmaking  is actually doable.

So, I end up with two types of visitors coming to my site:

1. Those that know about home snowmaking and are looking for a product to buy
2. Those that had no idea it existed and are intrigued with the idea

The conversion rates between those two groups differ immensely.  During college I heard over and over again, “market segmentation, there are different types of customers for which we must adapt our marketing mix.”  Ok, so we get them interested, they come to our website and they check things out, but time and time again I hear internet marketers lump their conversion rates into one, all-powerful number.  “Become an affiliate, this site converted at 10% during launch.”

Well of course it is going to convert 10% at launch, half the visitors that show up have already been sold on the idea from an early notification email list.  We cannot lump freshly exposed visitors with folks that have already been sold to somewhere else and are finally on your site to seal the deal.

Where are they coming from and what does that mean?

Right before Christmas I held a big launch-esc sale.  There was a lot of excitement around the deal I gave my customers and some bonuses I included, all of this communication was done to my email list.  The day before the sale, I received one order from traffic that was being pumped in from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo PPC campaigns.  The first day of the sale, I received 8 orders but only had 50 more people come to the site than the day before.  So you tell me, should I lump those extra 50 visitors in with the rest?

If we really want to boost our conversion rates, we cannot treat our traffic as one giant, mass.  Running a split test with half of our traffic coming from organic search and the other half coming from Facebook ads is not going to give us the information we seek.  We must segment our conversion rates by visitor type and find ways to increase the conversion rate of each segment individually.

Without segments, we may miss results.

If we don’t we could be making some changes that are boosting one segment and hurting another, and visa versa which may appear like no change is resulting from our changes.  By looking only at the lump sum, we have no idea that by splitting to two traffic streams we could increase our conversion rates in both sectors.