Understanding your conversion rate and what you can do to improve it

What is a good conversion rate? While that might sound like an easy question to answer, rates will vary by industry and even within the same industry. There are many different factors to consider when evaluating your conversion rate, such as size, type, and location of your property. So, don’t be tricked into meeting an overall industry standard. Let’s look at what a conversion rate is, what to look for when evaluating yours, and how you can improve.

First things first:

How do I calculate a conversion rate?

Google defines a conversion when a website visitor (or app user) performs an action defined as a goal. For the hotel industry typically, the conversion rate is determined by the ratio of the number of reservations made to the total number of sessions. 

Understanding your site’s conversion rate is crucial to your business. To help you know what to look for when evaluating your conversion rate, here are a few of our tips:

What to look for:

• Conversion rate by traffic source. Understanding the quality of your traffic will be a large factor in understanding your conversion rate.
• Conversion rate by device. As a business owner, you need to understand what device your visitors are booking on.
• Conversion rate by location. Are you in a big city or a small town? Are you more seasonal? These factors can impact your conversion rate.
• Conversion rate and parity. Take into consideration your hotel rates and if there is a steep decline in conversion rates via your booking engine you might have a price parity issue. Remember, one of the most important things you can do to boost your conversion is to minimize your undercut rate.

So, you know what your conversion rate is, but what are you doing to continuously improve? Conversion should be something you are tracking, tweaking, and optimizing regularly. Here’s how you can do that.

Tips on how you can improve your conversion rate:

• Make booking easy for your visitors. Booking should be a smooth process that does not involve a lot of steps, the fewer the better.
• Capitalize on specials and promotions. Customers like to know they are getting a good deal. Be sure to reinforce the offer throughout your site.
• Use visuals. Internet users no longer take the time to read text-only content, their attention is gained via images, videos, and infographics.
• Toot your own horn. Make your reviews and accolades as visible as you can. People want to feel good about the decision they are about to make, so reassure them with others’ positive comments.
• CTA (call to action) must be clear and where visitors can clearly see it.
• Keep it simple. There are many ways to get distracted on the internet, but by keeping it simple visitors will be able to clearly and quickly understand what you are about.
• Understand buyer psychology. Learn how to influence your visitors and what makes them tick.
• Regularly measure your progress and track your gains and losses. Use your data.
• Set a budget for testing. Ultimately there will be some trial and error involved in getting to the desired conversion rate for your business, so be sure to budget for this when making your changes.

Conversion rates are an important aspect of your business to track and understand. So, be clear, set your conversion goals, and track your progress so you can reach your goal of improving the revenue of your business. Improving your conversion rate is a never-ending game that continually needs to be thought of and improved upon.