When I used to do sales I would beat myself up about getting rejected. Then I started to keep track of how many people I talked to who were actual decision makers and realized I was mostly getting rejections from people who weren’t the decision makers and couldn’t buy anyway. This made me feel better because I realized my conversion rate was much higher once I got in front of a decision maker. The same applies to websites.

A less than 2% conversion rate seems bad when you think about it; 98% of people don’t buy. But if you were to whittle down the people who were actually there to buy your conversion rate would be a lot higher.

Take a look at all the different reasons someone would come to your site. There are visitors there to check their order status, contact customer service, browse, compare prices, find a store locator or are not interested in buying at all and leave after one page view.

If you can measure all the actions on the site that infer a certain kind of customer cohort than you can build something like this:

In this graph I’ve spit up all traffic into five segments:

• Service – visitors checking order status or contacting customer service.
• No Shot – visitors that show no interest in buying, visit <=1 Page. Who knows why they showed up we have no information on them to infer anything from.
• Browsers – visitors reading blog posts, relase calendars, looking at
• Buyers/Instore – choosing the pick up in store option, visiting the store locator, getting driving directions
• Buyers/Online – behavior that matches that of the Visits With Conversion segment

With this new view in mind you can measure accurately how well your site is converting those shoppers who actually have an intent to purchase. And you can accurately measure the task completion rate of those other visitors there to go to customer service or shop offline. You can also segment these buckets by marketing channel to see how many qualified leads each channel is providing.