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Well… that was kinda scary! But I ran the numbers and last spring, my conversation rate was .0638 #handmeacoffeenowplease but over the last 2 months, it has bumped up to .429 still not fabulous but it is much better. 2 big things – my traffic is falling off, cut in half, now that I’ve zoomed in so specifically. But my conversion rate is better. and yes… the traffic loss is a huge part to get over because of how much it has dwindled but on the other hand I love the strong community I’m building. This was helpful!
ReplySo…on the surface this seems concerning – but do you realize your conversion rate is now 7x what it was before? The strong community is what’s telling. You no longer have wishy-washy folks who only sort of like you. You have hardcore fans. The next step is just to start creating products to serve them. And THEN once you’ve established the business side of things, you can focus on driving more traffic to buy those products and build your tribe.
The funny thing is…once you have products for sale, it’ll boost your authority and your conversion rate will go up as well. Authority builds on itself. Excited to watch the snowball effect as you start releasing those products, Jenilee!
ReplyHi Rachel, Steph here from the Customer Success team over at ConvertKit. What do you want to see in ConvertKit? Because as of right now you can only see a month in our graphs. Does that help at all? Feel free to email support@convertkit.com so we can dive into this more for you.
ReplyLOVE. This is going on my monthly stats tracking spreadsheet so I can keep a pulse on the health of my conversion rate!
ReplyWow. So, I hadn’t looked at this in a few months…and when I did it today I was blown away at the change in the last couple of months!
I did two months at a time for comparison and here’s what I found:
Feb/Mar
No focused bribe to subscribe, burnt out posting 3-5 times a week, broad range of blog posts (DIY, recipes, life, etc.)
Conversion Rate: 0.23%
Apr/May
Free decorating course by email for sign up, still posting 3-5 times a week, but narrowing down to decorating
Conversion Rate: 0.44%
Took Blog Smarter Course…
Jun/Jul
Free 5 steps to find your decorating style guide for sign up, plus all printables free, posting less frequently as I worked through the course and took a vacation, stopped RSS feed as email, more subscribe options, removed dates from posts and comments, reduced ads, focused entirely on how to decorate
Conversion Rate: 0.42%
Aug/Sep
Free 5 steps to find your decorating style guide for sign up, only 3 free printables of choice as secondary bribe, and a few decorating cheat sheets as bribes as well, newer site design, no pop ups, removed ads entirely, posting once a week or less and deliberately posting authority content several times and then a trust post
Conversion Rate: 1.54%
I’d obviously like to see a higher conversion rate than that, but it’s 366% better than it was!
ReplyThank you for this tool! I compared July/August 2015 with July/August 2016. In that year, I have increased my subscribers significantly (partially with a new blog theme that has an email sign up front and center), but did not change my opt-in freebie, or general content/focus.
The conversion rates were:
July/Aug 2015: .69%
July/Aug 2016: 1.28%
So, my conversion rate doubled, which is great.
What I’d love to calculate next is the amount of INCOME I have generated from my blog. I think I’ll run the numbers from those same time frame and compare my effectiveness at supporting my family via my website.
I haven’t implemented my new onboarding yet, so I just calculated my baseline. .61%, which is far higher than I was expecting! So encouraging. How do you calculate the number of views to get one subscriber (8:55 in the video)?
ReplyI’m using a little formula still in the memory banks from pre-algebra… 🙂
%/100 = is/of
In this case, we want to say “1 is .61% of WHAT number?” So you cross-multiply and divide. 1 x 100 / .61 and you get…
164. At .61% conversion rate, you’re getting one new subscriber for every 164 website visitors.
ReplyWhat fun math! Thank you, Jeni.
(Out of curiosity, I calculated my conversions on new unique users as well as total unique users, and found that conversions on new unique users were always slightly higher, as I expected.)
ReplyHa – if you heard me hesitate on the video…I said “there are a few ways you could do this, but that’s good enough.” And that’s what I was talking about. 😉 At a certain point you’re splitting hairs, but MATH for the win!
ReplyFor those trying to find their monthly subscriber stats in Mad Mimi or ConvertKit, I’ve outlined the process.
In Mad Mimi:
1. Go to Audience
2. Go to All Contacts
3. Click the checkbox next to Email
4. Click the checkbox next to Select ____ People
5. Click Export and Export again (CSV or Excel file is fine)
6. Download the file that you’re sent, and open it in Excel.
7. Select All
8. Click Sort & Filter, and choose Custom Sort
9. Make sure “My data has headers” is checked
10. Sort by signup_timestamp, sorting newest to oldest.
11. Use your mouse to select the signup timestamps for one month’s dates. In the footer, Excel will give you the count of the number of cells you have selected. There’s your number for that month!
In ConvertKit:
1. Go to Subscribers
2. Click the checkbox next to Subscriber
3. Click Select all ____ subscribers in your account.
4. Click Bulk Actions and choose Export
5. Download the file that you’re sent, and open it in Excel.
6. Select All
7. Click Sort & Filter, and choose Custom Sort
8. Make sure “My data has headers” is checked
9. Sort by Signed up, sorting newest to oldest.
10. Use your mouse to select the sign up date for one month’s dates. In the footer, Excel will give you the count of the number of cells you have selected. There’s your number for that month!
Woot! Congrats, Jen – you’ve done a ton of hard work in the program and deserve every ounce of success you experience.
ReplyAmazing post like always! Your audio quality is amazing! What mic an equipment do you use?
ReplyIt’s my podcasting setup, Kit. The mic I use is a Heil PR-40 plugged into a mixer, and that’s where the great sound is coming from.
ReplyMy conversion rate is 1.17% I was very shocked to see that. I have watched my pageviews drop from 65K in Jan to barely 18K last month. It was feeling like a failure. But now I see that eventhough the pageviews have gone down my subscribers have nearly doubled. I have really focused my brand, reorganized my site and I’m getting lots of emails when I send out a newsletter. And this week I booked my first coaching client. Thanks Jeni for showing me what I really need to focus on.
ReplyThoughts on taking it a step further by applying the % new visitor to the unique visitors number in Google Analytics? I’m just curious if this might be a more accurate depiction of conversion, since theoretically these are people that have not been on your site before. Whereas, just unique visitors could include a lot of people that have already visited in the past, and therefore have already subscribed. Thoughts?
ReplySure, that could be more accurate…but sometimes folks visit your site 2-3x before they bite the bullet and subscribe. 🙂 As long as you’re comparing apples to apples (doing the same calculation for both time periods), you have solid data.
ReplySuch a great article, and I was just telling my husband the other day about our conversation about my lead magnet and what you said about tracking conversions…Only thing was, I had no idea how to calculate my conversion rate, so it was on my list of things I need to ask you! Haha, you’re such a good mind reader. 🙂
So I’m just going to put this out there so I have it as a baseline. Just did my calculations and for July and August of 2016 my conversion rate was .41% – not great, but def better than I expected, actually. Can’t wait to check back in a few months and run the numbers again. Thanks, Jeni!
ReplyHi Sandy, check out my reply to Doña Bumgarner above. 🙂 How are things looking for you?
ReplyThanks for this!
My conversion rate for July and August was 3.35%, and when I tried to go back to January, Google Analytics said that the stats are not available, which is weird.
Here is my question: Although my subscribers numbers are rising rapidly, and I’m grateful for it, how does that really matter? When I send a blog post to these subscribers, I get about 25% open rate of the emails, which doesn’t seem very much. When my subscriber list was lower than that, I got a 35% open rate regularly. So in a way that means although I have more subscribers now, fewer people are reading my emails.
Am I making any sense?
Hi Corina, such a good question! Your email subscriber list is only worth something if you’re using it effectively. It’s completely normal for your % of opens to go down the larger your list gets…so it’s a good idea to periodically clean your mailing list so you aren’t paying for a bunch of people who don’t open/click/read. The ultimate goal is to have an email list FULL of readers who L-O-V-E you and devour everything (post or product) you create.
ReplyAs a writer, I really shy away from doing math…but this helped me see that some of the new subscriber features I installed are really helping. My conversion rate went from 0.0037 (yes, really) to 0.51. Yippee!
ReplyThanks for this information. I calculated my rate and it is pretty low, .144. But at least now I have a baseline to start with. My conversion rate was higher in Jan at .222 but during the year I removed the pop up for my list sign up, I think I need a new strategy to get more people signing up each month. My traffic has been going up but my subscriber rate has stayed flat causing the decrease in conversion rate.
ReplyThis is awesome Jeni! Thank you. I’m just starting out. I’m literally building my blog (thinking of hiring a designer) so I can start off with a solid brand. I think I’m doing good so far, but I was just quoted what I thought was a ridiculously high amount to build it. Do you think I should spend the money to create the site now, or start with a simple design since my brand is intact?
ReplyGreat Article Jeni, another stat that people should know is their RPM (revenue per 1000 visitors). This can be quickly determined by the following bit of simple math.
Income/visitors x 1000 Obviously it helps if you know what others in your niche are making. If people are lucky a rival will do a monthly income report from that you can get their RPM (use similar web to get traffic if they don’t include it)
I’ve found that $100 to $150 is a good ball park figure to aim for initially, I do know of blogs that get $400+ RPM and unfortunatly some that do less than $20.
ReplyThanks Mark, I actually really like this tracking statistic too.
My newsletter subscription rate is actually quite okay considering I’m still very new to the blogging world (only a decade late) however, the actual sales I make are still very, very low.
In that, some months I don’t make any sales, but I pretty much always get a few e-mail subscriptions per week.
ReplyThis is awesome Jeni! Thank you. I’m just starting out. I’m literally building my blog (thinking of hiring a designer) so I can start off with a solid brand. I think I’m doing good so far, but I was just quoted what I thought was a ridiculously high amount to build it.
ReplyHi, Thanks for the useful article. I am an avid reader of your blog. You are sharing very useful articles for the bloggers.Keep going.
ReplyI hope that i can learn from this article because in this posts, She sheared her good knowledge to us.
Thanks
Umm…what if our conversion rate is 95%? But hardly anyone visits our site? In less than 2 months, I’ve had 82 new subscribers and 86 visitors to my site (hiding in shame). I’m shocked that the conversion rate is so high, but not really. My audience is so super niche. If they’re actually visiting the site, they will find information found nowhere else. So they sign up. But 86 visitors in less than 2 months? Geesh. (I can’t make comparisons, because my website was relaunched in December after it was hacked).
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