Most web analytics practitioners define Conversion Rate as the percent of site visitors who do something the company who owns the website wants them to do.

Measuring Conversion Rate is not good enough.

You should stop obsessing about conversion rate, put Overall Site Conversion Rate in some appendix of your weekly / monthly presentations but that is about it.

Overall site conversion rate (non-segmented) for your site is a nice to know metric but it is quite meaningless in terms of its ability to truly communicate actionable insights. You got 100 visitors, 2.2 of those converted, where do you start to look for what the heck happened?

A minority of visitors that come to any website come to buy (less than 50% of site traffic). So if a minority of people come to your website to buy why should we obsess about Conversion Rate?

So what might you be missing if you only focus on conversion rate?

Customers who will come to your website to “research” product. They might never buy from your website, maybe if you do a awesomely kick butt job on the website maybe you will convert them but it is highly unlikely.

Customers who will come to your website to “learn” about you, the company. They are looking for jobs, they are looking for press releases, they are looking for your company founders bio, they are looking for why you exist, they want your blog, they want to unsubscribe from your emails etc.

Customers who come to our websites for “help”. This is people looking for support or looking for driving directions to your office or they want to send you a nasty email or register their product etc.

Customers who come for reasons that we don’t know simply because we simply never bothered to ask (this is huge by the way).

Obsessing about conversion rate means a focus on the 20 – 40% of the traffic on your website that is “in the game” and solving for just that minority.

Powerful metric is -- Task Completion Rate by Primary Purpose.

Why are you visiting the website today? Where you able to complete your task today?

The answer to Primary Purpose question will look something like this: Research Products/Services, Purchase Products/Services, Look for Company Information, Register the Products I have already Purchased, Looking for Support

The answer to the Task Completion Rate question will be Yes or No.

If you can do this you suddenly are 1) massively aware of why people come to your website 2) just a few of them are there to buy, and how many 3) where is your website failing you.

Now you know what you need to do to improve your website experience for your major segments of customers to increase their task completion rate.

Stated simply the overall approach is: Understand customers really well and create personas for customer segments