Every ecommerce site on the planet is trying to work out how to increase their ecommerce site’s conversation rates by tweaking the site here and there. Literally just a 1% increase in conversion rates can make a significant impact on revenue and profitability. We’ve previously written about this in a blog on Landing Pages and Conversion Rates. but we’ve never discussed the impact on conversion rates on an ecommerce site till now.

What prompted this blow was when I saw by surprise, that the Top Online Retailer by Conversion Rate for January 2009 was a food site – www.schwans.com. As you can see from the graph, Schwans Foods converted over 50% of their traffic to customers. To be considered, e-commerce sites must have had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month and was based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates.

For those that don’t know Schwans Foods does home delivery and mail order of frozen foods and dairy products including ice creams, entrees, meats and desserts throughout American. I don’t know what Schwans Foods has done to increase their conversion rate, it’s probably not just one thing but a host of changes. It could even be promotional emails, coupons or online food advertising which has driven the sales.

If was the owner of an ecommerce site, I’d be taking a look over the Schwans foods website looking for some of the techniques which has helped them got to the number one Top Online Retailer by Conversion Rate for January 2009.

*** Updated ****

12 months later, Schwan’s Foods continues to be the leader, see Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate – January 2010

Schwan’s Foods Top Online Retailer is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Are you sending consumers to Landing Pages or the Homepage ?

Today we are going to take a moment to discuss the importance of landing pages and their effects on conversion rates. First of all, let’s go over the vocabulary: A landing page is the first page a customer sees when they click on your advertisement. Your conversion rate is the percentage of the viewers to you website that take a desired action which might be purchasing a product or signing up for your newsletter. Even those companies, who have no intention of selling their products directly online, such as breakfast cereals and ice cream manufacturers, need to have effective landing pages in order to make the most of their online marketing campaigns.

A landing page should usually not be the same as the company’s homepage in most cases. In order to prompt a viewer to action and achieve high conversion rates the website needs to be as specific as possible and make the desired action very clear. A great example of an effective use of landing pages to increase (and track) conversion rates would be a potato chip brand that places an ad. When a viewer clicks on the advertisement they are directed to a landing page all about that brand of potato chips. The call to action on the landing page encourages the viewer to “click here” to download a coupon for the potato chips. Since the person was interested in the potato chips when they clicked the ad, the conversion rates are likely to be quite high. Many people will likely download the coupon and buy the chips on their next shopping trip.

So how effective do you think your Landing Pages are?

There are several ways for a company to judge the effectiveness of their landing pages and increase their conversion rates. One of the most effective ways is through the use of split testing. Split testing allows a company to create two or more different versions of landing pages and send a segment of their clicks to each one. Then they can view the conversion rates for each landing page version and choose the most effective one. The companies with the highest conversion rates make a habit of regularly split testing their landing pages and making various tweaks and adjustments, because the market is ever changing and there is no guarantee that what worked last month will still be as effective this month.

Landing Pages and Conversion Rates is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.