Understanding the Role of Conversions and Feedback in Creating Great Content

 We all suffer from assumptions we each make about what other people mean. We are human, of course, but when we are working as sales people or in business development, we know or at least we have heard before, how important it is not to jump to conclusions about what a prospect means when they as a question or make what sounds like an objection.

We also know it is easy to draw conclusions about what people actually understand about what we are talking about at any time.

We have to bring this same questioning and verification nature when we start drawing conclusions about what is important to our web visitors who visit our website.

Now, we as business owners have a pretty good idea what people want,  what is important to people by having talked to prospects and customers for years, BUT, and this is a particularly important BIG BUT; we really must decide to start testing our website visitors reactions to our content; to better understand their values, to better understand what they want and to better understand the attitudes they have about what you do; and what their expectations are from you.




From within our own heads, we assume people understand what we understand. Always go with the email rule. How many ways to people figure out how to screw up something as simple as sending email. Strategic content is laid out in a pattern that a person searching for answers can decipher. Gems of information should not be hid and scattered about and taken for granted. You need the bread crumb trails and links for people to make sense of your content.

Conversion Experts Change Minds It’s critical to understand what can repel a customer. Perhaps more-so than understanding what persuades them. It’s what helps you define precisely who your customer is; what they want; what they fear; what motivates them; and why. So that you can design campaigns that capture their imaginations … and compel them to take the action that both you and they desire. Are you prepared to persuade?   - Brian Eisenberg

A website conversion tracking system is strategically important because it provides a means for testing and improving the effectiveness of the site content to attract and capture the chosen customer. We can use intuition to accurately estimate what the chosen want, but listening and testing and measuring gives the edge to the smart competitor.

First off, we need to define conversions on your site. A conversion is an actual contact to your business asking for help or asking for an estimate.
Standard conversions on our site are

• phone calls to you
• emails sent to you
• form filled out asking you to contact them. 

There can be many steps to a conversion on your website. Visitors might come in through any number of pages. They might look at some pictures and captions. They might read a bit, skip some text and then glance over at your citations. They do what they please.

There are only 4 outcomes of their visit. They either 

• create a conversion for you, or 
• create a bookmark- a thought to come back in the future or 
• they share the page with a spouse or partner for further discussion or 
• they wander off to find some other information.

Some head back to Google because they did not find what they were looking for. Some of these you might want to wander off, but some of these wanderers would be great clients for you. You have no idea how many are slipping through the holes in your net.

Tracking conversions is a key ingredient in the process of creating new content which better answers the needs and desires of your market.

The challenge is- people online have high hopes they are going to find exactly what they want, and they are always ready to click on a new potential prize. You need to capture them when they are on your site, or you will likely never see them again. Confuse them, don’t speak to their explicit intent- and they are gone.

How do we improve our connection to these desired web visitors? We make smart intuitive choices and then test and measure. With the feedback we receive we make changes the our strategic content and then test again. The data will tell  us if we improve. If our changes are useful, we improve our conversions.

This then is the significance of conversion testing. 

Next, we need to understand micro-conversions. Micro-conversions are the steps we strategically plan that attract clicks on our website, with these potential hooks we design as a next step that signifies that what we are talking about, is important to our visitor; and they have clicked on an offering that promises to tell them more. So a click on a hook we design around a topic that we are hoping to convert to a connection to us, is a micro-conversion.

Conversion tracking requires the thoughtful design and creation of micro-conversions. These are not just any link but carefully organized links that form a tentative progressive path towards an actual conversion on the site. The micro conversion might be a link to

• more detailed information about a particular topic on your site, for instance, 
• or a video; 
• or a series of images

and when associated with a particular topic, would denote a micro-conversion by virtue of the revealed in-depth interest in the information follow up around that subject.

Conversion tracking can come in handy for many uses. 

Conversion tracking allows us to postulate that particular information is critical to getting a conversion. Is the video popular? Has the number of conversions gone up since the addition of the video? The conversion improvement is giving you feedback and insight as to what creates the most satisfactory response from your web visitor.

If you are buying leads, say through Google Adwords, as you improve your conversions here, you are better able to differentiate what works best, and achieve a better return on investment and improve your leverage and use of the advertising  medium as compared to your competitors. Feedback and adjusting your content to match what you learn  from feedback is a good thing. This is a gambit that can give you a better return  on your ad investment in this case. It also insures you continue your advantage over the competition. Tracking conversions and taking in and using feedback makes your business more effective making sales.

Tracking conversions is actionable information. Our analytics can track social media sharing. We can track bulk traffic to the site. All this information, and none more important than conversion tracking; can help us understand the reaction to particular pieces of content and help us be smarter, fit better and convert more business with the same number of leads. We explore the analytics part of this effort here. 

Conversion tracking parallets and reinforces the information we get from our efforts at creating interactivity and surveying web visitors. We can use survey instruments and micro-conversions to help determine how well we are matching the intent and meeting the particular value thresholds for our chosen pre-customers. We can get an idea from a survey form create content we think is useful and then see how the new material affects our conversion testing.

We also get feedback from site visitors through our surveys and interactivity on the website. There is a nuanced but critical difference. This is soliciting for feedback. Make sure you see this post also. Together, conversion tracing and active attempts at interactivity and surveying help make sure you are getting the feedback you need to improve your content to better match the select web visitors you want to influence and connect to.

Oh, and make sure you understand the implications here. You have to have your content creation process in play because you need an active system to take in feedback and then respond to it, and the response is changing the content and then tracking the responses and the results in your system of analytics.

We learn. We get smarter. We pay less per conversion. We make sales easier because our site is being more simpatico with our visitors and winning them over before they call us. We are under less strain. We are more productive. A carefully thought out and verified conversion improvement process will pay off for us.


We will deal with fewer poor fits and spend more time with prime prospects. This is all sorted out through the interplay of our learned experience, the content we create and what we learn and adjust to through the combined interaction of our interactive processes on the site and in our conversations, and how well we integrate our conversion tracking system to track results.

The technology to make conversion tracking work is discussed here. Software makes this process easy to do, and with proper alignment of goals and testing methods, you can have effective feedback that works

So what else needs to be said here? Who  has some feedback?