Pinterest, the current darling of social media, has managed to bag itself some significant investment money – in fact an impressive total of $100m.
The vast majority of this money has been raised by Rakuten, the Japanese ecommerce giant which also owns both Play.com and Buy.com.
The combination of people’s interests or desires along with commerce is an extremely potent mix. With this news there is huge potential for Pinterest to drive its growth exponentially and to become the first real social commerce success story.
How can Facebook respond? Does it even need to?

“What is an average conversion rate?” – people ask us this all the time. Or better yet: “what is a good conversion rate?”
So before I begin explaining how to calculate your conversion rate (because believe me, very few businesses actually do it right), I am going to answer that question. And the answer is that there is no definitive answer.
Or rather, “it depends”.
Too many variables impact conversion for there to be a meaningful average across all websites. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that influence conversion rate:
- Industry – is what you are selling something people are likely to buy more than once?
- Products / Services – are you selling a high consideration product, like a long haul holiday, or something relatively simple like T-shirts
- Price range – do your prices range between £5-£100 or £500-£10,000?
- Payment options – do you offer easy online payment options - and do you have hidden extras, such as credit card charges
- Target – how large is your target market – how many people does your product/service address?
- Traffic acquisition – do you rely only on organic traffic or do you run paid campaigns as well?
- Seasonality – does this affect your sales patterns?
- Competitiveness – are you significantly more expensive/cheaper than your competitors?
- Landing pages – are you directing your visitors to landing pages congruent with a search query or are you directing them to a generic webpage (or worse, your homepage!)?
- What is your conversion goal? How do you measure this?
With all this in mind, the only thing that can be said for sure about conversion rates is that they can nearly always be improved.
Measurement: visits or visitors?
In most cases, divide your number of conversions by your unique visitors, not overall site visits.
Why?
If you are selling lamps and on average the same person visits your website five times over a week before making a purchase, it does not mean you had five opportunities to make a sale: you only really ever had one.

The first seven seconds a user spends on your page are critical: people are identifying the value of your offer and its ability to meet their needs. If you fail, they bounce. If they come back to your website, they are considering your offer. This phase can take minutes, days or weeks, but each visit falls under one potential conversion.
If you are not sure on whether to calculate conversions based on visits or unique visitors, have a look at your visits to conversion reports in your web analytics. If the vast majority of conversions occur during the first visit, use visits. Otherwise, you should use unique visitors as your metric.
Goals for non-ecommerce websites
Every website has a goal — otherwise it wouldn’t exist! Think about what that goal is (and what its key performance indicators are) to measure your site’s success in reaching that goal:
- Leads
- Sales
- White paper downloads
- Time on site or page/visit (particularly for content websites or blogs) and so on
Your traffic data is skewed
If you have a look at your organic search report and break it down by keyword; you will realise that a lot of the traffic to your website is irrelevant.
For instance, looking at our own DBD Media website analytics report I can tell you:
- 1.50% of our traffic arrived on our website looking for our clients’ logos
- 1.45% entered a search query that included some of our keywords but have nothing to do with our content; such as “telling a client about deliveries in SEO” or “how to handle social conundrum”
- 3.84% were searching for information on social media networks (logos, FAQ…)
Now it is safe to say that none of these visits were ever potential conversions. And by filtering out the 6.79% of traffic that is non-relevant, and measuring conversions against only relevant traffic, our website conversion rate goes up 7.28%.
At the moment there is nothing that enables us to setup a filter precise enough and complete enough to filter out all of that irrelevant traffic.
Which leads us to the most important point of this post:
You have more than one conversion rate

If you are looking to optimise a product page on your e-commerce website, it doesn’t matter that your website conversion rate is 3.4%.
What matters is …
(a) How many visitors to that page add the product to the shopping basket or cart i.e. the product page conversion rate
(b) How many visitors to that page complete their purchase i.e. the shopping basket conversion rate
(c) How you can improve these figures
That’s why in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), rather than looking at your overall conversion rate, we look at your conversion gaps i.e. where are visitors dropping out in the conversion path and why?
By successfully testing and implementing solutions to enhance your funnel conversion rate, you will see your visits to purchase decrease, your bounce rates improve, your ROI grow and ultimately, your website conversion rate increase. Now that’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?
There is no doubt that the Advertising, Affiliate and Search Theatre was one of the most popular destination at this year’s Internet World, this was certainly true of the show’s final day with seminars from key players in the digital world covering topics such as ‘Staying Google Proof 2012/13’ which was so heavily oversubscribed that half of those queuing were turned away. But, considering the incredibly recent algorithm changes from Google (two days prior to the event), this was no surprise.
Over the past week it has been clear that a mass of websites have been hit with Google’s recent announcement of their new algorithm to tighten up on existing ‘quality guidelines’. In the words of Internet World’s own speakers this ‘mass’ is in fact over a million sites. The air of panic was evident, every seminar was followed by at least one question from an MD or in-house marketer, perhaps struggling to keep up with Google’s recently volatile actions and major clamp down on ‘link schemes’, quizzing speakers on what they could do to stop their site being hit, or, in instances where it was too late, how they could recover their site’s ranks.
One of the most commonly occurring messages from the speakers of the Search Theatre was the fact that content is still king. And will continue to be so. But, to really make the most of unique content benefitting your sites, you need to be integrating this with your social media strategy. Social media provides an invaluable opportunity for sharing your unique content – particularly when it comes to the likes of images, videos and infographics, and thanks to tools such as Topsy, you can now identify relevant tweeters to whom your content is likely to be of interest. Locating these people provides prospective link building opportunities with real people who will share your content with their followers, who in turn are likely to also find this content of interest, and therefore potentially share it with their followers too – and so on.
While the necessity for link building looks set to continue, in light of Google’s latest algorithm change there is now far more focus on the quality, not quantity, of links. So as part of SEO’s on-going development, we should expect to see less backlinks to websites but they will be from far more relevant sources, as opposed to a multitude of low quality, spam-style links.







