Calculating Lead Conversion Rates
Today we’re going to look how to calculate the conversion rates for leads captured in TireConnect. If you’ve read our previous ProTip on how to Slice & Dice Reports, you should already know how to download the Leads Report from your TireConnect Admin Account and open it in Microsoft Excel. Go ahead and do that now...
The first thing you need to know is that TireConnect generates three types of leads (quotes) that all show up in the Leads Report:
Display Quotes: This is generated every time a customer clicks on “Select Tire” on the search results screen. In this case the quote has only been displayed to the user on-screen.
Print Quotes: Every time the customer prints a quote it is logged to the report. While printing quotes, the customer has the option to request a callback from you. Those are shown as 1’s in the Follow Up column of the report.
Email Quotes: Every time a customer emails a quote to themselves it is logged in the report.While emailing a quote to themselves, the customer has the exact same option to request a callback as mentioned above.
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The “Type” column shows what type of lead each record represents. In addition to Display, Print and Email Quotes (Leads), the column also lists entries for “Call” and “Appointment”. An entry for Call means the client was using the mobile version of TireConnect and clicked the “Call Us” button to call your business. An entry for Appointment means the client clicked the “Make An Appointment” button and sent your business an email requesting you contact them to book an appointment to come in. Looking at the illustration below, the “Follow Up” column tells us whether or not the customer requested a callback when they were saving (email/print) their Display Quote. |
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Each of these logged events represents a varying level of purchasing interest by the customer. Just the act of clicking the “Select This Tire” button on the quote screen tells us that the customer has at least a certain level of interest. Likewise the act of printing or emailing a quote to themselves tells us that the customer has an even higher level of interest in purchasing the tire. When a customer goes through all the steps of obtaining a quote and then requesting a callback, or even better requests an appointment to come in and see you, we can be fairly certain that they are very serious and the prospects of closing the sale should be fairly high.
By analyzing this log data in an aggregate fashion (not just looking at individual days), we can reveal important trends. Additionally, by looking at these in a linear fashion we can identify drop-off / conversion rates during the customer’s journey through your website from searching for tires to selecting tires, scheduling appointments and ultimately if you are using our ecommerce features to even ultimately purchasing tires.
Microsoft Excel is an incredibly powerful tool for performing exactly this type of data analysis. What’s more, it can accomplish this task in several different ways. We’re going to take a fairly basic approach in this ProTip. Advanced Excel users may well have a better means of doing this, but we’re going to assume only a basic or moderate skill level here so that we can help as many of you as possible.
Tip: In the illustration shown, we’ve moved the Follow Up column from its original position near the far right of the file, so that it is beside the Type column. You can do this simply enough by cutting (Ctrl-x) the column and then pasting (Ctrl-v) it beside the Type column.
Filtering Data
Excel has a powerful filtering feature that we’re going to use to help us figure out our quote conversion rates from display quotes -> print & email quotes -> calls & appointments.
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In Excel, open the Data ribbon by clicking on it, then select the Filter button. You’ll notice the filter menus will appear at the top of each column in the workbook. Filtering allows us to hide data from the report that we don’t currently need. Don’t worry, it’s still there. It’s just hidden. |
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Turning Filtering on in ExcelNext Step...
Go to the Type column and open the filter menu by clicking on it.
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A filter menu will open. It displays a list of all the types of quotes listed in this column. Deselect everything except Display and click the OK button. You’ll notice that Excel is now showing only the Display Quote entries. Look at the Info Bar at the bottom of the workbook. Excel is telling you how many filtered records were found. Write this number down. We’ll need it later. Now repeat this process once for each of the following filter combinations and write each number down:
We’ve grouped Email & Print together because they represent the same level of interest by the customer and occur at the same stage of the user’s journey. |
Once you’ve filtered and counted the results for each Quote Type you can calculate your conversion rate at each stage of our customer’s journey. In our example we ended up with the following numbers:
Quote Type |
Number of |
Conversion Rates |
Display |
1151 |
-- |
Print & Email (with & w.o. follow up request) |
52 |
4.5% |
Call & Appointment |
20 |
38.5% |
These are reasonable conversion rates that you can use as benchmarks for yourself. If you’re below these numbers, you may want to take a hard look at some possible explanations as to why. For example, if you’re having trouble with the conversion from Display to Print & Email quotes, perhaps you should look at your inventory coverage. Are you displaying a satisfactory selection of tires across all popular sizes and brands? If so, perhaps you should look at the default sort order in the search results. Perhaps you should be sorting by price or some other property?
For a little more granularity you can run these same stats again, but this time also try filtering Print & Email with an additional filter on the Follow Up column. The reason for this is that Print & Email quotes that the user saves while asking for a follow up from you, represents a higher level of purchasing intent than those without a similar request.
The example above is a basic, but highly useful example of conversion rate analysis. Many clients are combining analysis also doing similar analysis with their Search Report and Order Report so that they can extend their conversion report to start with overall searches and go all the way to purchase conversions. We’ll talk more about this in a future ProTip.