Conversion Rates

I don't write about conversion rates too often because often this data isn't available to me from all of my providers. Shopping.com updated their reporting tool to give me conversion rates so I can moniter changes we are making on the site (and indeed my whole collection of comparison shopping sites such as Best Buys Zone. I hit the shopping API between 50,000 and 150,000 times a day. I also cache the results (cache is updated when prices are updated at shopping.com) so this represent roughly 1/3 of my actual traffic. Naturally December provides the highest conversion rates (my conversion rates are well above the contracted target with Shopping.com in any case and I consider that information a trade secret). I am going to mention one day in particular when I saw something so rare it simply must be mentioned. My traffic peaked on 12/11, 12/12, and 12/13 - 12/11 was the highest. This might isn't surprising since 12/13 is roughly the limit people feel comfortable ordering for delivery before Christmas. That's been the case for the last 6 years I have been running shopping comparison sites.

The day I am talking about is different day. This day was 12/21 - not a huge traffic day for me (54,580 queries) but one feature stands out - on that day my conversion was 100%!! On that day every single lead I generated converted to a sale. This is very rare and indeed it's the first time I have seen it in 6 years. I have had other days that were high (40% or so) but this is the first time I have seen a 100% conversion. I think this is outstanding for several reason. Firstly it's because my volume of traffic to the shopping.com api is pretty high. Achieving a 100% conversion rate on 10 customers is pretty doable - doing so when the numbers are higher is much much harder.