If you are just brighter than a rock, you have some sort of stat tracker or analytics package on your website or blog. If you are smart and dilligent about your web presence, you actually analyze the stats that are collected.
There’s a lot of data to pour through, especially if you use something like Google Analytics or WebSideStory’s HBX Analytics (which is another stats package we implement for clients at Viget). But one of the metrics folks pay special attention to is “conversions”.
Conversions are simply goals such as “I want visitors to go to page Y”. Google defines it as 
when a visitor completes an activity that has been identified as important. The Conversion Rate is the percentage of conversions that occur in relation to overall site visits – or at least that is how most people define it. But not Avinash Kaushik.
Avinash is an obvious thought-leader when it comes to web analytics. Recently, he had a couple of really great points about Conversion Rate and how to properly assess the real conversion opportunity pie (i.e., how not to overestimate the number of ‘convertable’ visitors).
One take home for me was to think about removing those visitors who bounce from the site (leave in 10s or less) from the total opportunity pie. It’s likely that those visitors came to the site by accident. Avinash provides some other similar thoughts in driving towards the ‘real conversion rate’ – go check out his site. You’ll be smarter for doing so.
