The term "conversion ratio" is tossed around quite a bit in the adult Internet business. If you deal with adult websites, this topic eventually will come up in one form or another. When it does, keep in mind that a poor average conversion ratio does not necessarily mean a website cannot convert sales any more than an outstanding average conversion ratio means a website will always convert sales.
If you're asking for traffic and paying only on results, it's reasonable for interested parties to inquire about your site's ability to turn a sale. In an ideal world, your site's conversion ratio would tell potential affiliates how many visitors they would need to send to your website to generate a commission. If this ratio were as simple as it seems, your affiliates, or traffic-trade partners, could easily figure out just how profitable it would be to send visitors to your website.
Imagine deciding whether to send traffic to Site A or Site B. Site A pays a $40 commission for every sale generated and has an average conversion ratio of one sale for every 200 visitors, or 1:200. Site B also pays a $40 commission, but its average conversion ratio is 1:350. Based on this information, where would you want to send your traffic?
It's reasonable to assume, based on the given details, that sending 2,000 visitors per day to Site A would generate around $400 per day in sales commission, while sending 2,000 visitors per day to Site B would generate a less impressive $228.57 per day in sales commission. But website-traffic analysis is never quite that easy. The problem is that almost any website will convert traffic from one source differently than it will convert traffic from another source.
Think of a website as a business in a mall. Think of the shoppers as traffic. A stand could have the tastiest corn dogs in the history of mall food courts, but it would have very little chance of selling a corn dog to a vegetarian shopper, right?
Similar factors play into a website's ability to convert traffic into sales. A website featuring exclusive young models might average 1:200 from all visitors, but for traffic sent from a "mature models" website, it's a good bet that it will take a lot more than 200 visitors to get a sale. Surfers who prefer mature models might be less inclined to pay for content featuring younger models.
Ask yourself what surfers expect when they click over to your site. If the person sending you traffic is promising surfers that your site will deliver something that it doesn't - which some affiliates will do just to get surfers over to your website - you won't have much luck converting those visitors into sales. If a lot of visitors are sent in this way, your average conversion ratio will drop through no fault of your website.
The same will happen if a search engine gives your site a high ranking for keywords that really aren't appropriate representations of your content. Again, this isn't your fault, but as that search engine delivers more and more visitors who aren't looking for your content, the lower your average conversion ratio will go.
What about the reverse? Can a high conversion ratio be deceptive?
Let's say a porn star starts a website featuring her own content. Since our fictional performer has a good following from the various movies she has headlined over the years, she has a good number of fans who search for her name in Google. These arrivals already are looking for her content and consider themselves fans, so they are ripe for possible sales. Since our porn star has traffic from few other sources and draws mostly from eager fans, her site's conversion ratio is fantastic. Figuring her site is a great seller, she opens an affiliate program, invites other companies to send her traffic and offers to pay a good commission for every sale. She boasts about her fantastic conversion ratio of 1:85, which blows away the ratios of most of her competitors. Affiliates sign on and start sending visitors to her site - but these new visitors have never heard of our porn star and don't really care that she's big in Chatsworth. Guess what? Her average conversion ratio is going to go down - quickly. Anyone who was expecting to see 1:85 returns by sending traffic to this website probably would be disappointed.
What all this means is that professional website operators have to spend some time getting to know a lot more than just average conversion ratios. If someone wants to know how well your site converts, you might ask him or her about the source of the traffic before you offer up any estimations. When you buy traffic outright, don't rely on average conversions from existing traffic when calculating whether you can make the purchase profitable; you need to think about where the seller got his or her traffic and what frame of mind these visitors might have when they land at your website.
Connor Young, president of adult-industry resource YNOT.com, has worked in the industry since 1997.
This story first appeared in the February 2008 issue of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe to AVN Online, go to https://www.avnmedianetwork.com/subscriptions/
