The best-looking site in the world is worthless if it doesn’t include instructions to visitors on how to convert.

Previous columns in this series covered the need to sell the next page before you can sell a product or service, how to do the discovery dance so your visitors accept and trust your site or collateral material, how to move them through the X Funnel, and how to keep your material fresh while letting previous visitors find what they want. All of these were leading to what I call "Defining the Visitor Action Metric," and that's the focus of this week's column.

Let's start with an example. A client company had spent a lot of money on their website (the design, marketing, keyword buys, search engine studies, focus groups, et cetera). The site has won Best of and Best in Show awards several years running. But as the corporate website manager told me, the site hadn't earned a dollar in years. In fact, site visitors rarely navigated beyond the homepage and few stayed on the homepage for more than 13 seconds. "We have top people designing and marketing our site, and we can't get any conversions. What are we doing wrong?"

Nothing and everything. They'd forgotten or didn't know that what they were defining as their conversion metric was a series of conversion events and that each conversion event is based on the visitor taking some action you want them to take. Research showed that visitors wanted to convert. The problem was that the site didn't lead them through their conversion events.

Not all conversions are the same

Conversion events are not the same for all sites; they're not the same for all site visitors; they're not the same for all products and services. Conversions occur in the visitor's mind long before they occur on the webpage or brochure or email campaign. Visitors decide that they will or won't convert two to three pages before the shopping cart is abandoned or the form is not filled out.

Conversion events are the little decisions people make before they make the big decision to convert or not. Just as a little kiss can lead to more, so can conversion events lead to committed visitors navigating your site. Determining the conversion events for your site's visitors is a key item to making a site pay for itself in the long run.

Determining your site's conversion events is simple enough. All you need to do is define your Visitor Action Metrics.

The Visitor Action Metric

Web managers know what their conversion metric is; someone downloads a whitepaper, exchanges an email address, asks for contact, makes a purchase, and the list goes on. The conversion metric is a single event that is the end product of a long chain of events. This long chain of events can be expressed by two formulae. The first is

Visitor Action Metric + Decision Point = Conversion Event

Visitor Action Metrics (VAMs) are the little things you need visitors to do before they become a +1 in the conversion metric column. Much like you need directions when driving from point A to point B, so do site visitors need directions for getting to the grand conversion event. VAMs are the mile markers on the journey and decision points (DPs) are the turns in the road. Visitors need to know to take this right turn and that left turn and to look for the rock that looks like a bear and which forks to take in the road. These are the driving directions and site design, keywords and marketing are providing them.

Often a website's driving directions take the form of "Get in the car and head south, then stop." Stop where? Head south for how long? By which route? A homepage with no clear decision points is telling the site visitor "Get in the car and head south, then stop" without providing mile-age markers, route numbers or a clear destination.

Define some action you want the visitor to take (a VAM) on a page then assign a decision point to it. In other words, give the visitor a fork in the road and tell them which way to go. The first VAM may be getting visitors to read a short blurb describing what your company offers. Visitors were only staying on the client's homepage 13 seconds, so VAM#1 was getting them to stay on the page longer.

Easy enough. On the homepage there was a paragraph explaining what the client offered but there was nothing to draw the visitor's attention to it. Add a bright background behind the text and make the lead line's font bolder and larger. "Interested in product A? Read on...". Make the fork in the road visually obvious (the background and the font on the lead line) and visitors will take the turn you want them to take. If they don't, they're not in the market for that product. At the bottom of the paragraph add a link for more information. This link at the bottom of the paragraph is the decision point. VAM#1 was getting them to stay on the page long enough to get and keep their attention. Conclusive evidence of VAM#1's success was DP#1, the click on the link. Congratulations, you have your first conversion event and now know that your visitor is actively engaged.

Making each click count

The second equation defines the conversion metric as the sum of conversion events

Conversion Event#1 + Conversion Event#2 + ... = Conversion Metric

Increasing conversions is the process of insuring that visitors are constantly converting, that each step of the conversion process requires some non-conscious but recognizable buyin on the visitor's part. Defining VAMs and assigning decision points -- giving someone driving directions -- is an easy way to do this. Website visitors convert when your driving directions are good enough to get them there.

You need to make each click -- each decision point -- count if you want to increase your conversion metric. Each time the visitor takes the turn you want them to take they've demonstrated an-other conversion event; they've made a decision to follow rather than go away.

Determine which turns visitors aren't taking and you'll discover where your directions fail; where your VAM is either too much or too little or where that VAM's decision point isn't obvious enough. Each click, which means each decision point, needs to be clear and obvious. Remember that each successful turn in the road is a conversion event in the visitor's mind. If you know how to lead, they will follow.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truckdriver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthro-pology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychody-namics and psychosocial modeling - and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Analytics, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Develop-ment Network. He's inventor and developer of Evolution Technology and can be reached at jcarrabis@nextstagevolution.com. Joseph will be speaking at Chicago AD:TECH in July 05 on Persona Marketing for Multimodal Consumers. Come on by and introduce yourself.