4 Tips for Optimizing Your E-Commerce Site

3. Let the voice of your visitors guide your improvement efforts. If your data shows that 35 percent of the visitors who came to make a purchase weren't able to accomplish their task, you know you need to create a more friction-free buying process.

Thus, your objective for the category of visitors in the buying stage will be to fix the impediments so that everyone that's open to converting can do just that. If this audience bucket represents 20 percent of your total traffic, your true and relevant conversion rate is really the percentage of visitors you convert within those open to converting, not the percentage of total website traffic you convert.