Chitika (makes me want to sing that Abba song), a search advertising business reported that the ad click rate for Google is 0.97%. For Yahoo it's 1.24%.

These are useful figures to have at hand for people who want to know what sort of response level they should be getting for their advertising spend.

It sounds low, but according to Maxum, the average response rate to the old fashion direct-to-your-snail-mailbox marketing is only 2%. Whew - that's a lot of trees.

The average conversion rate for websites is reportedly around the 3%. Some sites can acheive a higher rate, but these tend to be brands with high profiles and big advertising budgets - or ones that have had some good conversion optimisation efforts applied!

So what does this mean for website owners?

If you want to get a high volume of sales (or acheivment of other goals), you'll need to work out your target volume of sales and work backward from there to workout how many visits to your site you need. For example for 10 sales a week, you'll need a minimum of 300 visits. You will also need to bear in mind that there is probably a number of actions on your site that those visitors can perform (in other words to convert from visitor to action taker).

The numbers get quite frightening quite fast for business owners, particularly those with limited marketing budget with which to raise their brand profile.

If you don't have big bucks to spend, there are things you can do to maximise both traffic and the conversation rate, including:

• Increase the quality of traffic to your site by ensuring your keywords and content are focused on what you actually provide (assuming this is of value to people).
• Ensure your site is visually compelling and supports your brand values so people want to stay.
• Ensure your site is optimised for organic search so people can find you without you needing to invest lots of money in advertising.
• Make sure it is easy for the users to acheive their goals.
• Ensure you include components that build trust in you, your site and your brand.

Finally, you need a context for your conversion goals. The nature of your business, how much competition you have and how motivated your site visitors are in the moment they visit your site - all play a part in how high a conversion rate you can realistically aim for.

But make sure you are getting the fundamentals right first - after that you may have to experiment a bit to find the optimum conversion rate for your time/effort/budget.