Read full Marketing Experiments Report on increasing conversion rates .

I also have more detailed guidance on conversion tips in my Perfect Landing page article or in the Web Design Best Practice Report

My brief synopsis follows.

1. What is conversion rate and why is it important?

Identifies four types of conversion rate (theirs in brackets below), that I would refer to as:

1. Macro-conversion - "overall"
2. Micro-conversion - "specific-point", e.g. steps in checkout process.
3. Segmentation - "condition-specific", e.g. different referrer or different offer. Two separate things really.
4. Trends - "can be used to infer knowledge about your site's seasonality, sources of traffic, or campaign optimization success".

2. Techniques to increase conversion rate

This Marketing Experiments reports gives some example of AB Testing, but doesn't look in more detail at multivariate testing. For this, see:

• Great New (Jan 2008) paper by Ron Kohavi describing experiences in site optimisation at Amazon and MSN. Explains how a structured approach to testing can help you listen to your online customers and avoid your site improvements being controlled by the Highest Paid Person's opinion (HiPPO).
• 2007 paper presented by Ron Kohavi to Emetrics on structured experiments - which describes some of the organisational issues associated with implementation
• See my example of multivariate testing methodology

3. What are some changes you can implement to improve your conversion rate?

There are 20+ tips here. Most are well known heuristics, e.g. decrease number of steps, reduce number of fields.

Have some useful links to some other pointers such as reducing page weight, testing offer pricing and free trial offers.