Archive for category Analytics

Do you have a successful website?

Posted by Joe in Analytics, Design, Marketing on August 28th, 2009

One of the things I seem to do a lot is figuring out how to make a particular website more successful – which first begs the question of how do you define success?  Then more importantly is the question of what you do to get things turned around.  There are tons of helpful articles online that will help you get started (see below), I also have some other marketing articles posted that will help, and you will quickly notice that many are saying contradictory things to the point that you will get confused on how to proceed. No worries – remember that no single solution is right for everyone, and definitely not right for every website. Because if there was one single “best design” for a website, then they would all look the same.

Here is a basic list of things to get you going.

  1. First of all look at the level of web traffic – you may simply not be getting enough traffic to do anything with. If that is the problem, this needs fixed first.
  2. If you are getting web traffic, but no one is converting, then do a little detective work on what is ailing you and then take action:
    1. What is your bounce rate? If it is really high, then people are either coming to your site by mistake or your web design sucks.  Fix it!
    2. What is the page views per visit? If it is very low, then your web content needs fixed (assuming your website is set up with multiple webpages). If you have lots of people moving round your site but no one is converting, then your offer may need to be tweaked.
    3. What is the fall-off rate in your sign up form, or shopping cart?  If people are looking like they want to convert by clicking the sign up button, but no one converts, take a close look at your form or cart first. In my experience that will have the greatest impact on increasing CR.
  3. Basically you need to figure out what is going on – there are lots of statistics available to give you hints, so just narrow it down to the likely issues, and then address them!  Take action!  Usually it means for you do some of the things that the experts say you should, so take a look at some other articles in this blog, or do a little research online.  Below are some links that will help with ideas.  I would not take any single article from anyone and think it is gospel (even this one) – instead you want to find the “golden nuggets” in each.
  4. Lastly I would urge everyone to have some sort of testing program for their website.  If you put two different versions of your webpage up – the normal one you have (the control) and another different design – it will definitely give you improvement. Let the two run side by side and see which is better.  Once you have a winning design in the test – immediately take the winner and run it against a new alternative one, and just make it a continual process of improvement.  Something as simple as the button that gets clicked on the form can make a difference – you just need to keep testing.

Here are some links you might find helpful:

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Increasing Conversion Rates

Posted by Joe in Analytics, Marketing on July 15th, 2009

As I always say, it is much easier to increase your website conversion rates, than to get more traffic to your site. So I get asked how to best go about it – how do you increase your CR? First thing is that you need to know what your current CR is – duh.

I would recommend going back to the basics – reduce your form fields, place your offer up top and overt, etc. After making these initial revisions for improvement, you are likely to see dramatic improvements too. But what specifically are the “basics” you need to go back to?  A good place to give you lots of ideas is Conversion Critic.  Basically they ask you lots of questions about your website, then “score” you on your answers.  They don’t actually evaluate your website for you – they make you look at it yourself, which is what I like about it.  Also, the Conversion Critic website is ran by people who offer these type services, so beware that you may get a call from them about your site. But even so, it is one good way to go over the basic setup of your site and look for opportunities for improvement.

Now if you have already done all the basic stuff, then your site has already picked all the low-hanging fruit. What you need to do is set up a testing program, either A/B or multivariate, to find out what works best for the type customer you have coming to your site.  Google offers both types for free, as usual, and are not bad to get you started.

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The Importance of Conversion Rates

Posted by Joe in Analytics on April 16th, 2009

Of all the things to worry about on a website, the one at the very top of anyone’s list should be their conversion rate (CR). The conversion rate can be defined as the percentage of website visitors that do what you want them to do. How many are buying your product, how many are giving you a leads, etc.  The CR determines how successful your website is, at least in regards to how well it contributes to your bottom line.  I usually calculate mine using like this: (Number of Sales) ÷ (Number of Unique Visitors) = Conversion Rate

And sure, some websites are meant just to be pretty, not necessarily to actually contribute to a company’s bottom line, but that is an exception to the rule. So here are my no-nonsense reasons why you should be aware of your conversion rate:

  1. The CR is the most efficient statistic to try to improve upon. If you look at the costs involved of your different options, increasing your CR is the easiest and least expensive thing you can do. It might mean something as simple as revising your web lead form by removing some of the fields on it (fewer fields on a form automatically increase the completion rate), or revising your web content. There is lots of help on the web to give you pointers – or of course, you can also hire a professional to do it (smile).
  2. The CR is the least expensive alternative.  Your problem is how to make your website more profitable, and this basically means doing one of two things: increasing the web traffic to your website, or increasing the conversion rates of the traffic you are already getting. The two things are not exclusive of each other – you should actually try to do both – I’m just saying that the efforts toward your CR give more bang for the buck. 
    1. For a real-world example consider this: you can take $1,000 dollars and try to get more web traffic like with increasing your Pay Per Click traffic in Google Adwords.  Say it doubles your traffic for the one month, and doubles your sales as well.  Great – a 100% improvement over last month!  But next month your traffic falls back to where it was and you are in the same boat you were before.
    2. Or you can take that $1,000 dollars and increase your CR. Say it increases your sales by 25% for the month (getting a %100 improvement is not unheard of).  25% is not as great a result for the month as the spend with Google, but it is actually much better if you look at the results at the end of the year. For the year you get a 23% improvement – while for increasing your PPC for one month only means an 8% increase for the year.

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