Improve Conversion

Analytics is a must have on any website. If you do not have it set up yet, we would recommend you to sign up for your free account with Google at http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html

One of the key features of Analytics is setting up what is known as goal tracking. With goal tracking in place, you can view which marketing campaigns are resulting in goals/conversion. With this information to hand, you can begin to focus on campaigns that generate the most leads/goals and implement changes to those that are not performing so well.

What could you set up as a goal?

• ‘Contact us’ form submissions
• PDF download requests
• Competition sign ups
• Site registration
• ‘Offer’ sign up

Setting up your analytics account is crucial. Without it you could be analysing and making changes based on irrelevant or incorrect data. This could result in your changes doing more harm that good.

Set up Analytics correctly

This article http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/05/8-stupid-things-webmasters-do-to-mess-up-their-analytics.html has summarised the 8 biggest mistakes people make when setting up analytics accounts and how to rectify them. We were hard pressed to add much to this so have added their link.

However this post does not include the advantages of setting up additional website segments. The website segments tool allows you to separate your data into various profiles such as organic search, paid search, returning customers, new customers, by area etc. You can then analyse these areas on their own or compare them together.

You may need to know how one of the profiles reacted to changes you made rather than diluting results with all visitor data. The profiles segments set up here should be based on your aims and objectives such as new visitors and returning visitors, brand aware and those that are unaware of the brand.

One of our favourite segments is search traffic with and without brand terms. If you include brand terms in any paid or nor paid search reports it is likely that the figures will be diluted as a brand aware visitor, and possibly a returning customer, are far more likely to convert. Therefore the data will indicate that you are attracting new customers at a higher conversion rate than you actually are.

Build personas and identify goals for each one.

By using segmentation it is easy to analyse the data for each persona and suggest changes accordingly. A very simple example below shows how different goals need to be analysed for different segments.

1. John is a potential new visitor who has not heard of your company and we want him to download our free PDF guide.
2. Sarah is a returning visitor and her goal is to buy a product. She is unlikely to download the free PDF guide as she may already have it.

Bryan Eisenburg has posted his 7 deadly sins of Analytics which we recommend should be read by all. http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/27/7-deadly-sins-of-web-analytics/