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/

Every site today should have a form of some sort to capture details and make it easy for potential customers to get in touch or register.

However, more often than not the form makes it harder rather than easier for a customer to make contact.

Common Mistakes on forms

• No title or heading above the form to tell the user what the form is for and what they should expect after filling out the form.
• Not making it clear which fields have to be filled in. Additionally once a user sends the form but have not filled in all required fields, is there a clear message to tell them what has been missed.
• Do you need to know the life story of the person sending the form? The more fields the less likely they are to complete. Of course demographic interests are good to know but they can be drawn from a customer later when they have a better relationship with you.
• Don’t use reset buttons. The only thing this is likely to do is be clicked by accident instead of the send button and frustrate the user.
• Instead of using ’submit’ use text that forces the user to click like, ‘Contact me now’, ‘receive your quote’, ’send me your brochure’ etc.
• Use a better image than the standard grey box so it stands out more and is more appealing to the eye.

The most important element

How are your users going to find your form? If it is only on the enquiry page, and only 20% of your visitors go to that page, then 80% of your visitors will not find the form to even try and submit.

Look at incorporating on all pages if possible or on each main product or service page.

Use tracking to improve conversion rates via tools like Google Analytics

• Do you know how many form submission you have over a given period?
• Do you monitor submission rates?
• Do you know where successful submissions came from?

Try to send successful submission to a new ”Thank You’ page. This can then be tracked as a goal and by using analytics you can see the submission rates from keywords, direct to site, other sites, banner campaigns etc. By using this data you can drive up spend and focus on the areas that are leading to submissions.

On the ‘thank you’ page reinforce when they can expect a reply. If you say you are going to get back to them in 24 hours make sure you do. Point them to other products or services they may be interested in or highlight more information about your business and why they should buy from you. They have taken action on your site and are likely to do so again if you have an attractive offering.

All the evidence suggests that you can get high rankings for keywords in your domain names fairly easily. A domain name such as www.antiqueclocks will work better than www.bobsemporium . This situation has been fairly constant over the last 5 years.

That’s great but finding a domain name with your keyword that is a sensible length or a well know extension (like .net .com .co.uk .org) can be challenging and time consuming when you have to try to contact sellers and negotiate a fair price.

Using Geography for better results

One area that we always surprisingly seem to find availability is with geographical areas in the domain name.

One of our IT clients FOS were targeting the phrase IT Support. Their main service area is the county of Essex. We agreed to build a microsite under www.itsupportessex.co.uk

Not only were we able to get the site listed in the top 3 for IT Support Essex and Computer Support Essex by following on site best practices and some themed link building but we found the domain name worked better at generating clicks.

Potential customers would see an advert or listing with a URL that seems more relevant to their search and are more likely to click the advert.

This approach delivers

• Higher SEO rankings.
• Increased conversions from search to click through.
• Increased conversion to leads/sales as the customer feels they are on the right site.

Where can you find suitable domain names?

Try domain selling sites that offer available alternatives to your initial request. If you can’t find a suitable domain name try domain resale sites such as www.sedo.co.uk  . You can also look to buy websites for sale with a presence and history on Google for quick success. Just ensure that if you rebuild the site you redirect old pages to any new pages using the Google 301 redirect.

How life was easy with just one browser, however today there are several browsers your customers could be using.

Additionally each browser has different versions and you should conduct several tests to ensure all visitors can access and use your site. The more visitors that can use your site effectively, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Let’s think about this in a traditional retail environment, imagine you spend money on a promotion to try and drive visitors to your store. This works however as you assume all your customers are over 6 foot tall, you build shelves so high that 20% of you visitors that are 4 foot tall cannot see items on the shelves, let alone buy them. By not catering for all visitors you could be cutting off some customers. This would never happen in a retail shop and the same should apply to online.

What browsers do online consumers use?

Internet Explorer is still dominating the market but Firefox and Safari now account for 30% of visitors. Typically we see the breakdown as:

• 70%  Internet Explorer
• 20%  Firefox
• 7%     Safari
• 1.5% Google Chrome

Within Internet Explorer alone at the time of writing there are three versions

• 6 (65%),
• 7 (25%)
• 8 (10%)

We have sometimes spent days ensuring that a site displays correctly in IE6 as well as IE7 and now we have to work on IE8 too. As you can see there are sufficient numbers on each of these browsers to ensure this work is done.

How to ensure your site works on all browsers?

There are free and paid for tools to run tests in all browsers but often this just gives you a snapshot of any issues. You really need to go through all pages and functionality to make sure everything displays and works correctly.

Each of our staff work on a different platform and browser, so each person can test any website on all platforms when quality testing and spot issues quicker.

Your stats package or analytics will have information on what browsers and versions your customers are using. Don’t ignore it.