Improve Conversion

You may have heard it before but content really is king.

The way your content is displayed and the way it is structured will determine if users bother to stay on your site and move on to take action and convert.

It’s better to have a bad design and great copy than a great design but bad copy. We have seen some very ugly looking sites delivering incredible sales.

A set formula that often works is to use a layout such as:

• Heading title
• Summary of what the page is about and any conclusion
• Bullet points for the most important points
• Sub heading
• Content of sub heading
• Call to action (there should be a call to action near the top, maybe to the right of the content)

The heading titles should be bigger and in different colours so that they stand out.

Your visitors will often scan the page to see if this page has the information they are looking for.

Make sure that your text is sized so it is easily readable. Try to use darker colours as sometimes light ones may appear fine on your computers but on others, depending on factory default settings, may be too light to read. Avoid grey, orange, sky blue, violet & light green.

We use the tried and trusted marketing approach of the AIDA model which provides a compelling framework for persuasion online:

• A – Attention
• I – Interest
• D – Desire
• A – Action

A - The heading can get their attention. Communicate your offer and value very quickly to grab a visitor’s attention.

I - The summary of the page and how your business can solve their problems.

D- The bullet points display the desire by communicating value, showing your most important reasons why they should do business with you.

A - A call to action helps you potential customer take action by giving them options on relevant content or to complete any form submission.

By using this structure the content will be displayed in an ‘F pattern’. Numerous studies have show this is how users view content areas. This ensures that content does not get missed.

Ask 3 Critical Questions

Bryan Eisenburg believes there are three critical questions that should be addressed for every page a website visitor sees as they perform a sequence of actions (e.g. ‘click to see…’) that result in the ultimate objective (typically a sale, booking or enquiry).

1. What action needs to be taken?
2. Who needs to take that action?
3. How do we persuade that person to take the action we desire? Is it easy for them to take action?

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/