There’s no denying that increased traffic levels to your website is a plus for any website’s long-term health. As long as that traffic is quality website traffic, and you have a set of goals in place for that traffic, then things are definitely headed in the right direction. However so often these days, webmasters overlook the value of optimizing their websites for conversions, rather than pure traffic growth. This surprises me, because the math is pretty simple on this. If you were given the option of having 100,000 visitors come to your site with a 1% conversion rate, as oppose to 50,000 visitors to your site with a 10% conversion rate, I know which one I would prefer. To help you see the importance of website conversions, we’ve provided and some strategies you can use to help increase your conversion rates no matter what the goal via the following helpful hints.
Start with your ROI and determine your goals
Generally there’s a reason why you start a website. Whether it’s to increase awareness of your brand, make sales online, act as a subject matter expert, or any other of the numerous reasons we dabble online, there is always a goal in mind. Otherwise, why would we bother right?
At various stages of the development of your online marketing strategy, your goals may change, but either way, there is a return on investment figure for the hard work you are putting in which must be met. And this is where you need to start. By determining what your ROI is, you can begin to evaluate whether your website is performing at the level you feel it should. This may be based on internal criteria set by yourself or your team, and will often take into consideration the growth levels your competitors are seeing as well.
For example, if you’re running a blog and were putting in 10 hours a week on that blog, you would have to have some sort of goals in mind for that work. This may be generating a certain number of sign ups for another service, funneling a certain number of enquiries to a particular page, or generating a certain number of social shares or comments on your blog, maybe even all of the above? Never the less, you need to set a return on your investment that you work to each week, otherwise your efforts will most likely be fruitless and you’re going to have much less of an idea as to whether your time and money could be better spent.
You have to measure your website conversions
Campaign Tracking: Tracking your website conversions is vital to the continual improvement of your website’s performance. Tools such as Google Analytics are a must-have in your arsenal for tracking conversions. The first aspect of analytics you want to familiarize yourself with is what’s called Campaign Tracking. Google provides a simple wizard for building URL’s with the required parameters for tracking your campaigns. This way, when someone clicks on a link, banner, or visits a certain URL with your campaign tracking parameters appended to the URL, you can see how much of your traffic was driven via a certain location, therefore fulfilling your website goals. A sample report that shows the sort of data you can expect with Campaign Tracking is provided below.
Event Tracking: The next area of tracking you may want to consider is what’s called Event Tracking. Similar to Campaign Tracking, Event Tracking lets you track when a particular event occurs on your website. This may a registration, a sign up, or an action on a particular page such as a contact page submission, either way; Event Tracking is an excellent way for you to record when you have successfully been able to convert one of your website visitors. Because event tracking takes into account whether you actually made a website conversion, you can use this figure in unison with your campaign tracking. For example, if I wanted to know how many website visitors registered on my site after visiting my registration page from my registrations banner, I could do so using Campaign Tracking to see firstly how many visitors made it to the page from that source, then secondly with Event Tracking, how many actually converted to website members using my page in that session.
Goals: Analytics has a really nice little tool called Goals, which allows you to measure such items as:
- Reaching a thank you page after submitting a form
- Duration times on pages i.e. the number of users exceeding 3 minutes
- Pages per visitor counts i.e. those that exceeded 5 pages
- Event related goals such as video plays
Goals within Analytics is a really unique way of not only measuring whether a user got to a particular page, but what they actually did once they got there. Goals is great at measuring and breaking down other statistics in Analytics that you already have access to. Sure you can see that for a particular page you averaged 2:00 minutes overall per visitor, but wouldn’t it be cool to know how many of those visitors stayed for 3:00 minutes or 4:00 minutes to see the drop off rates of a particular user session, and what you could possibly do to influence that? With Goals, all of this is possible and much, much more.
Ecommerce data: If you’re selling goods or services online, you’re probably going to want to know how many people made it through step 1, step 2, and then your final checkout process? Maybe you want to flag purchase amount ranges, billing locations, or simply profile when sales where made so you can measure the success of your marketing campaigns? With Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking, all of this is possible. By simply adding a small snippet of code to your pages where you want to track ecommerce information, you can open up the floodgates on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. With Ecommerce Tracking, you can take the guess work out of whether your time and money is being well spent with your marketing campaigns, and also whether your website is optimized for sales conversions, and is not prone to dropouts through the ecommerce process, via programming, design or logic errors which can be vital to improving your bottom line.
Multi-Channel Funnels: According to Google, Multi-Channel Funnel reports are generated from conversion paths, the sequences of interactions, i.e. clicks/referrals during the 30 days that led up to each conversion and transaction. By looking at the paths which led to a conversion, you can determine where you are getting the best return on your investments moving forward. By using Multi-Channel Funnels, you can track conversion paths using just about any channel. Google lists the following as examples:
- Paid and organic search (on all search engines along with the specific keywords searched)
- Referral sites
- Affiliates
- Social networks
- Email newsletters
- Custom campaigns that you’ve created, including offline campaigns that send traffic to vanity URLs
Of particular note when using Multi-Channel Funnels, you’ll be able to measure what’s called Assisted Conversions that show how many sales and conversions each channel produced, and Top Conversion Paths that rank your conversion paths based on your ecommerce goals and conversion goals.
Eye tracking software for website conversions
Eye tracking software is an incredibly powerful tool webmasters can take advantage of to determine where on the screen users are spending their time, what screen elements they are most attracted to, and whether this actually correlates with the sorts of goals you are trying to achieve. For example, if you had a particular link on your site which was vitally important to you that your users visited, eye tracking software could tell you whether or not that link was receiving the attention you were hoping for. This could indicate that in fact you are generating the sort of attention you want for the link, but it could also show that the link placement or design of the link was not prominent enough resulting in a slight design change which could make all the difference in the world to your website conversion levels.
Tools such as Crazy Egg are a favourite for many developers. Crazy Egg provides a service with affordable pricing, including features such as Heatmapping, Scrollmapping, Overlay reporting, and Confetti reporting which will show you just about every movement your user makes on your site. Data such as this can be invaluable in determining whether your on-page content is receiving the attention is deserves, and whether your design elements are doing their job. Although Google Analytics does have a feature called In Page Analytics which gives you some free information on where your users are clicking certain links, professional Eye Tracking tools are a must-have for serious web marketers.
Changing with your goals
Goals like websites change over time. If your website is making a $1000 a month, you’re highly likely to have a different set of goals to a website that was making $100,000 because you would be at a different point in the project life cycle. But how do you change with your goals. It’s pretty simply really, constant review of the performance of your goals. If you’re running a website, you need to have an intimate knowledge of how it’s performing. You need to check in daily to see what sort of performance levels you’re attaining, and if something’s not right, fix it straight away. Just like you see with brick’s and mortar retailers, if they’re doing something that is not to the consumers liking, consumers will abandon them without a moment’s hesitation. Because online you can see vast amounts of visitors coming to your site on a daily basis, you need to be very careful that your marketing campaigns, and website elements are converting. Quite often, apart from the fact your website is not converting, you may be doing a large amount of damage to your brand and service offering by missing the mark resulting in large site abandonments.
A good way to change with your goals is to go straight to the source. Survey your customers, ask them what they like and dislike about your services, and even reward them for helping you out. Often consumers will jump at the chance for a discount coupon, or even just an opportunity to interact with their favourite brands. Take the time to listen to your consumers, review your previous successes and failures, and make sure your on-point, as this can make an incredibly large difference to your business, no matter what stage of the business development life cycle you’re at.
Website conversions lead to more traffic
If your website is converting on a regular basis, it’s incredibly likely that this is going to result in increased traffic to your website. Why? Because the more customers who convert on your website are increasingly likely to mention your website to others who may benefit from your services, and the ball will just roll from there. Sure, do what you can to optimize your website for bounce rates and make sure you have a complete website marketing strategy in place to generate more traffic, but remember, that keeping your customers happy once they actually reach your website should be your #1 priority as a webmaster.
Just as you would expect quality service and a great product showcased when you enter a department store, you need to take the same approach to your website development and customer funnelling once your visitors reach your website. The good news is, that you have fantastic tools at your disposal to do so, some free, some paid, but at the end of the day, if you’re not seeing the sort of ROI you would be hoping for you can make some very concerted efforts to fix the problem.
Recently we made some minor adjustments to the Job Stock blog based on some observations we made as to the placement and design of our search and social elements on page. This resulted in a large increase in both conversions and use of each of the services, which was really frustrating, because we soon realised how many benefits we were missing out on because of such a small change. Examples such as this are proof, that with a combination of careful analysis of your analytics, implementation of eye tracking technology and a clear cut review of your website goals, you can vastly improve numerous metrics across your web presence in a very short space of time if you get things right.
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