“What’s in it for me?” you ask. “Why should I measure how people use my website? How does it help and what does it all mean?” The purpose of this article is to try to give you some insight into effective web measurement and to talk about
most important page of any website, landing or home page.Why measure at all?
Fred Flintstone lived in Stone Age but we live in Information Age. We deal with a constant flow of information from TV, websites, email, RSS feeds, mobile phones, PDAs, radio, newspapers, flyers, billboards, and magazine covers. Even sides of buses hit us with information about companies, products and services. So why on earth, in midst of this information overload, would you want to measure how people use your website, another source of data to barrage you with even more information? The answer is quite simple and is summed up best by 18th century writer Sydney Smith. “What you don’t know would make a great book.”
Consider this.
Your business is selling $50,000 worth of product a week (5000 units a month) through your website. You are delighted with these results, as many would be, and you only measure them because you figure you’re doing something right. However your competition, always watching and waiting for their chance, come along suddenly and steal a lot of your market share before you know what’s happening. How? They were consistently testing how they could improve their conversion rate online and after they had maximized their conversion rate, they went out and aggressively targeted your potential customers. The bounders! However since conversion rate on their website is much higher than yours, they eat your market like a hungry lion.
Let’s put it another way.
You are successfully selling 5000 products per month through your website but your conversion rate is only 0.18%. According to research carried out by shop.org, average sales conversion rate is 1.8%. That means that you could be selling 10 times as many products (50, 000)! Imagine what that could mean to your bottom line. If you don’t know what your conversion rate is, then you don’t know how to improve it or even that it needs improvement.
Measuring conversion is not complicated.
Measuring sales or prospect conversion is very easy. Over a given time period, you simply need to know how many people buy or register an interest in your product or services as a percentage of how many visitors turn up. However, there is more to effective measurement than simply measuring this kind of conversion.
What a good measurement tool should give you.
The ability to improve your conversion rate depends, at very least, on 2 basic things. In essence, this is what you ‘have’ to measure to begin a conversion improvement program.
·Firstly, you need to be able to accurately measure number of visitors arriving at your website. ·Secondly, you need to be able to see how they use website by looking at paths they have taken and how long they have spent browsing your pages.
Don’t just sit there going hmmm….
You look at paths that regularly ‘don’t’ lead to a conversion and try to improve them. Don’t simply sit there looking at your path tracking tool wondering to yourself why people don’t convert, but look at your website and physically use path that your visitor has exited. This is where careful analysis is required and where comparisons should be made with paths that ‘do’ convert people. In many cases, variables that are present in higher conversion paths are not present in lower conversion paths.
It’s that simple. If you regularly compare best paths and worst paths whilst measuring your changes consistently, there should be a steady improvement in conversion. You undoubtedly will make mistakes, but that is why you should carefully measure any changes you make, and why you should measure one change at a time. If you change more than one variable, then you won’t know which change made difference and you won’t learn anything valuable.
Of course this takes a lot of time and effort on web marketer’s part, but I never claimed it was going to be easy. In comparison to say direct mail marketing or TV advertising, it is still much less expensive when you do make a mistake.
The landing page
The landing page deserves special attention. When people do a search on Google, for instance, they have something in mind when they get to your landing (home/index) page, and if you’re not it, they have gotten to you by mistake. There is nothing you can do about this at all. It’s a simple fact of life that people using keywords like “improving conversion” could be talking about a web site marketing campaign or catalytic converters for their car.
The landing page however does require special attention from you as a web marketer because you want to reduce number of 1 page exits from this page as best you can. This means your focus should be purely on visitors who arrive. How well you service their needs when they find you is critical to your level of conversion. Again, measuring visitors who arrive and ones who leave immediately (the bounce rate as it’s sometimes called) is a good measure of how good your home page is at getting its message across. The ones who read for a few seconds and leave aren’t your target market so don’t worry about them. On other hand, ones who read for a little longer and leave might be slow readers, or might be your target market so concentrate on getting that number down. Your conversion rate for your landing page should rarely be measured as registrations or sales. It’s more likely reading time (for those websites that make proposition on landing page) or click-through to another section of site.
