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Seven Things You Must Know to Increase Conversions by Alden DeSoto, Urchin Software Corporation
1. First, get clear on your website goals.What exactly does your site offer? Do you want visitors to request information? Download a demo? Buy a product? Begin by getting clear on the specific actions you want visitors to take on your website and design your website to funnel visitors towards these actions.
Think about every opportunity that you have to fulfill a visitor’s need, whether that need be for a product or a service or for information. Each of these opportunities is a conversion point – an opportunity to make an online sale or to request visitor information and create a new lead.
Once you have defined your points of conversion, you’ll be able to track the effectiveness of your website content, pay-per-click ads, and marketing campaigns. Urchin allows you to define and track both monetary and non-monetary conversions. You can view reports on how many e-commerce transactions occur for different groups of visitors and correlate these conversions to ad campaigns, referrals, and visitor activity.
It’s very simple in Urchin to define pages as con-version goals. For example, the following Urchin report shows that a single conversion goal page (receipt.html) was reached a total of 699 times over the week. When setting goal pages, make sure that the goal corresponds to a page that the visitor can only reach by actually achieving conversion. If a visitor can reach a goal page and still back out of the actual conversion, you will get inflated conversion results. In the above example, the goal page is a receipt. Visitors can only get to this page by completing a purchase.
2. Attract buyers, not visitors.Many marketers put a great deal of effort into attracting the largest number of visitors possible to their site. You could end up losing money on pay-per-click campaigns if you follow this strategy. What you really want are the visitors who are most likely to convert – those who are actively looking for exactly what you have to offer.
How do you attract these visitors? Consider buying highly specific keywords. If you sell cameras, keywords such as “Nikon D1X” are more likely to draw in visitors ready to buy than more general keywords such as “digi-tal camera”. Specific keywords are often less expensive than the most general keywords and you will find that general keywords bring in fewer conversions than specific keywords that highlight your points of difference.
3. Make a promise.What you say in your search ad is often as important as a high search engine ranking. Make a promise and use the search keywords in your promise. If the keyword is “hot tub”, promise “Order today, enjoy your new hot tub tomorrow. Free fast shipping.” If the keyword is “best price BrandX”, promise “We’ll beat any price on a new BrandX”.
In Urchin, use the Lead Sources > Acquisition and the Keyword Comparison > Acquisition reports to monitor how successfully you are attracting visitors through each keyword, search engine, and ad campaign.
4. Deliver on your promise – quickly.OK, you’ve attracted your visitor. What do they find when they get to your site? Be careful - your home page might be the single largest obstacle to conversion. According to Catherine Seda, author of Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales:
“Do not, I repeat do not, send search engine users to your home page without a very convincing reason...If on-line consumers use a search engine to direct them to a topic but don’t see it addressed on the web page they visit, they’ll abandon that site.”
Your home page is much too general a page to effectively channel visitors. Instead, create a landing page for each kind of search you address. Each landing page can focus on a specific product or promotion. This may seem like a lot of extra work, but effective landing pages will dramatically increase conversions on your site.
Once you have created your landing pages, monitor how well each one is converting. The Bounce Pages report in Urchin gives you a quick view of which landing pages are resulting in immediate exits from your site. You should rewrite any page that appears with a high bounce rate or match it to a different search ad.
5. Offer multiple options for conversion.Don’t underestimate the usefulness – to both you and your visitor – of providing different conversion options and paths on your website and e-mail blasts. Even if your focus is e-commerce, try adding lead-generation activities such as Contact Me or Sign up for Newsletter links on your landing pages. Many visitors who don’t buy on their first visit will sign up for a newsletter. You’ll have the opportunity to convert these visitors later via newsletter promotions.
6. Conversion - make it painless.You’ve attracted your customer, they’ve filled their shopping cart or they have agreed to provide informa-
tion about themselves. Moving quickly past the transaction to the “Thank you and enjoy!” page will increase conversions. If your conversion is a registration, auto-fill in the form as much as possible. For sales transactions, show the buyer exactly where they are in the checkout process each step of the way.
What about requiring a registration before a purchase? From the visitor’s point of view, there is little point in registering unless they know that they are going to return to your site several times in the near term. Consid-ering that the visitor has yet to complete a single transaction, how likely is it that they’ve decided to return again?
Don’t turn away buyers with money in their hands. Eric Petersen, author of Web Analytics Demystified, rec-ommends that you either, (1) don’t require registration, (2) don’t require registration but provide an optional registration process that visitors can opt into or, (3) register the customer silently during the checkout process and send them an email telling them how to take advantage of their new registration. Petersen writes, “One customer I work with had been requiring registration to move through the purchase process. They were doing so because other companies did it and they were reported to be very successful (I often refer to this as the “Amazon syndrome”). What this customer didn’t stop to consider was the negative effect this would have on visitors who were unsure they would ever make a repeat purchase”.
7. Test, test, test Boosting conversions on your site is an ongoing process of testing and refining. As you implement changes, you’ll be able to use your web analytics software to see how you are doing. Urchin is the perfect tool to help you find out:
• Which search engines and search keywords deliver the visitors most likely to convert. • Which email blasts and other campaigns deliver the visitors most likely to convert. • Which copy works best. • Which landing pages and web content work best. • Average click value and how much you should spend on each keyword. • Revenue and ROI for each campaign, referral source, and keyword • Where visitors prematurely leave your site. • And much, much more.
Get started and Good Luck!