 The next step is, naturally, to make certain that you are doing everything as well as possible to ensure that as much of this traffic as possible actually converts into sales, enquiries, phone calls and other calls to action.
The performance of your Pay per Click, SEO and other traffic generating campaigns are easy to measure, and for these it is much easier to identify what needs to be done to fine tune your campaigns; whether it be bidding up, bidding down, changing the text of an ad or another well-known manoeuvres.
Site Conversion (from traffic to actions) is also easy to measure, but it is harder to identify the changes that will improve your site’s performance.
I shall suggest some solutions on doing this below.
By now, most companies are beginning to understand that they need to move beyond the usual web stats packages and start looking at web analytics packages that do more than just parade before you a series of unrelated lists of top referrers and top pages viewed. The more important next step from the point of view of marketing strategy is being able to watch what people actually do on your site, what routes they take around your site and how they get to important pages on your site.
By allowing you to label and compare your customers by whichever criteria you choose, these new packages allow you to generate reports on topics such as which search engine referrals were most likely to get to a particular page, or which landing page converted into the greatest average sale, or what peoples’ preferences are when visiting your site.
Don’t Drown in the Sea of Statistics
The bewildering mass of statistics that these programs generate can be off-putting to the general user analysing these stats for the first time. With the huge amount of information available, users can be forgiven for feeling lost in a sea of stats. Why is this?
To quote ClickTracks, one of the most important web analytics providers, ‘Put simply, web analytics is actually people analytics; you're looking at the behavior of people at your site’. Humans are unpredictable creatures, and as we are looking at the behaviour of all the (human) visitors to the site over a pre-defined time period, it’s hardly surprising to find that analytics of this kind are extremely complex.
Although these tools are very powerful and can provide a wealth of information, we have isolated two statistical functions that we have identified as being particularly important for measuring the success of your site, and showing you exactly what you need to do to up your conversion rate. These are the ‘navigation report’ and the ‘funnel report’ in the ClickTracks package although they may be known under different names when used by other analytics packages. You should be able to run both of these functions on whatever package you install.
What is the difference between the two? Well, the navigation report tells you the exact path followed by each visitor on their journey through your site. It can show you the direction users take when, for example, they leave the home page. Some will exit the site completely while others will leave the homepage to other pages in your site. This can give you useful clues as to what people like and don’t like on your site. If you find that enough people from your homepage click through to a specific category or region in your site, you might wish to boost your offering for that range of products.
The funnel report doesn’t concern itself with the particular path followed by the user. It simply looks at two or more nominated pages or group of pages (for example the homepage, or your product pages) and records how many visitors have visited both groups. One of the best ways to use this feature is by noting how many of the visitors who visited page group A (for example the resort pages of a holiday site) also visited page B (for example the thank you page after making an enquiry). Armed with this information, site owners can pinpoint the pages which are sending low numbers to a booking form or registration point, and take appropriate action to improve their offering and performance.
These services also offer tools such as Split Testing, which allow you to create two versions of a page, and see which one performs better. Tips and tricks like this are likely to be hugely useful for any website and will lead to better converting traffic.
There are a growing number of these kinds of packages available in the market today and some of them can be quite overwhelming with the wealth of information that they provide. One rule of thumb for getting to grips with this is not to look at the numbers that can be provided but to see what marketing decisions can be made with the information that you receive. If you need any help or advice finding a package that makes marketing sense, please contact us on marketing@leadgenerators.co.uk |
