Web Site Conversion Part One
Sales - Quotes - Leads
Get them to act now!
Whether your business is B2C, B2B or highly complex sales you have goals for your prospects.
You want to ensure they take action on your website.
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What do you mean by conversion?
Do you mean getting someone to answer the
simplest call to action such as "read more here," or actually selling a product or
service? What you 're talking about here are two different ways to measure your Web site.
" Read more here " is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I
call these kinds of variables "micro conversions " because they are all small (microscopic, even)
steps toward full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should test
and measure. "Read more here " might not get as high a click-through rate as
"Click here to find out how to win a month's supply of vintage wine." So by
improving this click-through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward
your final Web site goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in
this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month' s supply of vintage
wine.
Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring
the click-through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines
and copy. Full conversion means persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do.
In my example, it would be registering to win wine. But it could be subscribing to a
newsletter, downloading an audio file, buying a product, selling a service, or whatever. It
should reflect your Web site's business objective.
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What strategies would you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible?
I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.
There is no such thing as "no online conversion." You 're looking for leads who will
eventually phone you, but the visitor is the one with the power. If you donƊt give your
visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won't. Using
opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone
number from your visitor so that she or he can then get useful information from you in the
form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First you qualify the visitor as
someone who is interested in your services, and second you get permission to contact him or
her again .
Rather than expecting someone to pick up the phone, you need to build into your Web site a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt-in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering.
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What if the product that you sell is also
sold by several others on other Web sites?
People visit a Web site to get information, so give them the means to get it. How do you
get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?
In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It's no different online.
If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different
(not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP (unique
selling proposition)
makes an enormous difference to conversion rates.
The second point is that your site should be of use to
your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse
they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of
education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away
something useful from your site, they will remember you over your competition.
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How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company?
How do you get the address,
telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you're trying to get
in touch with to see whether they might be interested in what you sell? You need to
get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can't be done with any
available tracking tools.
There is a very good reason
for this, and it's called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names,
addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous.
Imagine if you were online talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway
land for the next few weeks, and your personal information could be gathered. The person
who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while youƊre
away.
It"s OK to track browser behavior, because no personal details are ever tracked.
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What should one look for in the Web logs to determine conversion rates?
Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every
request to your site's pages from search engine indexes, email harvester software,
link harvesters, and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the
information that isn't relevant to visitors. Then you#39;re looking for unique visitors
(not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the
approximate number of visitors coming to your site. It#39;s still not 100% accurate,
because proxy servers record multiple visitors as one browser, but it's as close as
you can get with log files. Then, divide the number of people who complete the conversion
action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn't use logs, such as
IRIS Metrics, or log software that works out the filtering, such as Web Trends,
it makes your job much easier.
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What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my Web site?
The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site#39;s relevance to your
desired audience, measurement, experimentation and (most importantly) trust.
Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the
competition. It should start with the domain name and continue throughout your entire Web site#39;s strategy. Then, in
your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes.
You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that
audience.
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Relevance is hugely important
Relevance is hugely important, too. If you#39;re running a campaign on Overture or Google with
certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those
keywords and finding your Web site. So if members of your audience type #34;Red Vintage Wine#34;
into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to your page that
talks all about and sells red vintage wine. Those visitors shouldn't land at the home
page of your Web site, which probably has a small link to the red vintage wine section and
five or six other types of wine for sale.
Then, measuring and experimenting are the key to
improving conversion rates. You can#39;t improve conversion without measurement unless
you're making educated guesses or you're just plain lucky. So get a good measurement
system,
learn what it's all about and test your changes.
Finally, and most importantly, there#39;s trust. You can't sell anything if your audience
doesn't trust you. You can start earning that trust by prominently displaying your
privacy policy and your shipping procedure. Also, clearly state that you use SSL
encrypted protection for the forms on your site and that hundreds of satisfied customers
have already bought from your store. And make it very easy to find your contact information,
such as a name and address, in addition to providing support via email. For the longer term,
you could educate your audience via your Web site with articles and "how-to"
sections or newsletters; doing so will instill trust over time. In short, your prospect
must trust you to part with his or her money.
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Does it help to track Web site visitor behavior with software?
"Yes" is the simple answer. Here's why,
if you don't measure, how can you know what to improve? With effective tracking software,
you have facts in front of you. Effective measurement, though, is more than simply having
good software; it's analyzing why things happen. One thing that we measure is bounce
the number of people who arrive at a specific page and then leave without doing anything.
The lower the bounce rate, the better (obviously). A low bounce rate means that people
are using the site effectively.
A recent client is a perfect example. She had two pages with different articles on her site, with exactly the same navigation left and center. Most articles had a bounce rate of about 53%#34;. But one had a better bounce of about 50%, and another had a much worse bounce of around 90%. We analyzed both and found that the one with the 50% bounce was much more relevant to the reader arriving at the page. Specifically, it had better and more relevant links at the bottom of the article. We concluded that by being relevant on the poorly performing page in the same way, the bounce rate would be reduced. We would simply not have known that this was occurring at all without tracking software.
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What measurement software tools would you recommend?
We use IRIS Metrics. I would also recommend browser-based software such as HitBox, WebTrends Live, RedSheriff and Omniture. Generally, you get what you pay for. And while these systems are not cheap, they do provide the level of detail required to run an effective Web campaign. People have asked me if it's possible to use webalizer (which is free log software) to run an effective Web measurement campaign. While it's possible to get a lot of useful information from free and cheap systems, you don't get truly useful information such as path tracking, bounce rates, repeat visitor information, accurate visitor counts, accurate page counts and loads more information. Such information is critical if you want to base business decisions on your measurements.
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What is the difference between log-based and browser-based measurement?
Tracking tools that rely on server-based measurement are typically programs that are installed on your Web server (by your ISP, if your site is hosted) or installed locally on your PC using the log files taken from the server. Server-based measurement programs measure activity based on the text files held on the Web server (referred to as log files). The way that browser-based measurement works is that information from each browser that visits your site is recorded, usually in a database, and then the data is manipulated into reports you can read. Typically, these services ask you to paste some JavaScript code into your Web pages. A cookie is used to determine which user is accessing the site. This is then tracked on a remote server and you log in to view the reports.
I recommend the use of ASP measurement, because it only measures how people using a Web browser use your Web site. The log files record everything visiting your pages. They need a number of added filters to stop email harvesters, search engines and a variety of other software generated crawlers or bots from being counted as "visitors." Without them, you can get seriously skewed results. Server access is often required to get log file filtering right; otherwise, you're relying on your ISP to report your tracking correctly. The log files for one of our clients had 10 times as many page counts and visits recorded than shown by using an ASP. That's a 1,000% error!
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What is an average conversion rate?
This is a topic of serious debate. In other marketing industries, there's no guesswork. They have standards that everyone follows. We need those same standards in the online space before any real answer can be given. Analytics companies, the big research companies and digital media associations are going to have to come together to define these standards.
Currently, we're in the process of trying to establish a worldwide benchmark with a number of other prominent people in the industry who also want to know the answer to this question. But, meanwhile, here are some statistics we've gathered from different sources. I have figures for three types of Web sites: sales (e-commerce), lead generation and subscription-based sites. Generally, sales sites seem to range between a 0.5% and 8%, with the average rate at 2.3%, according to FireClick statistics published this year and figures published in 2003 by e-consultancy.com. In 2000, the average figure for sales conversion, as published by shop.org, was 1.8%. The high-end figures, I hasten to add, are the top e-tailers, according to all sources.
My own experience shows that sites hit between 0.5% and 5.3%, so this seems to correlate with the published figures. Of course, since there is no defined standard, these numbers have to be taken as a rule of thumb. The only source we have for lead generation sites is e-consultancy.com. It quotes 2-3% as the rate for users that complete an optional or free registration process, with 5% being best in class. Our own experience again falls in the same ballpark.
Subscriptions-to-sale conversion is typically between 1 and 7%. Again, the source is e-consultancy.com. We don't have figures for visitor-to-subscription conversion, but our experience with clients has been between 1 and 8%. Our
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How do you go about consistently improving conversion?
What it really boils down to is treating Web marketing as a science. We do it by consistently measuring how people use a Web site. Over time, you will learn what works and what doesn't, and you'll stop wasting your time on the things that don't work.
First, we look at the technical aspect of the site. It's amazing how many people overlook and ignore thousands of people who don't use Windows XP with Internet Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024x768. So, first, make sure that you develop something that works for everyone.
One of the next areas we look at is where the traffic comes from. It allows you to concentrate your efforts on your best chance of generating traffic that converts. Then we try to reduce the average Web site bounce rate. The lower the average bounce, the higher the number of people surfing your Web site and seeing the value of your offer. The higher the number who see your offer, the better the chance of a sale. Checking bounce rates also usually brings up some juicy problems to be solved.
Then look at testing and improving copy and graphical content, running split tests and measuring bounce rates on copy or simply testing the click through on links. We do much more, but the basic premise is this: test and measure; follow up with experimentation, then with more testing and more measuring. Sounds like science class doesn't it?
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How do keywords affect your conversion rate
In terms of search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM)? Keywords are important for two reasons. First, by using the keywords that relate to your reader you will be listed by search engines which means that people can find you. Notice that I phrased the last sentence carefully. I said, "keywords that relate to your reader." It's important to understand that what you consider keywords might not be the keywords your visitors are using to reach you. Second, and more important, keywords help to qualify your audience after they have arrived at your Web site. If you click through from a search engine to a Web site and the headline or first paragraph does not strike you as relevant to what you're looking for, you're likely to "bounce" (leave the site). The keywords that you use help to assure your visitors that they are in the right place.
Good use of keywords embedded in your copy and content will help you to attract the right kind of people. Second, they will help to effectively qualify them as being in the right place. If you manage to both attract and qualify, the readers are then more likely to click through to find out more about what your Web site is about. If they do that, there is a much higher chance that they will convert to your desired goal. A good SEO or SEM company is one that understands that it#39;s about answering the visitors needs, not simply packing the Web site with related key words and phrases.
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What Is pay-per click (PPC) ?
What Is pay per click (PPC) ? Is it worth the money ? Does PPC affect conversion? PPC is when you set up an account with a search engine (Google or Overture, for instance) and run ads that appear when a visitor to the search engine requests a certain keyword. If a visitor clicks on your ad, you pay a predefined fee to the search engine. Done correctly, PPC is a good way to drive people interested in your product or services to your Web site. Well executed PPC marketing should positively affect conversion.
One of our clients recently asked about a PPC campaign (0run by another company) that was converting poorly. The reason was that the ad was optimized to be clicked-through, but not optimized to qualify the reader. The product in the ad was a mobility scooter priced at $11,850. The ad explained that you could get great discounts on mobility scooters, and therefore the click through on the ad was high. So it was an expensive campaign for our client. But it didn't convert into sales.
Why?
Why? The ad should have tried to qualify the reader more by including the price and location in the ad. A fair percentage of visitors who are interested in purchasing an expensive item like a mobility scooter will want to see it first. Therefore, a good way to actually sell this product is to tell the reader the price and location so that they know without going to the Web site whether the product is for them. Furthermore, mentioning price in the ad prequalifies that they have the money. So if they have the money, are in the market and are in the same city there is a much higher chance of a purchase. Another thing to remember in PPC campaigns is the relevance of the ad to your landing page. It's a frequently overlooked problem. Often, the PPC ad doesn't relate directly to the landing page. Our client did this correctly by linking the Google ads directly to the page about mobility scooters. But it's a common mistake to link the ads to a home page an approach that expects the visitor to do the work of finding the item.
Too many PPC companies work on click-through as their gauge of success. They see it as their job to drive the traffic rather than convert it. The idea of successful PPC marketing is simple economics. You spend less than what you earn from the visitors' arrival, and so you make a profit. However, ads that use the shotgun approach aren't doing you any favors. Ads that you're paying for should bring in very interested and pre-qualified visitors who convert at a higher level.
When visitors arrive at our Web site, they are a mixed crowd with different expectations. How do we cater to them all? You can't please everyone, and it's fatal to try. You have to figure out your best chance of business and cater to the appropriate clientele. If you have a large, varied audience or are running some kind of portal, then you should have a clear strategy to attract people to dedicated sections of your Web site.
For instance, small businesses have thousands of individual, varying wants, needs and requirements. Your landing page (home or index page) is going to have a very hard time catering to all of those small-business customers effectively. So don't try. Figure out how people find you, discern the biggest segment of traffic, and cater to that group. Then take the second-biggest segment of traffic and develop a different landing page for them using content (and embedded keywords) more relevant to their wants and needs. It's possible to develop layered Web sites that cater to a variety of audiences.
For instance, a small business owner in need of a sample contract of employment isn't immediately going to be interested in accountancy services. He might, instead, be interested in a resources section that has sample documents for download and listings of lawyers who cater to small businesses. If this visitor arrives to find a Web site with a plethora of choices (when all he wants is a sample contract), he is likely to leave. But if a section of your Web site were dedicated solely to business documents and sample downloads for small businesses, and the visitor clicks through to this page from a search engine, there is a much-higher chance that he will browse to find what he is looking for. If then he sees that you have more resources (like an accountancy portal link), then he may even bookmark your site before leaving for future reference.
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How much traffic do you need to determine that something is not working?
I know about testing. But how much traffic do you need to determine that something is not working? Again the focus is from where your visitors arrive. If you have well-targeted traffic arriving at your pages via PPC or strategic links, then 1,000 visitors to the site (or test page) is a fair sample size. When traffic is less targeted and bounce rates are higher, then you have to make a decision based on larger numbers. If, for instance, one week 500 visitors arrived at your Web site who weren't from your target audience, it's fair to say that you should discount them from your testing. Is it really the "holy grail" to be listed at the top of the search engines? What are the other alternatives that clients should consider?
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GOOGLE - YAHOO - MSN - ASK JEEVES - TEOMA
Being at the top of the search engines is not entirely necessary, but it certainly helps. You should try to get a listing on the first page of results for your chosen keywords. If potential visitors have to wade through to link number 8,074 on Google to find your products and services, then you're pretty much invisible.
For example, if you do a search in any search engine including "GOOGLE" "YAHOO" "MSN" "Ask Jeeves" "Teoma" etc. for "Free Telephone Scripts" our site appears two times on the first page. In the top position, as we've optimized for that key phrase. We hoped that this is what our potential visitor will key in when doing a search. However, although this was part of our strategy it was only a very small part. You cannot rely on search engine algorithms to pay your bills.
The alternative is to find strategic partners who like what you do and want to reference your information. Strategic linking, while it's more difficult work, works very well. The subscription conversion rate average from our top strategic partners is 31%. By that I mean that nearly a third of the visits coming from the partners subscribe. Because the partners we're working with are well known and highly respected, they are a great means of qualification. The added benefit is that the more outbound links you have pointing to you, the higher your ranking gets on many of the search engines. Another benefit is that even if you can't get listed on search engines directly for all your keywords, some of the partner sites will do so due to their own visibility, so more paths flow to you. This is a far more effective strategy than SEO/SEM alone.
This article has been about one subject relevance. You begin with keywords that relate to and qualify your readers. This helps with search engine visibility and means that your visitors feel as though they are in the right place when they arrive at your Web site. PPC campaigns should qualify your audience initially and land them at a highly relevant and specific landing page. This means that your advertisements are working for you and not simply driving less-targeted traffic. Your Web site message should not try to cater to everyone. It should be specific and relevant to a particular target market. This means that you can focus your message in relation to what your visitor wants. Finally, you should find strategic partners who work in related industries with audiences similar to yours. This means that you improve your visibility to your target audience. In simple terms, being relevant means putting the right offer in front of the right people. By getting more of the right people to your Web site, you improve your conversion rates considerably.
Steve Jackson is editor of the Conversion Chronicles and CEO of Aboavista, a Finnish company that improves Web conversion rates.
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