FIve Easy Steps To Improving Conversions
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Rod Jacka, Panalysis
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By Rod Jacka
I am sure that you are expecting a few little musings on how to improve conversions; and these will come in a minute, however let's start with a simple hypothesis:
Most websites don't work
There, I said it. A provocative statement, yes, but surely it can't be true.
If we were to assume that this statement is false, then how do we prove it? Some might start by saying something along the lines of "but our site gets lots of visitors".
This may be true, but is this really an indication of success? I am sure that you are in business to make money and not just win a popularity contest.
Others may say but "visitors are viewing lots of content" or "the people that I ask think the site looks good" or "visitors are buying (or contacting us) and some mention that they found us on the web" and other similar statements.
But still there is not enough evidence to prove that your website works.
Imagine that you had to stand up in a court of law (or your CEO) and prove above all reasonable doubt that your website worked. How would you do it?
The answer is partially good old business planning and partially web analytics and reporting.
Combined, these are the secret to improving conversions.
So what are the five easy steps that I promised? Well here goes:
1) Know your business and your goals on the web. If you are using your site to generate sales or sales leads, then make sure that you have a strategy for ensuring that this occurs.
2) Set monthly targets and measure the performance of the site against them. If your site needs to get 20 new leads a week; then make sure that you know each week how many leads it actually gets.
3) Do something about achieving the goals and measure performance against this. How are you going to get 20 new leads a week? The ‘magic leads fairy’ is kind of busy right now so you are going to have to do this one yourself.
4) Use a high quality measurement tool. With Google Analytics being free there is no excuse to not having a professional quality analytics tool to use on your site.
5) Know how to use this tool to measure your website against your business goals and targets. If you don't know how or don't have the expertise on staff, then talk to a professional.
It doesn't matter how good or bad your website looks or what the CEO thinks of it, if you can't justify why the business should invest in it by having the evidence to back it up, then I'm sorry, but your website doesn't work.
Rod Jacka is the Managing Director of Panalysis.
Search Engine Room: September 2, 2007
