First you need to be clear about the goals you have for your site and second, you need to be measuring them. Only then can you see what’s working and what isn’t so you can take action.

What you need to do to get your site on track:

1. Define your business objectives for your website
2. Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data
3. Define your KPIs and measure them month on month
4. Know what to do with the data you gather

Points 1 to 3 ahould be fairly easy but point 4 is where the gold is. If you know what the data is telling you then you know exactly what to do to to get better results. You need this business information to make informed choices otherwise you are just guessing so don’t do it, measure it and know for sure.

Let’s look at these points a little closer:

1  Define your business objectives for your website

This is probably very simple and most likely to be one or more of the following:  more sales, more leads, more visitors, better relationships with prospects/customers, brand building.

2 Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data

You probably already have Google Analytics installed but if you don’t go do it now. Then set up your goals, analytics has a good help system to show you how to do it but first decide what your goals might be – these are likely to match your business objectives by measuring a successful completion. For example, you might have a goal for a completed sale, a completed lead form, a completed registration for a newsletter or download. Whatever your goals are they should mark something that you want people to do on your site

If there are several steps involved in a successful goal completion then set up the funnels too. If you have 4 steps in your checkout that people have to follow in order to buy something then make each step a stage in your funnel. When data collects here you will see if you have unexpectedly high fallout from steps in your processes. Making changes will allow you to measure before and after so wee if you can make improvements.

3 Define your KPIs and measure them month on month

You can set up custom reporting in analytics to produce a KPI report month on month. KPIs would include your goals but would also include other crucial measures. For example: traffic from organic search, traffic from specific referral sites, number of keyphrases used to find your site, total revenue, number of transactions. The idea of KPIs is that they are measures that should be increasing every month – no excuses (except for seasonality of course but definitely year on year!)

There are other measures you can use that are useful to track that will have thresholds and so won’t increase indefinitely but are worth keeping a close eye on, such as: average transaction value, conversion rate, bounce rate, average time on site, number of pages visited per session.

4 Know what to do with the data you gather

This is the key to making this work and this will make your website make you more money. Having all of this data available is crucial for you to be able to see what is currently working well for your site. Watch out for paralysis by analysis identify some key reports to watch. You need to know exactly where your sales are coming from and where you might have problems with your site that you can take action to fix.

Lets look at a few examples of what you can see now you have all this wonderful data

• See which key phrases are bringing the most traffic (easy)
• Looking at this same report but clicking on the goals tab will show you which convert best
• If you have an ecommerce site, look at the ecommerce tab & see which phrases make the most money
• Look at which landing pages are popular and have the highest/lowest bounce rates – why might they be high?
• You can see which phrases brought traffic to which page & then how well that worked out for you
• See which referral sites bring the best quality traffic, can you get more traffic from them or other sites like them?
• If you run PPC Campaigns look at the same reports for your PPC data – Adwords will show a conversion but analytics will show you the value of that conversion.
• Look at Funnels for you various goals – is the fallout disproportionate at any particule stage in the process
• If you see “problems” make an improvement on your site, make a note of the date then compare your data before and after that date.
• Analytics lets you compare this week with last week, September with June & this quarter with the same quarter last year – any time period you want.
• This is great if you have seasonality as you want to compare with last year, not last month.
• Note that not all data will behave the same way, for instance your bounce rate for direct traffic will be lower (better) than PPC traffic because people know your site & have bookmarked it or know exactly what they are looking for.
• Bounce rates for contact us pages could be high because people find the details they want quickly – that doesn’t mean the page is performing badly.

Get to know your data and your visitor behaviour so you can interpret your data to get the best results.

Strategy use these methods to define goals and measure success so that we can get the best results for our clients. By working together to define goals and set up KPI custom reporting on your analytics this provides transparency for the way we work. If there is anything you want to measure and you are not sure how, we will work with you to set this up.

In addition, we work on results so your success is our success. Find out more about our exclusive 100% Pay-Per-Results SEO Service and our new 100% Results Based CPA SEO.

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Conversion rates will vary for different kinds of traffic that visit your site and that’s to be expected, what you want to learn is what is your best converting source of traffic and how can you get more of it. Track it back to referral sources, if it comes from organic search find out which phrases convert best and focus on improving the rankings for those phrases.  If it comes from PPC which are your money phrases and conventrate on them for SEO.

The following is a list of Conversion Factors that could be affecting your conversion rate. Scan down the list… do any of these factors affect your conversions? Can you take action on any of these points to improve your Conversion Rate?

If you are not sure where to start consider doing some Usability Testing to get feedback from real people using your website to perform tasks designed to test your specific website conversion goals.

Trust Elements:
- Safe Shopping Icons (hacker safe, BBB)
- Free or Local Cost Phone Number visible
- Address visible
- Quality of Design
- Quality Domain Name
- Money Back Guarantee
- Risk Reversal (We’ll pay the return postage costs)
- Accepts all forms of payment
- Nice Logo
- Testimonials
- About Us prominent
- Contact Us prominent
- Privacy Policy
- Order / Postage / Invoice tracking
- Privacy Policy
- We don’t spam you messaging
- Clear and unambiguous optin/out for marketing & 3rd party marketing
- Ability to get offline help at physical locations

Look and Feel:
- Site is easy to navigate
- Easy to grasp what the site does
- Clear Calls to Action on every page
- Links to further information are easy to find
- Great site search returns relevent results
- Checkout / Conversion process is clear
- Forms are forgiving (e.g. taking dashes, spaces for credit card)
- Forms error handling – clear, concise errors & instructions for correcting
- Does not require registration up front
- Fast Page load times. Adverts render last.
- Pages load consistently (high availability)
- Renders in all major browsers
- Accessibility Issues have been addressed
- Pictures are good quality and highly optimised
- Good quality help / FAQ system
- No Broken links or broken images
- Relationship Marketing, encourage 2-way interaction through Facebook, Twitter etc

Product / Selling Proposition:
- Product / Site Exclusivity
- Compelling Product
- Brand Name awareness and reputation
- Good Product Pictures, quality and quantity
- Compelling Offer / Price / Clarity
- Price easy to find
- Add to cart button is inviting and prominent
- Terms and Conditions highly visible
- Path to checkout is unencumbered with no distractions
- Extra charges (postage) are low and easy to find
- Speedie Postage
- Free Postage
- International Shipping
- Good Comparison Matrix (including competitors)
- Independent Product Reviews
- Good Headline
- Good Tagline
- Supporting Copy
- Supporting resources (buying guides, blog, forum)
- Scarcity (limited Quantity or limited time)

Off Page Factors:
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Holidays
- Seasonality
- The weather
- Event Timing (product will be regulated, taxed or discontinued)
- Item / site gets significant press coverage (TV appearances, BBC coverage)
- Relevant Advertising
- Type of Advertising (banner vs PPC)
- Visitor profile of site where advertising appears
- Compelling ad copy
- Ad copy matches landing page
- Click Fraud
- Quality and efforts of Affiliates
- Reputation of your Site
- Size of your Organisation
- Newsletter Quality
- Offline advertising
- Presence of offline locations
- Competitor Offerings and Marketing

The original conversion factor list that inspired this post came from: http://paul.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2008/08/15/conversion-factors/ I have taken the liberty of adding to it and amending it for our target audience.

What other factors would you add to this list?

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However, if you want your website to make you money… read on!

A well optimised website will bring targeted traffic not only through search but through referrals too (referrals are visits that come from links on other people’s websites).  Getting targeted traffic to your site is fantastic but then you have to convert them.

Most SEO companies stop at getting traffic to your site, in fact the vast majority of SEO companies stop at getting you rankings! Because our company is all about Strategy we look to the very end of the process and understand your business objectives and what the goals are for your website.

Think about what you are trying to achieve… 

• Are you looking for completed sales?
• Sign-ups to your newsletter?
• Completed enquiry forms?
• Contact by phone or email?
• Increased and consistent traffic so you can sell advertising? 

Whatever you want your website to achieve, whatever your conversion is, you should be measuring it at every stage so that you can get more of them. Do you know where your best traffic comes from? Do you know which are your money phrases?  Do you know what aspects of your site are your conversion factors? What is the route from landing page to conversion that works best? Do you know where the weak areas are on your site? How does your competitor offer a better experience than you do?

Knowing the answers to questions like these will improve your conversions so that your website makes you more money.

If you are looking to increase targeted traffic to your website so that you can increase your conversions contact us today.

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