From John Jantsch:
Measurement is one of the most important topics when getting online and starting a website. The funny thing is, most of us don’t want to think it’s important. We want to know how to get more people to our website (traffic), how to show up in search engine results, and how to add more social media fans.
Turning the hard work on your website into a sale is a process referred to as a conversion in online marketing. Because you convert the website visitor into a client, a customer, a contact or whatever you desire the most.
It’s funny, but when most business owners think about revenue goals, they’re really thinking about conversions (mostly). But conversions can mean different things to different people. For example, if you’re a contractor, you may decide that a conversion is a call from a potential customer who requests a quote.
To make that happen, you need to focus on two elements: measuring and testing.
Measure and analyze
Understanding the who, what, when, where and why of your website visitors is the first step toward understanding how to increase your sales, and there are two kinds of tools that every website owner should use to understand as much as they can about their visitors. One tool looks at what those visitors do while they’re on your site, and the other looks at who they are.
Visitor behavior
Adobe Web Analytics from Omniture is a paid tool that can measure a great deal about the visitors to your site and how people engage with you on social media sites.
Google Analytics is a free tool that can provide some very rich insights into your website traffic. To get that, you need to paste one line of a special code into each Web page on your website. The tool then uses that code to produce reports to show how people come to your site and what they do once they get there.
These are some of the Google Analytics reports that you may find useful:
- Referring sites: This tells you where your website visitors are arriving from—a link on someone else’s site, a search engine and so on. For instance, If you promote your content on a blog, this can really help you see how well the blog is working.
- Keywords (what words searchers use to find your site): Did someone search for the words “tennis shoes” and end up on your site? This report shows you all the search terms that brought visitors to your site. This way, you can tailor your content to mirror the words they are using to find you.
- Content by title: This shows you what content on your site is getting the most visitors.
There are many more things you can measure once you’re up and running.
Two helpful resources for learning the basics are:
- Getting Started with Analytics Guide in the Getting Started section of Google Analytics
- Conversion University
Visitor demographics
Demographics is a big word that means “What kind of people are visiting your website?” How old are they? What gender? Do they earn a lot? And so on.
Some fairly new tools can show you a great deal about the people who visit your website. This is important: If your business is for senior citizens and you discover that most of your visitors are under 30, then you have a problem.
- Tools like Crowd Science and Quantcast take the direct route: They post survey questions to visitors to learn more about who they are and why they visit a particular site.
- The 4Q Online Survey is a free solution from iPerceptions that helps you learn why visitors are at your website and whether they’re doing what you want them to do there, and if they aren’t, what’s getting in the way?
- UserVoice takes a different approach. It lets your customers submit, discuss and vote on feedback for your business or your products.
Depending on what you need most, any of these resources can help you learn more about the demographics of visitors coming to your website.
Increase sales through testing
Conversion is a bit of a science. You should test every element on the pages of your website: headlines, “call to action” phrases (those that tell the visitor exactly what to do such as “call us” or “buy now”), social media connections, images and more.
You may find that putting a headline reading, “Welcome to Acme Furniture,” leads to more conversions than one that simply says “Acme Furniture.”
The good news is that you can test these things pretty easily by running what is called an A/B test. That is, you set up different versions of the same page of your website, “page A” and “page B,” and see which one performs better. Tools like Optimizely and Google Website Optimizer are designed just for this. Visit those links to learn how to do this.
These are obviously more advanced techniques of online business than we covered in earlier chapters. But we wanted to make sure you are well on your way to becoming a true website tracking wiz.
Image credit: jeff_golden
John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine and the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.
Source: http://www.openforum.com/articles/increasing-sales-by-knowing-what-works-and-what-doesnt
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