Ow Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate Part 1

Question 1.

What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting you to definitely answer the simplest proactive approach such as "read more here" or actually selling something or service?

What you're discussing here are two various ways to measure your site. "Read More Here" is what I'd call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables "Micro Conversions" because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a complete conversion. A micro conversion is a thing that you should test and measure. "Read More Here" could easily get a worse click-through rate than "Just click here to find out how exactly to win a month's way to obtain vintage wine." So by improving this click through, you get the individual browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. Using this method, you enhance your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get you to definitely register or sign up to win a month's way to obtain 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 is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it could be registering to win wine, nonetheless it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, nonetheless it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies would you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible? I want them to call me for more information, to learn more also to eventually provide them with a proposal.

There is no such thing as "no online conversion". You are considering leads who'll eventually phone you however the visitor is the one with the energy. Unless you give your visitors grounds to let you continue to have a dialog using them, they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email and telephone number from your own visitor so that he is able to then get useful information from you by means of a free of charge report or audio file, you do a couple of things. First, you qualify visitors as a person who is thinking about your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. It is advisable to build into your website a powerful reason behind your visitors to give you permission to email or speak to them instead of expect someone to pick up the phone. Available for you, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they have 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 keep the dialog using them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can read more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so provide them with the means to get it.

Question 3.

What if the merchandise you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How does one get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your website and desire to order from you?

In offline marketing, an effective tactic is differentiation. It's no different online. In the event that you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes a massive difference to conversions. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for half a year by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are searching for information. So give your visitors what they want by means of education. If your potential prospects become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they'll remember you over your rivals.

Question 4.

How do you obtain the address, phone number and name of the owner of any company you are trying to get in touch with to see if they would be thinking about what you sell?

You have to get permission from visitors to get that information. It can't be finished with any tracking tools available. You will find a very good reason for this and it's called privacy. In the event that you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it may be potentially dangerous. Imagine in the event that you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on christmas in a faraway land for another few weeks as well as your personal information could be gathered. The one who sees that information then knows when to visit your address and rob you as long as you're away. It's OK to track browser behavior because no personal stats are ever tracked. I for just one hope it stays that way.

Question 5.

What should one search for in the net 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, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you must filter out from log files the information that isn't highly relevant to visitors. Then you are considering unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. After you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your website, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as you browser, but it's as close since you can get with log files. You then divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That's your conversion rate. When you can get software that doesn't use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that computes the filtering like Web Trends, it creates your job easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?

The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site's relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, & most importantly trust.

Differentiation is the first rung on the ladder in the process. You must discover a way to stand out from the competition. It will focus on the domain name, and continue during your entire website's strategy.

Then in your articles, your copy and your design, you need to smack your target audience between the eyes. You need to find out just what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of this audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you are 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 website. So if the audience types "Red Vintage Wine" into Overture as well as your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your own site talking about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the house page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine on the market.

Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can'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 about, and test your changes.

Finally and most importantly trust. You can't sell anything if your audience doesn't trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the point that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that a huge selection of satisfied customers have previously bought from your own store, that you ensure it is very easy to find contact information for instance a name and address and support via email. You can educate via your website with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust as time passes. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.

What's next?

In part two of this series, we'll be looking at measurement software tools, the professionals and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversions, why it helps to track visitor activity utilizing the software that is available, and what you should test and tweak to boost conversion rates.

Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Chronicles internet site