Much of this blog is dedicated to driving traffic to your site. But there’s another really important part of the equation: Conversion Rate. Making money online is defined by this equation:
Traffic x Conversion Rate x Price = How Much Money You Make Online
(1000 visitors x 2% Conversion Rate x $100 Product = $2000 Revenue)
If you increase conversion rates from 1% to 2% your sales will double and your traffic will be twice as valuable. Spending time on conversion rate is as important as spending time on driving traffic. Unfortunately, conversion rates are a bit harder to understand. Let’s take a look at some of the free tools out there to help us measure and better understand why people buy and why they leave.
Stop Reading and Install Google Analytics NOW
Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you lots of important information about your site including different sources of traffic, where they’re clicking, when they’re leaving, and conversion rates. It’s very easy to set up (all you have to do is cut and paste some JavaScript into your web pages).
One of the most important things Google Analytics measures is conversion rates. First you have to tell Google what kind of conversions you want to measure. For example, if you’re selling a product, put the URL for the completed transaction page into Analytics. If you’re looking to capture email addresses in exchange for free videos, use the thank you page.
Google Analytics will give you the raw data about how many people you’re converting to sales. This is a great place to start, but to really understand what these numbers mean, we’re going to have to look a little deeper.
Infrared Goggles: For Your Web Pages
A heat map is one of the most useful ways to understand how users are looking at your pages. Remember the way the Predator found Arnold Schwarzenegger in the jungle? It’s kind of like that for web pages. You can see exactly where your users are hovering with the mouse and where they’re clicking on your page. The more users that hover and click on a certain link, the hotter the map looks over that one spot.
This is extremely useful information because you can start to understand how your users think. If most of your users are hovering over the menu and then choosing a link at the very bottom of the menu, it may make sense to move that link to a more prominent place at the top. If your users aren’t scrolling down to your offer at the bottom of the page, consider how you can move it above the fold.
The best free tool to give you Heat Maps of your site is ClickTale.com. It produces high quality heat maps and can even give you videos of how your users are mousing over your site.
If it’s Hard to Use, I Just Don’t Use It as Much
One of the most useful things you can do is go out in the world and spend some time with users. They’re easier to find than you think. Bring a laptop to your rock gym and spend 5 minutes with climbers for your climber site. Spend some time at a health fair to test your health site. Spend some time at a independent coffee shop and you’re guaranteed to find some writers for your writer site.
Steve Krug wrote an incredible guide to Usability called “Don’t Make Me Think.” It’s a great place to start when you’re thinking about usability. You’ll be amazed what you find when you start watching people use your site. They’ll ask real time questions, they’ll click in all the wrong spots, they’ll get hopelessly lost. Pound for pound, it’s some of the most interesting feedback you’ll ever get about your site. And it only takes an hour.
Test Test Test and Then Test Some More
What can you do with all of this great feedback? Well, the most useful thing to do is start testing different ideas. Luckily, the brilliant engineers at Google came up with a free tool to test different pages on your site (aren’t you glad they’re spending so much money on us).
Google Website Optimizer is very easy to set up. Create a second home page, landing page, information page or whatever else you’d like to test and give Website Optimizer both URLs. It’ll handle the rest. Use the feedback you get to help drive additional sales and you’re well on your way to doubling profits.
Happy converting!
