Instantly Double Your Conversion Rate!
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I can instantly double your conversion rate.
How? Is it through better user experience? A/B and multivariate testing? Those annoying talking avatars I see everywhere?
Nope. It’s simple math.
Why Does Conversion Rate Matter?
If you haven’t noticed, there’s been some buzz going around the blogosphere (and Commerce360) about improving your conversion rate. Nielsen/Netratings released a list of the internet retailers with the top 10 conversion rates on the web.
Conversion rate is obviously an alluring metric, because it is one way of representing how well your site is persuading people to take the actions you want them to take, usually purchase. The usual wisdom is: the bigger your conversion rate, the better.
Generally, that’s true. However, it’s also one of the easiest metrics to miscalculate or misinterpret.
Calculating Conversion Rate… Maybe
Calculating conversion rate should be simple–just divide the number of orders (or desired actions) by the number of people who came to your site in a given time period. That is: orders / people.
The problem when it comes to calculating your conversion rate is the denominator. Web analytics are very imperfect and no one metric truly measures “people” accurately. Instead, you end up substituting some other number to represent “people”.
You basically have 3 basic choices of metrics to substitute for “people”:
- Visits - As defined by the Web Analytics Association, this is, “an interaction, by an individual, with a website consisting of one or more requests for an analyst-definable unit of content (i.e. “page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the visit session will terminate.”
- Unique Visitors - The WAA’s standard definition of this metric is, “The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.”
- Clicks - Sadly, there is no standard for measuring clicks. Typically, this is reported by another tool (such as Google’s AdWords or Linkshare’s affiliate management tool). Clicks are the number of times a person clicks on a link, usually an advertisement, as measured by the front-end tool. This will likely vary from the count of visits from that sort, because of click fraud and people click away before your analytics code loads, among other things.
The difference can be significant. Let’s take some fictional numbers:
When Should You Invest in SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessary part of any website strategy. The potential traffic is simply too big to ignore.
The question isn’t “Should I do SEO?” it’s “When should I do SEO?”
As a site owner, you have to make hard decisions about how to spend your always-not-enough budget and when. In this post, I’m going to talk about some of things your should consider when trying to determine…
When Should I Invest in SEO?
SEO is not direct marketing. Just because you put a dollar in today does not mean you’re going to get a $1.50 out tomorrow.
Fundamentally, natural search optimization is a long-term investment. With the right strategy and the right implementation, I do believe you will get the return on that investment and, possibly, a sustained competitive advantage.
Of course, this presents a problem: you have to spend the money now, but you might not see it for a while.
Fundamentals to Make the Most of SEO
Search engines don’t buy from you, people do. There a few things you need to have in place in any site to make the most of SEO:
- Functioning Site - There’s no point in bringing people to your site if it doesn’t work. People don’t like it and neither do the search engines. Getting your site to work properly is as important as getting people there.
- Great Product - You can optimize your site till you’re blue in the face, but if you’re product stinks, you’re fighting an uphill battle. They say the quickest way to kill a bad product is to advertise it…
- Measurement (Web Analytics) - Spending money without any way to track it is pointless. What’s more, you need analytics in place to help you refine the SEO you do execute.
The Resources You Need to Execute SEO
There are 2 paths to SEO: do-it-yourself or hiring an SEO consultant.
The choice between the two could fill several blog posts. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you are looking for professional help.
A good organic search optimization agency will:
- Do your keyword research
- Make recommendations about your platform and information architecture
- Address on-page code elements
- Conduct a competitive and market analysis
- Make specific content recommendations
- Build and, possibly, execute a link strategy
You then have to execute that advice you paid so much for.
3 Web Analytics Questions to Ask Before Buying a Company
I got an email from an entrepreneur contact of mine. He’s smack in the middle of the process of due diligence for the acquisition of an internet marketing property.
He wanted to include a web analytics as part of his due diligence questionnaire and asked if I had a checklist.
Having not gone through the process, I wrote up a few quick bullet points that I thought I’d share with you.
3 Web Analytics Questions to Ask Before Buying a Company
1.) What tool(s) are you using to measure and optimize your site? What process and personnel are you dedicating to use data to grow your business?
The goal here is to understand their relative dedication or lack thereof to continuous improvement.
There is a range of 7 possible responses here:
- The analytics ignorant won’t have or know what tool they’re using. Be afraid, be very afraid.
- The vendor-dependent might simply have reports from their partners, but not invest in site-side tools. That’s can be a problem when you switch vendors or consider campaign attribution.
- Some might be relying on something in-house or what’s baked into their ecommerce platform or content management system. Tread lightly here, as these will vary wildly in sophistication.
- An internet unsavvy organization might have slapped up one of the free or inexpensive, but have done little to act on the data.
- A business with an average level of sophistication will have one or more tools and 1 person for whom part of their job is to use web analytics data.
- More sophisticated marketers will actually dedicate 0.5+ full-time employees to analysis and likely be using a suite of tools, including one core web analytics package.
- The most advanced will have great talent, good tools and a process for regularly analyzing and optimizing their site and marketing.
8 Links Worth Your Time
Link time. I’m curating the best of the blogosphere for your enjoyment. Know a great post? Leave a comment.
Marketing Optimization & Web Analytics
Over at Web Analytics World, I ignored the right way of doing things and detailed the 5 worst practices in web analytics.
If you’re looking to hire an in-house web analyst, you might want to do a little salary research. Anil put out a survey and Eric has tool to let you dig into his own salary data.
Social Media
If you’re looking to refresh the look of your blog, Smashing Magazine rounds up 100 free Wordpress themes.
What happens when you invite customers to create ads for you and they slander the competition? Just ask Quizno’s; they were sued by Subway for the content of user-generated ads.
Search Marketing
In-house SEO’s are probably reviewing their paychecks with word that $100K is the average for those with experience.
49% percent of users don’t trust Google. I’m guess that paid search advertisers are even less trusting…
Your paid search reports are probably wrong. The culprit? Latency.
Ignoring This Post Could Cost You $500 (or More)
I call it the “white screen of death”.
For the past week, I’ve sporadically encountered a white warning message from my host when attempting to get to my blog. According to the folks at HostICan, I had mysteriously used too much CPU processing time.
Clearly, this was a major issue. If the site was down, I couldn’t update my blog, visitors couldn’t visit and websites would go unoptimized. Think of the wasted money!
My problem cost me time and visitors. Yours could be costing you revenue and conversion. Read on for my cautionary tale about…
Site and Image Speed Optimization
I started sending frantic emails to HostICan to try to understand and resolve the errors. Their first suggestion was to install the WP Super Cache plugin for Wordpress.
That was a nifty idea, but I couldn’t even log into my blog. Eventually, the CPU usage finally dipped and I activated said plugin. No luck.
Their initial response was to encourage me to buy a virtual private server…. at $45/month. As much as I enjoy blogging, I could think of better ways to spend $540 (mmm… iPhone).
HostICan’s next suggestion was to optimize my SQL database. I like to think that, owing to my analytics background, I’m a bit more technically than the usual internet marketer. Still, this was over my head.
They said they optimized it for me, but the problem persisted. Finally, I asked the golden question, “What is the root cause of this issue?”. I was tired of medicating symptoms.
After a little digging, here’s what they said…
3 Marketing Optimization Predictions for 2008
In case you missed it, Maxamine and Memetrics (a multivariate testing vendor) were purchased by Accenture. That got me thinking about the possible trends we’ll see in 2008.
Here are my predictions for the year in marketing optimization:
#1 - Testing is Hot, Hot, Hot! - Even though most advertisers still have a lot to do in paid search before the click, optimizing after the click will be the sexy media darling.
With analytics thought leaders pushing testing and Google marketing its free Website Optimizer tool, more people will test the optimization waters.
My prediction is that we’ll move into the early majority phase of site optimization. Those who haven’t tested will start with landing pages, a/b testers will move onto multivariate testing and experienced MVT practitioners will continue to boost results.
A Basic Website and Marketing Analysis Method
You’ve got a measurement tool and you’ve got a website. Sometimes it feels like the two will never meet.
Layer in your paid search campaigns, email tactics, and search engine optimization projects and you can see how translating data into dollars can be a little cumbersome.
Much blog ink has been spilled over the topic of web analytics process as a way to operationalize measurement (here, here, here and again here).
I agree that process is key to improving your website and advertising. I want more to be written, improved upon and advocated.
Thus, in this post I’m going to lay out my thoughts for a basic website and marketing analysis method that has worked for me and my clients.
My process is built on 5 steps:
Step 1 - Data Preparation
Step 2 - Analysis
Step 3 - Report Preparation
Step 4 - Communication
Step 5 - Action
Each step in the method feeds into the next, as detailed in this graphic (click here to see a larger, clearer image):
Campaign Analytics - Which Tactic Gets Credit?
Do you know how your marketing campaigns are performing?
It’s likely that your web analytics tool could be under or over-reporting the true performance of your advertising.
The culprit? Attribution.
Attribution - Which Tactic Gets Credit?
The easiest way to understand campaign attribution is to think about a fictional prospect, Joe.
Joe searches for “black and white sneakers” and he clicks on your paid search ad. Nothing catches his eye, but he signs up for your email newsletter.
Next week, he gets your newsletter and clicks on the “Sale sneakers” section. A pair of Onitsuka Tigers catches his eyes, so he does a little price comparison research.
Seeing that you have the best price on Shopzilla, Joe clicks your listing and buys.
Joe hit 3 different campaigns while shopping: paid search ads, email and a comparison shopping engine. So, which one gets credit for the sale?
Well, it depends.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me!
Matt and crew over at the SEMMY’s have nominated my review of Compete Search Analytics for best analytics post of the year.
Vanessa Fox and Brad Geddes are going to narrow the list to 3-4 finalists before public voting begins.
Cliché though it may sound, the nomination is pretty cool. That post took me hours to write, so the recognition is definitely nice. Plus, the company is pretty flattering too.
