After reading the first two parts of this series, your website should now be providing you with a torrent of enquiries and sales. Website traffic is up and the conversion of this traffic is working. However, can your internal processes manage and react quickly to this change?
The key to building on your website success is to understand who is visiting your website and when.
Step 1
Install Google analytics on your site. It is free and easy to install. (www.google.com/analytics ) This will provide visitor stats for your website. If you use Google Adwords ensure you also install the ‘lead’ tracking tool.
Step 2
Great, you have some data on your website, but what does it mean? Always look at the number of unique visitors rather than views or hits. Unique visitors are the number of individuals coming to your site. It gives a more accurate idea of new prospect numbers. Views are simply giving a number of pages looked at or items clicked on in the site.
The analytics will then provide details on the behaviour pattern of your visitors.
• Where have they come from?
• What are they looking at once they arrive on your site?
• When are they leaving your site? What does this mean?
• Assessing where they come from will indicate any effective ad campaigns, successful keywords etc that you have implemented.
• Seeing what visitors click on when they arrive, means you can gauge the most important things to THEM.
• You do not want people leaving your website until they have made an enquiry or purchased from you. Being able to see where they leave your site before this process is complete will indicate a weakness that can be addressed.
Step 3
Use The Data!
This data is precious and will help you to refine your online strategy. It will help you to give your customers what THEY want from your website.
The impact of this approach can be rapid and substantial.
Example 1:
A consulting firm, in just three months, saw online enquiries jump to a massive 80 percent of total new business. Initially they were struggling to get their website working. All of their previous new business had come from referrals and it was a risky position to be in. How did they turn this around?
• They stripped the information down on their site. Only gave visitors what they wanted to know in a clear and easy way.
• There were obvious contact points on the website to encourage people to make an enquiry.
• Keyword research created an obvious list of primary search terms to implement on their site. It matched what people were actually searching for.
• A revised Google Adwords campaign, based on the newly researched keywords, meant they were also attracting new traffic to their site. This was finally starting to work for them rather than sinking money into an inactive or inappropriate campaign.
• They installed Google Analytics and could monitor their new website traffic. It allowed them to tweak their online strategy and see what was providing results.
Example 2:
A woman’s online shoe site had recently launched onto the market. Starting from scratch was always going to be a matter of letting people know you existed, both on and offline. It was essential that shoppers could find the website and then be able to make a purchase easily and quickly. They saw 300 percent growth in online sales within a month. How did they do this?
• A well researched key word strategy and implementation on the site. Matching keywords to what was actually being searched for by shoppers was critical and allowed visitors to find them organically.
• Google ad words reflected the keyword list and the campaign started to drive traffic to the site.
• When people arrived on the site they were guided to buy the product and the process was easy.
• An offline PR campaign also helped to build traffic to the site.
Kirrily Dear is development director of Eyes Wide Open, a management consultancy specialising in companies with up to 50 staff. For more lead generation tips visit www.eyeswideopen.com.au
