The old way of gauging the success of the website is dead. Visits, page views and bounce rates were the old stalwarts and used to track the success of your website. These metrics are freely available either through your Cpanel or analytics program and are probably the easiest for any of us to understand.It takes very little knowledge of the web to look at your daily stats and see how many visitors your sites received on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s easy to see their average page views as well as their bounce rates.
Today’s web is all about conversions, how your traffic interacts with your sites and how you get them to take the action you want them to. Simply put, if you were to only get half your current traffic levels but double the conversions wouldn’t you take this option?
With the old metrics the only real one of any value is the bounce rate, it’s because you can clearly see whether people liked your site site or not and if they found what they were looking for, if they didn’t they will bounce back. It’s an easy metric to understand and gives you a clear indication of what your site is doing right or wrong, from these figures you can make an educated decision on how you can approve things and lower your bounce rate, you can also easily track the progress of your bounce rate after the changes that you made.
Now in the age of conversions we can no longer hide behind these figures, with conversions we are totally accountable for how our site performs, how well we are interacting are traffic and how well we are getting them to take the action you want them to.
Conversions is different from site to site and will depend on what you consider to be a successful outcome from the visitors you receive, everything from an RSS feed subscriber to check out or an enquiry are all positive outcomes for your site as should be considers a conversion. Knowing how well your site is performing with these metrics should be considered important to the real success of your site and not just how many site visitors it gets per day, per week or per month.
Tracking conversions through analytics is no more than five minute process all you really need to do is tell Google which pages are important to you. Once this is done all that is then needed is a little patience until you start to see data stack up.
Once you have been able to build up enough conversion and goal data you can then start to work your way through the click paths that resulted in a conversion, you can see what content was consumed before they decided to take the required action. By doing this you will have created a number of questions for yourself, the first is what was so special about content that ended with a conversions and secondly can this formula be used in other sections of your site that are underperforming.
You can also follow the click path right back to the keywords that were used in the pages the converting traffic landed on. By doing this you are taking the guesswork out of your keyword strategy, if you know the keywords that convert isn’t it wise to spend as much time as possible trying to rank for these keywords?. Even if they do not drive any significant traffic to your site is still worth focusing on these because of their high compression rates.
what converts and what doesn’t allows you to build on your success with other sections of your site that underperform, once you can highlight a successful formula it should be relatively easy to reproduce throughout your site. It may seem a daunting task to spend your time digging through your analytics program but if you can use this data to find the missing piece of the puzzle it can prove to be the key to the ongoing success of your site.
This is a guest post by Neil Jones who is head of marketing for eMobileScan, one of Europes largest online retailers of handheld computers and barcode scanners, including the Symbol MC70 and LS2208
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