web site conversion rate optimization    

What is your Web site conversion rate? The sad reality is that most businesses don't know. They don’t even know what a conversion rate is? Of those that do know, it's usually very low with about a 1 - 2% conversion rate (the number of actions or sales you get from a website). That means that for every hundred unique visitors to your Web site, only one or two actually take the desired action you want.

The sad reality is most web sites never really gave this much thought, let alone measured the conversion rate process. They never made a plan for visitors to sign up for a newsletter, find relevant information, or buy the product. So the web designer never took precise actions to manage and improve the conversion rate.

 How well do you understand your web metrics? Do they create actionable items you can use to effectively improve the visitor's experience on your website?

Landing page optimization is no longer just a buzzword - it is a requisite for anyone who wants to achieve optimum conversion rates on their web site. Whether you are utilizing organic search engine optimization (SEO) or pay per click (PPC) advertising, you cannot afford to leave the optimization process to the ¨will of the gods¨.

 Optimizing the entry points to your web site has been proven to be successful in increasing your conversion rates and improving the return on your investment (ROI). Google's Website Optimizer makes it possible for anyone to start testing the effectiveness of their Website.

Google's Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use tool for testing web page content that delivers results!

 Results, you can act upon immediately and will help you improve the ROI of your Web marketing efforts. It provides three primary benefits.

1. Using this incredible tool enables you to get direct feedback from visitors to your Website.
2. Testing makes it easy to increase the conversion rate of your landing pages making them more effective to both you and your prospects.
3. Using the Website Optimizer enables you to eliminate the guesswork when trying out new content. It helps you find out what leads visitors to the most conversions. This tool provides several clear reports that will tell you what works best.

In order to get started with the Google Website Optimizer, you must first sign up for a free Google Analytics account. Website Optimizer uses the same powerful tracking technology used in Google Analytics to collect experiment data. However, you will not need to interact with the analytics to use the Website Optimizer. Also, using Google Analytics will not interfere with the use of any other tracking software you might use. Click here for an overview of the Google Website Optimizer Overview. Or click here for the Google Website Optimizer User Guide.

The Google Website Optimizer is available in two versions. For smaller sites that receive less than 1000 unique visitors per week, they offer A/B Testing to compare two different versions of the same page to see which one performs better. For sites who receive more than 1000 unique visitors per week, they offer Multivariate Testing which allows you to manipulate multiple variables on the same page.

So how should you develop your testing strategy? What sort of things should you be testing? You should test for things such as 'time on page' as a conversion goal. Tracking movement beyond the landing page, experiment with site-wide changes, counting conversion when a link is clicked or a form is submitted, or old versus new website designs. Following are some tips to keep in mind as you begin to utilize the Google Website Optimizer.

1. Test a page that gets a lot of traffic
2. Test only a few things at first
3. Choose a high-volume conversion goal
4. Be bold or Go home
5. Carefully plan your combination
6. Use a control page to benchmark against
7. Consider your traffic volumes
8. Test and evaluate, and repeat multiple times

Ongoing testing is critical to improving your conversion ratio. Never assume you've optimized any of your pages to the best they can be. The Internet is a very fluid environment, and what works well today may not next week or next month or next year

Website conversion rate optimization is without a doubt the most important activity in which a website owner can invest their time and energy. Knowing how many visitors to your website actually take action - and take the action you want them to, is imperative to increasing your return on investment (ROI).

How well do you understand your web metrics? Do they create actionable items you can use to effectively improve the visitor's experience on your website? Web analytics software has been around since the early 2000´s and has continually improved over that time.

With studies now showing that  Google has garnered 45% of all organic search traffic and even more with its Adwords service, Google strives to ensure that all users of its search services - both organic and sponsored have a pleasant experience. To that end, they have created a wealth of resources for website owners to build on. Resources that are friendly, relevant, and easy to navigate. For the technical people they have created Webmaster Tools. These tools help you see how Google sees the pages of your website, so that you can diagnose and resolve problems that are preventing your pages from being indexed properly.

You can view, organize, and download extensive data about external links to your site with new link reporting tools as well as see how your internal linking is viewed by Google. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there. You can also tell Google about your pages by submitting Google Sitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let them know how you would like the URLs they index to appear.  There are  free tools such as XML-sitemaps  that help you to generate your sitemap to submit to Google.

In order to implement website conversion rate optimization, you need to develop intelligent strategies to help keep website visitors on track through your conversion funnel. By measuring the results of those strategies, you can accurately measure their effectiveness. In order to impact the profitability of your website, you need metrics that can measure the behavior of visitors to your site and how your actions changed their behavior.

You need details that essentially say "Fix this" and your visitors will view more pages or purchase more products. Often the one element that  needs fixing, is the number of clicks it takes for customers to buy your product or service - particularly on commerce sites, typically, the fewer the better. Did you realize that Amazon patented their '1-click Checkout' process? They realized why so many e-tailers lose customers in the checkout process - too long and tedious checkout process.

Fortunately, there are a number of web analytics tools available on the market that there is no excuse for not using one of them. If cost is a major factor, then why not utilize Google Analytics tools? Developed initially for their sponsored advertising clients, this tool will now monitor all activity on your website - regardless of where it came from.

Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn where your visitors come from, and how they interact with your site. It’s an easy to use program that improves your results online! It can help you develop better content, write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners
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If you would like to talk with us about any of these Google tools and how they can help your business, call us at 1-800-883-6198 or contact us support@strategic-internet.com, or use our online contact form to have us contact you.