How to Improve Conversion Rates:
How to Improve Conversion Rates
and Reduce the Costs of Customer Acquisition
Getting traffic to your website is just one part of your marketing
effort. Once your visitors arrive there, you must still convert them to
buyers, or you’ve just wasted your advertising dollars. In order to
recognize how you can improve your conversion rates, you have to figure
out why the unresponsive segment of your visitors aren’t purchasing.
That’s where testing and tracking come in they identify areas needing
improvement and reveal which improvements actually produce a better
response.
You Can’t Test What You Can’t See Tracking is the beginning, according to
successful internet marketer David Bullock, of DavidBullock.com. Tracking
means observing what’s happening on your site, explains Bullock. You’re
looking at how many people are hitting particular pages, how long they’re
staying, where they’re leaving, and so on. Tracking basically shows you
where your marketing dollars are paying off, and where you need to begin
making changes.
A Difference You Can Spend Testing is the process of implementing those
changes and analyzing the results. There are several different kinds of
testing you can use:
Split testing involves comparing one element of your site versus another,
against a stream of traffic. For example, you might create two identical
PPC ads, each leading to a particular landing page on your web site, but
with one page slightly different than the other. You can use this
approach to test sales copy, headings, images, placement, even pricing
anything you can see on a page can be tested.
Multivariate testing involves comparing multiple items and combinations
of items. You’re looking to see how consumers will respond to a
particular page rendered in a particular way.
The Taguchi method of testing is a complex, but highly accurate form of
multivariate testing. It involves using 18 different landing pages, or
creative elements, to simulate 4,000 different tests. The background math
tells you, not only which combination works best, but also which elements
on the page are most influential, so you know where to concentrate your
efforts.
However, it’s important to understand that testing is not a magic bullet
to get the best results, you must input good content and design to start
with.
In the last few years, tracking and testing have gone from being limited
in scope and cost- prohibitive to being thorough, accurate, and readily
accessible. Google Analytics has made Urchin software available for free,
and numerous tools like ClickTracks, Optimos, and Vertster are capable of
giving your eBiz a new level of transparency. This is great news for your
online business you can now see exactly how different creatives are
impacting your profits.
Putting Your Knowledge to Good Use The effectiveness of testing has been
proven in every area of eBiz from web design to SEO and PPC efforts to
page sequencing. It allows you to break down the sales process and
pinpoint how customers are reacting to the individual elements. You can
even test how traffic arriving from one marketing channel behaves versus
traffic from another channel, so you can optimize your landing pages for
your individual marketing campaigns.
However, as Bullock cautions, all that potential does you no good if you
don’t put it to use. The first step to improving your conversion rates
and profitability is to get some sort of tracking mechanism on your web
site. Once you understand how people are moving through your site, you
can begin to see areas where you can improve and start testing. Advises
Bullock, Let your customers tell you what they want to see the results
will pay for themselves.
As writers and hosts of Product Sourcing Radio and our many alliances in
the eCommerce industry we always run into very interesting eBiz
Solutions.
