Every business owner should know the answers to the following three critical questions about their web site…
(A) How many visitors did your web site get last week?
(B) What’s your web site’s conversion rate?
(C) And what are your website’s best and most profitable sources of traffic? (Visitors.)
If you don’t know the answers to those questions — or if you don’t know what I mean by any of those phrases — then I can almost guarantee your web marketing strategy is not generating the highest levels of sales and profits.
Why?
Well, first of all, you may actually be getting visitors to your site… but it may not be doing a good job of converting them into sales-leads or customers and clients.
Or you may have an issue that’s affecting one of my mentor client’s web sites… he’s got a web site that is now converting more than 9% of his targeted traffic into sales-leads, but it appears his site is NOT getting the traffic (visitors) he or I had originally been lead to believe.
My client’s been thinking his site needs to be better at converting visitors – whereas I’ve explained that’s no longer the main issue… what he needs more urgently is to simply get more prospects (aka ‘targeted traffic’) on to it.
My client needs regional sales-leads — rather than National or International, so in his case, based on his business and budgetary constraints, I’ve recommend he starts submitting articles and press releases to local publications that are read by his target audience, runs Google Adwords with radial geographic targetting turned on, and other such tactics.
Those tactics will produce a stream of genuine prospects, not to his main site but to landing pages I’ve helped him develop.
Now prior to me getting involved he’d been sold the ‘Search Engine Optimisation dream’… he’d been told that all he needed to do was have a website that appeared highly in Google for certain phrases. Unfortunately he’s discovered that’s very much only one of many things he needs to do.
So he had invested in a website that IS appearing high on Google’s organic (free) search results, but he discovered — thanks to web statistics which he didn’t have access to before — that the traffic he was getting was mostly outside his sales region!!
Also his site is well designed and worded to appear high up in Google, for competitive search phrases… but it’s pretty much useless at getting visitors to convert into enquirers. Typical!
The thing is, without having access to quality data (web statistics), he may have continued to focus on trying to optimise his site for conversion, when in fact the main issue was that he simply needs more local traffic.
The site (or rather the popups and landing pages we’ve created recently) are doing a damn good job of capturing sales-leads and allowing him to perform e-mail marketing.
How are your statistics today?
Ed.
The good news is it doesn’t have to be complicated, time-consuming or even cost anything! For example, Google Analytics is a great free package and can be installed on just about any web site quickly and easily.
If you want to go a step further and get a solid executive grounding in web analytics and find out how to get a web marketing dashboard that allows you to do a weekly ’5 minute stats review’, check out my newly expanded Stats Faceslap! home-study programme.
It’s a 2x disc DVD programme, and comes with workbooks and downloadable templates that take you from statistical novice to analytical expert… and I guarantee you’ll never waste any more money on ineffective web marketing again!
