Do you know how effective your web site is at converting visitors into customers or clients? If not, you’re severely limiting your web site’s ability to increase sales and add value to your business.
Conversion rate is one of the most important measurements of web site effectiveness. Here’s a simple 4-step process to calculate it:
(1) Log into your web statistics facility.
(2) Set the date range to cover the last four weeks.
(3) Get the ‘Total Unique Visitors’ (TUV)
(4) Divide the total sales your site generated in the same 4 week period by the TUV and multiply by 100.
We should take a lot more into account, but the result (expressed as a percentage) is a rough indication of your web site’s ability to convert visitors. (E.g. If your site had 100 visitors last month and generated 5 sales, that’s a 5% conversion rate.)
But were you actually able follow the above steps?
If your web site is like many, then you either:
(a) Don’t have web statistics installed (or don’t know how to access it).
(b) Or don’t know how many sales your site actually generates.
If you don’t have access to any web statistics then you can’t improve your site. If this applies to you, let’s fix (a) right now.
Start measuring your vital online statistics.
It only takes a few minutes to add web statistics to your site. Even sites with hundreds of pages can have statistics added quickly and easily.
And it doesn’t have to cost a penny.
To start with, if you have a Google Adwords account, check out their free ‘Google Analytics’ tool.
It’s comprehensive, and gives you almost any statistic you could ask for. (I wouldn’t be surprised if it starts revealing your visitors inside leg measurements soon.)
They provide detailed (but simple) instructions on how to add that to your site.
If you don’t have a Google Account, check out StatCounter.com (or similar services). It’s free for small business web sites, and does a great job of showing you what’s really happening behind the scenes.
Implement systems to measure web-based sales.
The second problem above (not knowing exactly how many sales your site generates) affects most sites that are not e-commerce based or accepting online orders in some way.
Luckily, it’s also easy to fix.
If you run a service company and get telephone enquiries and orders then you should always ask callers “where they heard about you?”
Whether enquiries and orders come in over the phone, via email or some other method — once you have systems that show if those are the direct result of people visiting web site, you’ll be able to include that fact when you enter data into your company database.
Then you can run reports telling you how many enquiries (or actual sales) your web site generated in any given period.
When you know how sales (or sales lead your site generated) over a given period, and how many people in total were on your web site in the same period… only then are you in a position to improve things.
Remember the old maxim: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
I’ll explain how to use this data to optimise your site in 3 powerful ways soon.
-Ed.
