Just because you have a website, does not mean that you will automatically have lots of traffic and your conversions and sales will skyrocket accordingly.
This is one of the major mistakes that many business owners make. They think that their website will naturally attract lots of visitors and all they have to do is count the money. However, as with all marketing strategies, you need to know how much of a return your website is generating and then be able to make changes to your campaigns or your website, based on these results.
Web analytics is one of the best ways to truly understand your website’s visitors, but many business owners ignore this valuable tool. In fact, one of the more common myths is that the higher the number of visitors to your website, the better your ROI.
This is not necessarily so, because what you really need are targeted visitors, people who are ready to buy and have their credit card in their hand. How do you find these visitors? Well you work smart and use an analytics package that will give you the information you need.
You can access the total number of visitors to your site and the number of unique visitors as well. The difference is that one visitor may visit your site multiple times, inflating the total number of visitors. So it helps to know how many unique visitors actually visit your site. With this knowledge, you can look at the number of successful events taking place on your website.
This is a count of the number of call-to-actions that have taken place on your website. These events can be anything from subscribing to your email list, downloading a free document, contacting your business via your contact form or purchasing a product or service. If you compare the number of events with the number of unique visitors, you can determine whether you need to rethink how you target customers or whether you are already successful in this area.
If you know how visitors are referred to your website, you can better target your campaigns. For example, if visitors are referred via an organic search, what keywords did they use? You might well find that you are ranking for keywords that you were not aware of and have not utilised on your site. So armed with these new keywords you can optimise a new or current page on your website and further increase your visitors and conversions. On the other hand, if a large number of visitors are referred from another website, maybe a review site or a blog, then you might be able to contact the owners and offer a discount to anyone who is referred from that website.
Knowing which pages visitors land on, how long they stay on certain pages, the way they navigate through your website and the where they exit your site can give you vital information to help improve your web content. For example, if visitors do not complete transactions or they leave before performing your call-to-actions, you can track where the problems are occurring and make positive changes to fix these problems. Alternatively, you might find that visitors stay on one or two pages longer than normal and then go ahead and make a purchase. Armed with this information you can identify what is working on those pages and repeat this strategy on other pages on your website.
In conclusion, it will take some time to understand Google Analytics, but if you are a business owner with a clear focus on the bottom line, the results are definitely worth the effort.
If you need help increasing conversions on your website, contact us on 02 8097 7957, email us at info@flowinteractive.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.
