What is a conversion rate? A conversion rate is the number of times (or unique times) a website visitor carries out an action that often influences your bottom line (ie - profit).

If you can get more of your customers to convert you will effectively make more money.

How To Do It

Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to find problem areas on your site.  Look at site areas that are problematic by analyzing bounce rates, exit rates and abondonment pages.

More info: http://www.google.com/analytics

Feedback Analytics

Google Analytics only allows your to find problem areas on the site.  You often need to do some form of user testing or get customer feedback to find the solution to the problem areas on the site.

Something like: http://www.kampyle.com/

Website Optimizer

Google provide a multivariate testing and a/b tool which will allow you to test your potential solutions, in realtime on your website.  By testing out your different ideas (often contributed to by the means of user testing / detailed analysis) on your website visitors - you will often find a page that converts better than the original.

More info: http://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt

Google Adwords

Lots of people leave “money on the table” with Google Adwords.  Once a campaign is making money and is optimized with regards to ROI and profitability - you should reinvest this money into Google Adwords.  Find more traffic that is looking for your services and analyze using analytics.

More info: http://www.google.com/adwords

Need Help?

Need proffessional help?  Take a look at Google’s new GCP partner program: http://www.google.co.uk/gcp

photo credit: Danard Vincente

A simple post this one - simply to find the opinions of other internet webmasters, marketers and entrepreneurs (or whatever your job may be :)) FYI - This post is not suggesting in any way that website traffic for this blog is dropping. Infact, it is growing! :)  Have you visited our forum?

I work on many websites, some belonging to myself, others not.  Across certain sites I have noticed that website traffic is generally dropping off.  “Your SEO is crap!” I hear you say - but no - it doesn’t.  If you use Google Analytics and the various segmentation tools that are available, you will see that just about all traffic sources are dropping of.  Services/Brand names especially seem to be dropping, this is not to mention referring and direct traffic.  Is this because budgets are being cut in marketing where budget would otherwise be put?

As a side note - check out the new enterprise features (including Advanced Segmentation) that is now available in Google Analytics.

Have you noticed any trends in website traffic dropping?

Its a simple post this one but one simply to capture people’s views and input.  I look forward to your responses.

PS: If the answer is no to the above - do you think the recession will hit the web at some point?

photo credit: eduardoizquierdo

Ask yourself: What is your website conversion? The answer should be something that impacts your bottom line.

Well, OK….what is my bottom line? An event on your website that produces revenue or contributes to the success of your website.

For some websites a conversion is much more tangible than others.  For example; a conversion for an e commerce site is quite simple; a sale.  A conversion of my blog could perhaps be a blog registration, time spent on site or somebody to comment on my blog post.

Bearing this in mind, how easy is it for your obtained traffic to carry out an event on your website that results in a conversion?  Is there a path for visitors to follow?  Do you reasure your visitors? Why are you better than your competitors?

Following on from the above; consider the following steps:

1. Install Google Analytics on your website and identify your website conversions.  Configure these as goals.
2. Do all the usual SEO procedures and techniques.  Title tags, heading one tags, link building etc…
3. Monitor the results of your SEO in Google Analytics.  What is working?  What is not working?
4. Move away from using a “rear view mirror” and use Google Analytics to influence change on your website.
5. Test your website using Google Website Optimizer.  Are the visitors finding your conversion point ultimately impacting your bottom line?

Ask yourself: what is my website conversion? Can people easily find my conversion point?  Do I provide them a simple map to the treasure?

Tackle this problem and you’ve identified how to maximise website conversions without obtaining any new traffic.

photo credit: CLF

Google Analytics, by default uses cookies to recognise traffic sources.  For example, in Google AdWords you may run multiple advert groups, advert campaigns and keywords.  Google Analytics detects this information by passing certain parameters to Google Analytics.

Fact: What people don’t know is that Google Analytics can be configured to measure email campaigns, radio, television and just about any source of website traffic.  Google Analytics is not just made for AdWords - it is an enterprise tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of all traffic sources.

Google Analytics provide a tool which allows you to measure all of the above - and it looks exactly like any other traffic source - except grouped into criteria you wish to report on.

For the purpose of this post - I am going to focus on Google Analytics tracking email campaigns.  I send regular mailings - I want to see if they actually give me any ROI.

In order to pass Google Analytics details of your email campaign - you need to understand the following:

Campaign Source: (referrer: google, citysearch, newsletter4)
Campaign Medium: (marketing medium: cpc, banner, email)
Campaign Term: (identify the paid keywords)
Campaign Content: (use to differentiate ads)
Campaign Name: (product, promo code, or slogan)

The above items are the parameters used by Google Analytics that identify and monitor specific traffic sources.  You pass these parameters via the URL.  If my email were to contain specific links - I would tag these links with the parameters above and Google Analytics would automatically monitor the traffic source.

For the example of a newsletter,  I would use the following:

Campaign Source: February 09 Launch Newsletter
Campaign Medium: Email

In my Google Analytics report - I would then see the above campaign details and I would be able to look at the visitor of these users in isolation from other website traffic using advanced segmentation (I will cover this in another post).  You can build the parameters using the Google Analytics URL Builder Tool.  The result of the above and using the tool would result in:

http://www.tdcreative.net/?utm_source=February%2B09%20Launch%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email

Obviously - for a TV or radio advert you can’t tell your listeners / watchers to type in all the parameters.  There is another way around it…I will see if anybody can hazard a guess as to how to do this!  Hey…I like setting challenges!

If you haven’t already - you should be using the new Google Analytics code (which looks something like the following).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js'
type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The new version has many new features (which I am not going into in this post) - but it allows you to use a function we need to track blog comments (namely an onclick event).

Install Google Analytics

Firstly, make sure the Google Tracking Code is on all pages.  You can do this by editing your themes footer.php file.  Simply paste the Google Code before </body>.  But you’re not done yet.  You need to edit wp-login.php.  Search for </body> and before every instance add your Google code here too.  This will put tracking not only on your blog contents, but also registration and various front end forms too.

Configure Goal Tracking For Blog Registrations

You are now ready to configure Google Analytics to track goal actions on your blog.  To start with, we will setup the goal for a user registration.  Remember the additional code we added to wp-login.php?  This is where it comes into use.  Create a conversion goal based on the screenshot below.  I always give a goal conversion like this a value of 1 - due to reporting and keyphrase / traffic reports - which assigns a calculated money value field to various keywords and traffic sources to work out profitable items.

To make sure this goal is only counted when people register (and not just visit the page), add the following funnel configuration too;

There we have it.  If you leave this goal running for a while - you will be able to see exactly what keywords / traffic sources are driving registrations - and infact - whether your registrations are growing or falling…

Configure Analytics For Blog / Page Comments

The new version of Google Analytics allows us to track onclick events.  Every comments box has a submit button or image.  We can track when this button is clicked using Google Analytics.  To get your head around this concept, we setup what we call a virtual page view (a page that doesnt actually exist - the submit button) and we link this virtual page view to a goal in Analytics.

The first thing to do is edit your themes template file - namely comments.php.  Unfortunately, you will need a little bit of HTML knowledge to find the HTML code for the submit/image button.  Once you have located this, add the following code to the input object;

onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/goal/wordpress.html’);”

Thats it! Now - everytime the submit button is pressed on the comments form - analytics will log that /goal/wordpress.html has been visited.  This leaves the logical conclusion to add a goal conversion to this page.  See the screenshot below on how to do this;

All done.

Thats all there is too it.  You have now setup goal tracking on your wordpress blog.

Feel free to discuss this post in the web developer forum we have on TD Creative.  I look forward to your comments.