Chapter 22 - Converting Your VisitorsKey Point! Visitor Conversion Is More Important Than Web Site Track and Test, Track And Test, Track and Test& How many people are coming to your theme site? How successful have you been at using the search engines to get people to your site? I will bet you even have some basic reports on how successful you ve been. I know that the free reports in FrontPage tell me how many visitors came to my site, how many of those were repeat visitors, where they were before they visited and how long they stayed on each page. Key Point!
While these are all important to your business, your main theme site s best measure of success is its ability to convert new visitors into captured e-mail addresses. Optimize your main website for e-mail conversions. Common thinking on website design revolves around the number of return visitors and the length of time that each visitor stays on your site. Web designers will also look at which pages are visited most frequently, in relation to how the navigation is set up on the site. This is where analysis of page load times comes in, along with questions about how useable the site is. Although these measurements are important, they should always be looked at after your conversion ratio. Those traditional measurements are important if the purpose of your main site is to keep buying visitors on their very first visit. You already know from personal experience that you need too many visitors for this strategy to work. The only sale you are making is your purchase of their e-mail address. Do not forget that. Getting caught up in site reporting can lead you away from your primary goal. Your main site is there to capture e-mail addresses and search engines. Each day, week, month measure how many new e-mails you added to your contact list and where they came from. Divide the number of new contacts added to your list by the number of first-time visitors to your website. If you had 100 first-time visitors your website and your site was able to capture 25 of those visitors e-mail addresses, you had a conversion ratio of 25/100 or 25%. This is your conversion ratio. Testing and ReportingOne process, five steps, and more than 52 tactics and strategies you can apply immediately. Where should you start? Your server logs are a gold mine if you know what to look for and how to analyze the appropriate data relationships. Combined with some basic financial information, the data can produce some valuable insights. Why, without even looking at your actual site, somebody else could tell you a lot about how successful you are just by playing with these numbers. What kind of response rate can you get with this system? I do not know and you should not care. You want to test and measure your conversion rates, not response rates. There are just too many variables when it comes to response rates. Conversion rates generate income. Response rates do not. Measure what counts, not what looks good. When you turn a responder into a buyer, you have a process. If you can consistently convert traffic into dollars you have a system. If you can duplicate it, you have a gold mine. E-commerce may be a numbers game while Internet marketing for small business is a ratios game. The trick is to focus on the right numbers so that you can make accurate decisions about how to improve your site and, ultimately how good a Customer Conversion Ratio you have. The key metric you need to track as you work to increase sales is your conversion rate. My experience has been that few companies are collecting the right data or, those that do are so overwhelmed with data that they do not know what to do with it. How Often Will You TestThe best way to lower your marketing costs is to get smarter about where and when you spend your money and your time. Internet marketing makes this easy. You can track every campaign that you do. Use variations in campaigns and track which ones are most effective.
The best tool for tracking campaigns that I have found is called Hypertracker. www.hypertracker.com allows you to easily create links that are specific to individual offers. You even get notified when you want with the conversion ratios and profit for each tracked campaign. What is a good response to this system? Who cares? Focus on how effective your process is at conversion. When you know conversion ratios, it is easy to plug in numbers and get real answers. With the numbers, you know how many customers you have to put into your sales engine and exactly how much money will come out. Test and retest to maximize your conversion ratios and by default you will earn more money. Ratio ExamplesHere are some ratios that you should track. They are simple calculations that let you to know exactly how well you are doing over time. Use the ratios to make decisions about what changes you should make to your process. Customer Conversion Ratio (CCR) This is the key ratio. You get the CCR when you divide the number of orders you get by the number of unique visitors who arrive at the site. You will have a CCR for your theme site and for each mini-site. The sale that you make on the theme site is the purchase of the e-mail address. The number of actual sales is measured on each Mini-site. The CCR (also called sales closing ratio and sales closing rate) is your bottom line metric. It is an exact measure of how many of your visitors actually complete the primary action that you have set out for every website. Customer Acquisition Cost The CAC measures your cost of sales. You can get the CAC when you divide your marketing expenses by the total number of orders you receive from unique new buyers over a given time period. You want to track this ratio because the cost of acquiring a customer, or traffic to a Mini-site, is critical to improving your profitability and also your cash flow. You can include the fixed costs of your Internet marketing expenses, such as the cost of the website as well as the monthly cost of maintaining the site, or only consider promotional and/or advertising expenses. Use the approach that works best for you. Sales-Per-Visitor SPV is another great ratio to track. You can measure your sales per visitor when you divide gross sales by the total number of unique visitors. This is similar to CCR, except that instead of showing you the percentage of visitors you "close" into becoming buyers, the Sales-Per-Visitor shows you the actual average amount purchased per visitor (not per order). The SPV ratio is the key to your Pay-Per-Click strategy. If you know exactly what the sales per visitor are on one of your direct sales sites, you know exactly how much to bid on appropriate keywords. Cost-Per-Visitor For the accountant, you want to measure the CPV or cost for each visitor. To get this ratio, divide your marketing expenses (or your marketing expenses plus your web expenses) by the number of unique visitors. Cost-per-visitor measures the effectiveness of your marketing and your conversion processes. The objective is to minimize cost-per-visitor and increase sales-per-visitor. No Sale Rate: Home (or Landing) Page The NSR and ratios are used for diagnostic purposes. Making changes to text, copy and layout of a Mini-site may have consequences that were not expected. Calculate the No Sale Rate for your main theme site home page by dividing the number of one-page visits to the home page by the number of visitors entering the site through the home page. This metric is crucial; if you have time to track only one thing, track this one. You can use this ratio on any high volume page on any of your websites. It is also effective for measuring your pop-up/ pop-under pages. How many subscriptions are being submitted compared to the number of times the subscription page was served to the visitor? If visitors are not making it past the page being tracked, something is wrong. Two items come to mind with this ratio. Are the text and copy right? Is the marketing on target? If it is, then the call to action might be wrong and the visitors simply cannot understand the offer or what is being presented. Use the NSR for hunting down copy problems. The lower the percentage, the better. No Sale Rate: Theme Site This same ratio applied to every page on your theme site can provide some room for improvement. Divide the number of one-page visits to the entire site over a period of time by the total number of visitors over the same period of time. This ratio points out general flaws in the layout and navigation of your main site. When you make global design changes, pay attention to this metric and aim for the lowest possible number. Key Point! 
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