How to improve your conversion rate

In this article we will give you a list of tips to help you increase the conversion rate of your site. If at this point you are not certain what the term conversion rate means you can find an article we did on this subject here: Conversions? What does this mean for my website?

• Offer your customers a toll-free number to call you. Some visitors will prefer to call you but it also gives your visitors more confidence that you are legitimate and they can always reach you.
• Make sure you are reaching the right people. If you are selling shoes and are advertising shirts you are not likely to get much conversions.
• Reassure your visitors you will handle their information with care and will never spam them or sell their personal information.
• Use third party certificates (VeriSign, Thawte, etc.) to show your visitor he can trust you.
• Make sure you have a privacy statement and create clear links to it.
• Make sure you have your companies address on your site. This will show your visitor you will not hide from him.
• If you have any and think it is apropriate for your business use customer testimonials. Never use fake information but use real customer testimonials. If you have satisfied customers it shouldn't be hard to get a few.
• Make sure you have an "About us" section on your site with information about your company. Preferably have a picture with the actual people working there as this makes your company more personal.
• Make sure you site is easy to use and your visitors do not have to search for your "call to action" buttons.
• Provide clear and attractive photos of your products. Remember your customers cannot touch and examine the product before buying and only have the photo to see what the product looks like.
• Make sure your checkout process is as easy as possible. Remove any elements that might throw off a user or confuse them.
• Offer your customers the option to automatically copy their contact information in case billing and shipping address are the same.
• Show your customers how many steps your checkout process contains and at which step they are at the moment.
• Perfom a spelling check on your site. Having spelling errors may look unprofessional.
• Make sure your visitors do not need to install any additional software in order to be able to use your site.
• Identify your unique selling points (USP's) and make sure you are communicating them to your visitors.
• Make sure you communicate your products benefits aswell as their features.
• Make sure your customer knows exactely what each product costs before he finishes the checkout process
• Test if having free shipping has a positive effect on your sales.
• If you sell items that can go out of stock make sure you display if the item is in stock at the moment of purchase by the visitor.
• Display the expected delivery time. Delivery can also be an USP in case you ship very fast or to locations your competition does not ship to.
• Offer your visitors the posibility to buy on your site without having to register first.
• When placing links on your site try and use text in form of an action. For example: in stead of having a link: "Privacy statement" make one that says "Read the privacy statement".
• If you offer a large amount of products make sure you offer ways of sorting and searching.
• If applicable try to provide a way to compare diferent products.
• If you offer only one option don't make the visitor have to select it but don't offer the option or auto select it.
• If you have special offers or a sale promote it so your visitors are aware of it.
• If you offer payment using creditcard make sure you use a secure connection.
• If you offer payment using creditcard make sure your form allows every possible form a creditcard number can be written and offer explenation about the security code(Where to find it etc.)
• Consider placing a link "Click here for help with your order" and having it link to additional information about your order process and contact information.

Compare page performance to your site average

When trying to make sence of the statistics for your site most of the time you are looking at the statistics of individual pages and checking their performance over a specific time period. But sometimes a lot can be learned from comparing it to your site's average.

Let´s say you are looking at the "Content by Title" overview in Google Analytics. You see information regarding "pageviews", "time on site" and "bounce rate" for each page. This is usefull information but you would like to compare these pages to eachother in order to find out if some stand out in either a negative or positive way. And you would like to know how these pages perform against your site´s average.

Click on . This graph shows you the selected metric of each of the pages compared to your site´s average. This gives you a good idea if there are any anomalies you should pay attention to.

The graph contains two dropdown lists you can use to select diferent metrics. In the first dropdown you can select a metric to sort your results by. The second dropdown lets you select the metric you want to compare.

This image shows an overview of bouncerates sorted by pageviews. You can clearly see there are two pages that have a relative high bouncerate compared to the site's average and these may need attention.

Interesting statistics to look at in this manner are for example:

• Time on page: Which of your pages are beeing visited longer and which shorter?
• Bounce rate: Which differences can you spot compared to site average?

How can I see if my CPC is too high in Google AdWords?

If you are running an Adwords campaign you know you are constantly managing your keyword's maximum CPC in order to keep your ad running in the top positions. But how can you decide what is the best value for Max. CPC?

When starting a new ad you decide the maximum price you are willing to pay for clicks for each of the used keywords. The price has to be above a minimum price which depends on the amount of other advertisers using the same keyword. If your bid is below this minimum you will be notified of this so you can increase your price.

Once your ad is running and you start getting clicks you can see how well your ad is doing and on which position your ad is showing. If your ad is performing well and has a high clickthrough rate your ad will be shown on a higher position. If your clickthrough rate is lower then the ads of your competitors your ad will be shown on a lower position. To get your ad to show higher than your competitors ad you can try to increase the clickthrough rate or bid a higher price.

You can raise and lower your CPC's by trial and error but there is a way to check what the expected CPC for a keyword is. You can do this as follows:

• Click on "Tools" and then "Keyword tool"
• Perform a search for the keyword you want to check

You now see a list of keywords related to the one you searched for. To see the CPC prices fill in a value for Max. CPC and click "Recalculate"

Now you will see estimated CPC and Ad position.


You can use this information to see if the CPC you are paying is in range of these prices. If your price is a lot higher you could try and lower your price. Experiment with diferent maximum prices and check the amount of expected clicks. If the clicks stay high enough you can try and lower your max. CPC.

Get more traffic through Google Adwords

A quick and guaranteed way to get traffic to your website is by using Google AdWords. Although this service is not free you are guaranteed to get traffic and you get to specify how much you are willing or able to pay for it.

Advertising with Adwords

Adwords allows you to create advertising campaigns which can start to run as soon as you finish creating your campaign. Adwords allows you to create various types of campaigns and offers a lot of ways to target your ads so you can better reach your desired audience. In a later article we will discuss the various targeting options that are offered but for now we will discuss the basic principals of advertising with Google AdWords.

Creating your advertisment

Adwords offers various types of ads you can create which include audio ads and ads in printed media but for this article we will stick to online advertising using text ads. Text ads consist of a title and two lines of text and are shown above and to the right of search results when searching on Google. Optional your ad can also be shown on relevant websites in the content network.

Adplacement options

Placing your ad on Google search results page
This is probably the best way to target your ad at a specific audience. You select keywords which are most relevant to your ad and when users search on Google using these keywords your ad is shown. You don't pay for the times your ad is shown, just for the times people click on your ad.

Placing your ad on other sites
You can have your ad placed on other sites within Google's content network. This network consists of websites which have implemented Google Adsense code. Based on the websites content Google desides if a site is relevant to your ad and they show the ad on the site.

• The content network offers large amounts of expected views of your ad but click rates may be lower
  
• The average Cost per Click is usually lower for content advertising than search advertising
• Traffic is less targeted advertising on the content network which means more chance of reaching the wrong audience
  

Advertising costs

Ad prices are based on Cost Per Click(CPC) where you pay for each click that is generated by the ad. In Adwords you can specify a maximum price you are willing to pay. Prices vary and depend on the keyword and amount of competition the keyword has. Competition in this case means the amount of other advertisers using this same keyword. Although there are some other factors that determine the price for a keyword you can say that the more advertisers there are using the same keyword the higher the price.

You specify a maximum budget you are prepared to spend on advertising and Adwords will show your ad until your budget is reached. This ensures you will never pay more than the maximum you specified which makes it a relative save way to advertise on the internet.

Google Adwords: Adwords.google.com
Help with Adwords campaigns: mexmax-internet.com

My site has a high bounce rate, what do I do?

Bounce rate is an important statistic to keep an eye on as it can tell you a lot about your pages and visitors. The bounce rate shows the percentage of users that leave your site after watching only one page. You might say they just bounced of your site as they didn't get past the first page.
The most prominent reasons for having a high bounce rate are:

• you are attracting the wrong visitors or
• there is a problem with your site

What you can do to lower the bounce rate

Try and identify pages in your site that have the highest bounce rate and do the following:

• Check if there are any errors on the page
• Check if there are internal links(links to other pages of your site) on the page
• Check if the internal links on the page are sufficiently clear and attractive

Besides checking your site you can also check to see if you can find more information about the visitors that bounced of.

• Through which external link did visitors come to this page
• Check which keywords were used to find this page and see if the page is relevant to those keywods
• If visitors came from your Adwords or other advertising campaign check if the page is sufficiently relevant to the keywords and text of the campaign.

The above video is a very interesting explanation of what bounce rate is and how you can use it to find problems on your site.

Conversions? What does this mean for my site?

You may have heard the term "Conversions" or "Conversion rate" being mentioned in regards to a website's performance. What do these terms mean and how can you use them to improve your website?

If you already have a website or are thinking about creating a new website you know that your site has a specific goal or a set of goals. If you have a site just because you want to have a website this article is not for you. A goal could be to sell products but it could also be to generate interest in your services and have potential customers contact you. You create your site in such a manner that it will help achieve this goal. You present your products in such a manner that it will lead to a sale, or so you think.

It is very important to measure your websites traffic but even more important to be able to analyze the data in such a manner that it tells you if your site needs improving or not. This is where "Conversions" come into play. The term "Conversion rate" is described as: "The percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting the website"(Wikipedia). So this means the amount of visitors that came to your site and completed one of your website's goals. So a conversion occurs when a visitor to your site "converts" himself from a regular visitor to one that fullfills one of your goals. For example a visitor orders a product. At the moment he orders a product he creates a conversion.

By keeping track of your conversions you will be able to find out which percentage of visitors converts and therefor which percentage of visitors is of value to you and generates revenue. You can use this information to set up an online advertising campaign or use it to further finetune your website in order to increase your website's conversionrate.

Hello and welcome to this blog. Just a quick post to introduce this blog before we get started.

This blog will contain helpfull articles for webmasters in the process of creating a new website or optimizing their current website.

We will cover subjects like SEO(Search Engine Optimization), promoting your website and how to measure website performance, helpfull tools you can use and lot´s of tips and tricks.