Tracking and Analysis Make Your Website Work Harder

Even if your website does not have e-commerce functionality, it still must have 'salability' - the ability to create the desired response from its visitors. If your company has developed a solid web strategy, you already know whether the desired transaction (or conversion) is online sales, potential customer inquiries or getting visitors to become registered users. With these objectives predetermined, it becomes easier to identify where a website is successful and what areas need improvement.

Search Engine Optimization

First and foremost, user tracking and analysis should be built into your online marketing program in order to identify these areas. It is foolish to invest significant resources in a website only to walk away from it without evaluating its performance on an ongoing basis.

A 'hands off' approach can only hurt your company's chances of future growth, whereas continual monitoring and user feedback can identify new opportunities.

Online Sales - What's the Problem? You've built the store and are still waiting for the orders to start flooding in. The first question to ask is whether or not the right customers are finding your site. Have you optimized your site for the search engines by using keyword-rich copy? Have you listed your site with the key directories: Yahoo, LookSmart, and the Open Directory Project? If not, then you need to start here.

SEO Packages

Writing for the web is difficult - not only must your copy include your key search terms, but it must also convince the user to buy products from your site. If the first pages visitors see do not immediately make clear the benefits of buying from your site, then they are likely to leave before ever finding your order page. Here's where your website's traffic statistics come into play - how many visitors get to your order page compared to the homepage? If the number is considerably lower, then visitors have determined you don't have what they want or the copy did not convince them to buy.

Now let's look at the buying process:
* Can visitors buy in 5 clicks or less?
* How many visitors get to the order page and buy?
* How can you streamline the buying process?
* What incentives can you offer buyers?
* Are your prices competitive?


The standard e-commerce conversion rate of visitors to buyers is reported at 3-5%, yet judging your site's performance by those numbers can be especially difficult if you are in a niche or highly competitive market. Understanding user behavior on your site and analyzing feedback from customers can drive successful changes to your site functionality. Case studies show simple modifications to order forms and sales copy results in significantly improved conversion rates - as much as 25%. If yours is a dynamic website, making products within the database available to search engines allows those users looking for a product by name or model number to find it on your website.

Registered Users
Whether you're an e-commerce site or not, an effective way of attracting repeat visitors is by creating a free or paid membership program. In the case of an e-commerce enterprise, asking users to register for a free membership provides a pre-qualified email list of potential buyers to which email newsletters showcasing new site features or special offers can be sent. By creating your own targeted opt-in email list, you have an engaged audience who has already established a level of trust in your products or services and will return higher response rates than a non-targeted list.

Paid memberships are most effective with services publishing a high-quality newsletter that offers in-depth information for a highly interested audience. Can you offer your current customer base any value-added services via email? Is there an opportunity to create a subscription-based, password-protected area of additional content covering industry specific information and topics? Either of these options would require significant employee resources to maintain a regular update schedule and produce quality content that meets subscribers' expectations. However, you may be able to efficiently develop the content needed by way of other materials that are produced in normal workflow. If your business is seeking an added revenue stream, you might consider setting up one of these programs to attract both new and repeat users to your website.

Customer Inquiries
Most traditional businesses simply use their website as online collateral describing services offered, encouraging users to contact the company for details. In this case, a successful site will draw qualified users based on the content within the page, which should be optimized with key industry search terms. Placement in appropriate industry directories and portals will further increase chances of being found by interested users. Ideally, the website will drive potential customers to call you for more information, yet will educate users enough to minimize time spent on sales calls. Again, tracking mechanisms should be in place to allow your business to effectively calculate ROI for costs spent on building and marketing your website. Each sales call should collect information about how the user found the site and what they were looking for, even if they did not find the desired product or service. Mining this type of data will not only provide new ideas to make the website perform better, but also identify new opportunities for business growth overall.

Increasing Salability
If you can identify areas in the above scenarios where your company is not achieving maximum performance, it's time to revisit your online marketing strategy. Start by reviewing the competitive marketplace and look for potential growth areas. Review your content:

- does it need updating? Does it reflect company goals and reach the desired audience? Do you know if the right people finding your website and how are they reacting to it? Solutions to these types of issues range from simple changes to complete website overhauls; however, long-term success comes from continually analyzing and improving overall performance.