What better way to learn some great website optimization tips than from other experts? And I am delighted to say that I have managed to line up an interview with one of the most up and coming website optimization experts in the industry – Zack Linford of ConversionVoodoo.com. He offers some great tips and insights on their blog - and now on this interview too. So let’s get started… Continue Reading »

SEO used to be the big buzzword online. Now conversion rates have become the big buzzword lately – unfortunately though too much emphasis is now being placed on them as the main way of determining website performance and success… 

But why? Believe it or not, a conversion rate metric in isolation is actually often problematic and too subjective.

Here the main reasons why you should NOT rely solely on just one conversion rate to determine how your website is performing:

- Too often live in a vacuum with no context. A great shopping cart conversion rate means little if you have a really high homepage bounce rate, losing you many potential clients.

- No two websites are exactly the same, therefore its misleading to benchmark against other website conversion rates in your industry. Your conversion rate is unique to your website.

- Depending on how you calculate them, conversion rates can easily be manipulated. For example using unique visitors instead of visits will result in a higher conversion rate.

- Conversion rates can be manipulated easily by altering traffic flows. Eliminating poorly converting traffic is often just a band-aid – you should really optimize all your traffic sources.

So if conversion rates on their own can be this problematic, what else indicates a well optimized and well converting website? Luckily there are many other indicators that are just as important to help you understand your website’s performance.

What you should really be looking for to indicate a well optimized website:

To help website owners and marketers understand these other success indicators, I have put together a checklist of what you really should be analyzing when trying to understand how well your website performs. These success indicators vary by website type, so I have broken them down by the main types. You should aim to be achieving all of these for your website type, not just one or two. Here is the list:

E-commerce websites:

1. High percentage of repeat visits (above 50%)
2. Low bounce rate of your homepage (below 40%)
3. Low shopping cart abandonment rate (below 20%)
4. High average order value (depending on average prices)
5. Multiple products per order (at least 2.0 per order)
6. Low average number of days until purchase (lower than 7 days)
7. High total site order conversion rate (total site visits by/of orders)
8. High usage of refer-a-friend & social tools (e.g. Facebook Like or sharing)

Media/publishing websites:

1. High pageviews per visit (at least 6 PPV)
2. High percentage of repeat visits (above 50%)
3. High user initiated video views per visit (if applicable, at least 2)
4. High registration form completion rates (higher than 30%)
5. High ad revenue per page (depending on CPM & number of ads)
6. High ad revenue per visit (depending on CPM & number of ads)
7. High completion rate of newsletter sign up form (at least 50%)
8. High usage of refer-a-friend & social tools (e.g. Facebook Like or sharing)

Lead generation websites:

1. High sign-up form completion rate (higher than 50%)
2. A high total site sign-up conversion rate (total site visits by/of orders)
3. Low bounce rate of homepage (below 40%)
4. Low exit rate of sign-up page (or first page of signup flow, below 40%)
5. High whitepaper/request info form completion rate (higher than 50%)

Blogs:

1. High average time spent on site (greater than 5 minutes)
2. High average number of comments per page (more than 10)
3. High number of RSS feed/email subscribers per unique visitor
4. High pageviews per visit (at least 6 PPV)
5. High percentage of repeat visits (above 50%)
6. High usage of refer-a-friend & social tools (e.g. Facebook Like or sharing)
7. High ad revenue per visit (if revenue is part of business model)

Community/social networking websites:

1. High number of registered users (at least 1,000)
2. Low bounce rate of your homepage (lower than 30%)
3. High pageviews per visit (at least 6 PPV)
4. High number of contributions per user (at least 2.0)
5. High registration form completion rates (higher than 30%) 
6. High usage of refer-a-friend & social tools (e.g. Facebook Like or sharing)

So go ahead and check out these success indicators for your own website – you might be surprised at what you find. You now have no reason to continue to focus on conversion rates in isolation as the only way of determing how well optimized your website is and how well it performs overall. Your thoughts?

Just how good is your website at influencing and converting your many visitors? Unfortunately it’s not good enough anymore to just rely on a great looking website or having the lowest prices – you need to understand your visitors mind and influence it to the best of your ability. But how can you learn how to do that without taking a class in psychology?

One of the best ways to do this is to learn from the  principles of a true expert - Dr Robert Cialdini. He wrote an outstanding book called ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion that reveals six weapons of influence that can be used to great affect, even in the online world. The basic premise of his book is that in our increasingly complex and pressured world, we often make decisions by falling back on his six instinctive patterns – and that many smart marketers and sales people make use of these patterns to influence and convince their potential customers with great results.

Therefore, I thought I would tranlsate Robert Cialdini’s six great principles to the online world with some examples, hopefully helping you understand how you can influence your website visitors better, thus converting more of them and keeping them coming back for more (without them even realizing how you are influencing them so well!)

Let’s get started – here are his six ‘weapons of influence’ adapted by me so you can take advantage of these on your websites: Continue Reading »

I’m excited to do my first blog post in a while – it’s certainly been too long! I’ve been busier than ever, particularly with trying to help write the 2nd edition of Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization book! After going to eMetrics a few weeks ago and seeing some great new tools, I thought I would do a quick review and roundup of some newer tools that will help you to optimize and improve your website. So without further ado…

- Loop11.com  This tool is website usability testing on steroids, and allows you to determine your website visitor’s user satisfaction by asking them questions and getting them to complete tasks - essential to understand when trying optimize your website. Basically, you set up tasks for key goals on your website, and invite your visitors (via popup or email) to participate and try and complete them. An example task might be ’Find the key benefits of using our premium product’. You can then review task completion reports and come to a better understanding of task completion rate – and fix any problematic tasks users find.

Its pretty cheap too – just $350 per test and is much cheaper than traditional usability testing. And for an even more feature-rich tool in a similar vein, try using UserZoom.com which is even better, like allowing for getting written responses to tasks, but it is more expensive though.

- CodeBaby.com Nope, this has nothing to do with website development – its actually a fantastic tool for creating an interactive online spokesperson to help your website visitors find what they are looking for. This technology has been around in basic form for a few years now, but this is the best implementation I have ever seen. It allows you to customize the conversation script and its related links on each page of your website to really fine tune the help the CodeBaby offers for your website visitors. I particularly like how you can add call to action buttons for your key website goals right below your online spokesperson, so that it gives your visitors something to click on (and means users don’t even need their sound on to interact). A very clever tool indeed, and will no doubt help increase your conversion rates.

- CrossBrowserTesting.com Do you know what your website looks like on all the different combinations of browsers, different screen (resolution) sizes and different operating systems? Probably not, because the number of combinations you would have to test are mind boggling, and chances are your website might be broken in a common combination that you haven’t looked at before, thus decreasing your conversion rates without you knowing. This tool automates this checking process, and allows you to easily see if your site looks weird or breaks on different combinations, for example Mac users using FireFox 2.5 on a screen size of 1680X1200. Very cheap, at just $20 for the basic monthly plan, and is a great tool to help optimize your website performance for your visitors.

- AttentionWizard.com You only get a vital few seconds to try and engage your website visitors when they first arrive on your website. But how can you be sure their eyes  are focusing on what you want them to focus on? For example, are one of your images too distracing, or is your call to action button too small? This great new tool allows you to get a much better understanding of your visitors eye flow and what they are drawn to, and therefore discover possible issues with your website and its landing pages. It uses a proprietary eye pattern algorithm and works on live websites and even design mockups - you just upload the screenshot and it gives you an instant prediction. The best thing is that you can upload one screenshot free per day, and its pretty cheap to upload more per day ($10-25 per screenshot). Definitely money very well spent to help understand and improve your website.

- UserTesting.com This great tool is another essential for gaining true visitor insight and finding possible issues with your website. Similar to Loop11 and UserZoom in the sense that you create tasks for your visitors to try and complete, but this goes a great step further. It actually allows you to cherry pick your website testers based on their demographics or website habits, and records their interaction with your website and their attempts at completing your website key tasks – mouse clicks, voice commentary and all. It’s also very cheap – if you get a minimum of three users to test, prices are as low as $29 per user. Go ahead and spend $90 bucks on this tool to get 3 great videos of user’s interactions with your website, and their task completion experiences – its truly eye opening and will be one of the best $90 you ever spent on your website to help improve it.

Hopefully you discovered a few tools that you hadn’t heard of before – ideally your site should be making use of all these tools to make the biggest impact regarding your website optimization efforts. Oh, and I promise not to leave it so long before writing a new blog post!