Get More from Your
Website Visitorsby Steve Lionais
You’ve heard that It costs 10 times more to attract a new customer than retain an existing one. It applies to web sites too. Chances are that most of your site’s existing traffic is not adding an item to a shopping cart, filling out a contact form, or signing up to your newsletter. 

How can you improve the effectiveness of your website? 

First, identify the pages or steps that have the most influence on your success measures. If you have an e-commerce site this is your shopping cart process. If you have a B2B focused site it’s probably your ‘Contact Us’ page, for a publishing site it may be your newsletter sign-up, and for any site it is your home page.

The next step is to ensure you’re measuring appropriate key performance indicators such as the conversion rate of your site’s goals, pages per visit, and the bounce rate of your home page. (All of these stats are easily configured and tracked using software like Google Analytics.) Finally you want to make changes to these key pages to improve these metrics. 

The changes you should make are up to you to decide. But as a good marketer you should be measuring the impact of each change in isolation against a control in order to accurately measure the impact of the change. This process is called A/B testing. Once you are satisfied an improvement has been made, make another change & measure. Over time you will systematically improve the performance of your website.  

Next month I’ll delve deeper into A/B testing & multivariate testing processes including software that can be used to automate the testing process.