But unfortunately many companies launch a website, and then begin marketing it. What they have done in essence is make their website another product that they need to promote. Your website should do the marketing for your company, not the other way around.

So when developing your website expect it to help grow and increase your exposure as you constantly create and publish high-value content that your customers or clients would love, therefore over time gaining backlinks and growing your search engine rankings, and therefore your leads or sales.

By performing two simple tasks you can go a long way towards making your website work for you. First of all, as I mentioned above, make sure that it contains compelling, valuable content for your visitors to read, and then ensure that search engines can crawl and index it as effectively as possible.

Then work on getting other sites to link to you. The more popular the site linking to you is, the better your traffic will be for a couple of reasons. The search engines award high rankings to sites that are linked to by a diverse range of other sites.

Even though your website is unique to your product or service, there are good design practices that should be implemented on all successful websites. Obviously your target customer and your product dictate a lot about the form and function of your website, but there are certain characteristics that most successful websites share. Some of these main points are discussed below.

Home Page
You home page is like the reception area for your business. It is the first impression that a customer gets when they enter your site. A visitor may find your website through another page with the help of a search engine, but it is the front door to your online business. As such, you need it to do a good job of representing you and it should make the customer want to continue deeper into your website and hopefully do business with you.

Not only is your site’s home page a visitor’s first impression of your online business, but it should also accomplish a few goals, namely:

• Display Branding – Your site’s home page should reinforce your brand. You want to use this opportunity to display any graphic images or logos that your company uses to identify itself.
• Showcase Products & Services – Your site’s home page outlines your product line or your services for the customer at a glance. From your site’s home page they can delve further into the details of a specific product or service, but they should be able to take a quick look at your website’s home page and know what your company has to offer.
• Generate Interest – Your site’s home page needs to not only display your products and services in a quick overview format, but also the page content and presentation needs to be interesting. It has to grab the visitor’s attention and hold them there long enough for them to appreciate what you can offer them. You can gauge the effectiveness of the page’s effectiveness by monitoring your site analytics Bounce Rate percentage. High bounce rates means that you should change and test your page using a testing tool such as Conversion Chicken or Google Website Optimiser.
• Convey Trust – You site’s home page needs to present a solid, trustworthy first impression. If it is too flashy or gimmicky it will not convey that element of trust that you want your customer to have. You know that you are trustworthy, but your visitor has to take a leap of faith and give you a chance. Make it easy for them by having a thoughtful, solid home page.

About Us Page
Your website’s About Us web page helps a visitor get to know you and your company. The type of information that you want to include on this page are things like how long you have been in business; how much experience you have; what business organisations you belong to; what guarantees you offer; any specific training or special talents that you bring to the table, and it is an excellent place to introduce your staff, if you have any.

Your site’s About Us web page helps you be a tangible entity in the customer’s mind. Think of it like the conversation that you might have with a retail customer as they are checking out. They are learning a little bit about you and your company, and they feel good when they walk away. This page should build confidence in your customer.

Contact Us Page
Your site’s Contact Us web page should only request minimal information (name, email, phone, message) for the user to contact you, as this is an important conversion event. This page is also a good place to include your businesses hours of operation and hours for phone support if different. For example, while office hours may be 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, you may offer customer support from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. every day. Your Contact Us page is the perfect place to display this information.

Products & Services
If your site sells goods and services, then you need to have pages dedicated to product description details and photos. If you only offer a single product or service, then you may be able to include this information on your home page, otherwise you will need to detail the information on your product and services pages.

Your Product and Services pages should be complete with every detail that you customer may want to know or see about a product including color, style, price, size and specifications along with photos including zoom capabilities to showcase product details. The design of your product page should be clean, easy to read and easy to navigate, and of course (and this may be stating the obvious but its not obvious to some people!) should feature a conversion event, i.e. “add to cart”, or a contact form.

Site Navigation
When you are designing your site you want to take the time to look at it from your visitor’s point of view. Site navigation should be intuitive. You never, ever want a customer or visitor to get tangled up or lost in your site. You also absolutely do not want a customer to click any link on your site only to end up in the middle of someone else’s site, unless that is expressly intended; think of this: do you really want to go to all the effort of attracting a visitor to your site only to have them invited to leave it?

A well-constructed site lets the user move easily throughout, and it offers a sitemap so they can quickly find whatever they need.

Here are a few things to designing the navigation for your website.
• Be Consistent – The navigation buttons or tabs should be in the same place on each of your web pages, and they should look the same. Whether you use buttons or drop down tabs, you want to be consistent throughout your site.

• Be Obvious – This is where a sitemap can really come in handy. At a glance your customer can tell not only where they are, but also where they want to go. You can also use breadcrumb trails/links to remind customers where they came from. Whatever method you choose, be consistent and try to make it virtually impossible for anyone to get confused and lost in your web pages.

• Be Helpful – Again the sitemap comes in hand to allow customer to get a good overview of where everything is on your site. You do not want customers to have to dig around for what they need. Consistent section headings throughout your navigation can help a customer find what they are looking for. Another helpful feature that you may want to include in you website is a site search, but if you include it, make sure that it works properly, and also make sure you track it’s usage in Google Analytics

Putting It All Together
If a website is well constructed not only will it be easier for the customer to use, but it will be simpler for you to maintain as well. When you are using your website to broaden the reach of your company regular maintenance is absolutely necessary to keep your website up to date and functioning properly. So when you make the commitment to go online, take the time to design a visitor friendly site that will keep your customers coming back time and time again.

This can give you a crystal-clear view of what pages in the checkout process of your online store are literally losing you sales hand over fist. This post is an adjunct to an earlier post on this blog which is at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/.

Once you can then see which culprit pages are scaring your customers away (just as they have taken out their credit card), you are thus armed with the knowledge of which pages need changing in order to boost your conversion rate and therefore your sales.

Ok so when you log in to your Google Analytics account, click on the website profile name that you want to add the goal and funnel tracking to, and on the next page click the the “Edit” link on the right hand side of the website profile. Next appears the website profile for your Zen Cart site. Click on the “Edit” link for the first available “Conversion Goals and Funnel” profile.

Next, enter in the data into the required fields as shown in the screenshot below.

So firstly, you have an Active Goal, then use the Head Match option with the Goal URL (the checkout_success page), name the Goal something like “Checkout Complete” and then fill in the details for the checkout Funnel, which starts with the “login” page, then the checkout_shipping page, then the checkout_payment page and then the checkout_confirmation page. The Goal URL should be the exact same value as the one entered at the top of the page.

If your site is not built on Zen Cart, just replace the URL’s in the sample above with those from your site, starting with the URL of the first page which begins the checkout process, and the Goal URL being the page URL which is displayed to the user when they have completed payment (the “thank you” page). Make sure to leave out the dynamic query parameters part of the URL (i.e. everything after the “?” in the URL).

So that’s it, click “Save Changes” and you’re all set! Now you will be able to view all of the Google Analytics Goals reports for this website profile. It will take a day or so before any data is available of course, and may take a week or two before you have enough data to make accurate judgements about what needs changing.

Make special use of the “Funnel Visualisation” report which is shown in my previous post at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/. This is a very powerful chart showing visitor behaviour in your checkout funnel, visitor entry and exit points etc. and will show you what pages along the way in the checkout process that people are abandoning their purchase, giving you vital information about changes you need to make to your site pages.

Your questions, comments and feedback are welcome, and please do bookmark these posts and share the link love!

In a blog post back in March, (“First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts” I wrote about a friend of mine who has an ecommerce website which had a fair bit of traffic but not many sales.

Since then we put a Google Analytics Goal Funnel in place on the checkout funnel pages to examine what site users were doing when they got to the point of checking out on the site. A screenshot of a one-month view of the funnel is below.

This shows us that almost 9 out of 10 people who click on the “Check Out” button abandon the process along the way. See that only 18 of the 90 people who attempted to check out proceeded on to step 2 of the process, i.e. 72 people abandoned the check out on the “Login/Create Account” page. So we have an almost 90% funnel abandonment rate!

So this Login/Create Account page is the major culprit, causing the loss of 80% of potential sales on the site). So we need to take a very good look at this page and redesign and re-test it.

This site is built on Zen Cart, which is a great open-source template-based online store system. Now the default templates that come with Zen Cart are usually just customised by adding page styling by the web designers who build the site, as is the case with this site, but the overall structure and wording of the page templates are not changed. These default checkout page templates leave a lot to be desired regarding conversion optimisation, and they really need to be changed to achieve better performance.

A great resource for getting off to a flying start with optimising your Zen Cart site (or an online store site built on any platform for that matter) is the free e-book written by Eric Leuenberger from ZenCartOptimization.com. The ebook is available for free download at http://www.zencartoptimization.com/2007/05/09/20-surefire-ways-to-increase-sales-using-zen-cart/. This ebook details ways in which you can change your e-commerce page and site design so that you achieve a much higher sales conversion rate.

So that is where we are at now with this site. We are going to totally overhaul the Login/Create Account page, and keep an eye on the Goal Funnel, to see how the new design performs. From that we can expect at least a doubling of sales on this site.

Other pages such as the Checkout Payment page, also need an overhaul (its causing 30% of visitors to bail, just as they are about to pay), so we’ll implement the suggestions from Eric’s ebook on this also.

We will update this series of posts with a post on how our newly optimised pages are performing, and I will also be writing a separate blog post on how exactly the funnel is implemented on the Google Analytics account in a short while. Its pretty simple really, when you know how.

We appreciate your comments in the meantime.

So anyway, my friend mentioned to me that he wanted to get an AdWords campaign going in order to get some traffic to the site and generate more sales as business from the website have been slow. I remarked “ah, ok, well how many visitors are you getting to the site per day at the moment?” to which he looked at me perplexed and replied “don’t know!”. So we hopped up to the computer and logged into his Google Analytics account.

We were presented with the Google Analytics dashboard:

Ok, now correct me if I am wrong, but 1535 visits and over 7000 pageviews in the past month is not bad going, given that the site has not had any inbound link building done or any real SEO of any kind. So I suggested to my friend that we should first concentrate on getting more sales from the existing traffic before we go throwing money into Google AdWords when the conversion rate is abysmal.  

So what does he do to improve the conversion rate?  Well, we can see that most of the traffic is from the UK, coming in through the parked .co.uk domain. So the first thing my friend is going to do is to take a look at his pricing, taking a good look at his main competitor’s pricing for the products on the most trafficked product pages on his site. He can see which are his most viewed products by going to Content -> Top Content.  So an experiment would be to slash the prices of the top 5 or so viewed products and then see if sales on those products pick up.

But there is more that can be done of course, using Google Analytics more advanced features.  So, from a scientific metrics point of view, it will be useful for us, using his most trafficked product pages as a starting point, to use Google Analytics’ Goals and Funnels to chart the purchase path (the series of pages starting at the product page on through to the order “Thank You” page), and see using the Funnel Visualisation tool which pages along the way are causing the user to abort the purchase process. If most are aborting on the product page itself then either the page needs to be changed and re-tested, or the price needs to be reduced, or perhaps both.  Other pages along the way to the “Thank You” page may be leaky also. We will use the modify and re-test approach for these also until we are happy that the conversion rate is reasonably good. There is no limit to what you can do with the right tools and the commitment to using them.  We can also use a website optimisation tool like Google Website Optimizer to test variations of the pages on the site, analyse,  improve and re-test. 

But one thing is for sure, we can improve the conversion rate using Analytics data and tools. And this is the best approach at this point. Once we have the conversion rate improved to a satisfactory level we can then consider sending more traffic to the site with organic SEO methods and Google AdWords.  I’ll write an update post at a later date to tell you how we are faring on this project.  

Update: Part 2 of series of articles is available here http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/

Please feel free to leave comments if you have any feedback.