For example, a search on Google.ie as follows “online marketing cavan” yields the following results:

This is a massive boon to local businesses, especially those who have a website which can be displayed in the Google Local Business Search result.

So those business who may not have known how local Internet search has become will be pleased to find out that Google is favoring local business listings in their ever developing search algorithm.

Most businesses in Ireland are unaware of how uncompetitive local search is for their business niche. And this makes it even more tantalising to get into the online game. At a time when businesses are feeling the pinch and looking at new ways to market in a cost effective way, this subject is more relevant than ever.

I think I’ll write a post in a few days just on this subject.

Till then, take care.

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.

I spent a few hours doing the basic SEO work on this site, the same as I would do on any site we develop. At a minimum, the title and description tags are carefully written to target the desired keywords and of course the page content must be relevant and contain the keywords that the site is targeting also. There are of course, lots of other on-page SEO factors, and we took care of those also.  Within a week of launching the site, it is on the #1 spot of Google.ie for the keyphrase “dating coaching” (check out the screenshot below).

The keyphrase “dating coaching” does not have much competition in Ireland, so this was not such a difficult task.  The keyword “life coaching” is much more competitive so more effort will be required to get the site ranking for this keyword, more content is needed, and also a long-term manual inbound link-building campaign will be very useful in this regard.  “Dating Coaching” is a low-volume keyphrase (i.e. very few people actually search using those keywords in Ireland) but “Relationship Coaching” is much higher, and “Life Coaching” much higher volume again, so in this example the competition follows the search volume, which is usually (but not always) the case.

More updates coming soon, do subscribe and leave comments also, all appreciated.

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.