Editorial Articles

The aim for paid and natural search campaigns has traditionally been to drive highly qualified traffic to companies’ websites and drive valuable transactions for their businesses. Whilst paid search budgets have consistently been able to deliver great ROI through bespoke campaign recipes of keywords, ad copy and landing pages, this can now be taken one step further by optimising on-site conversion rates. This will ensure that the whole customer journey is analysed and improved to generate greater conversion rates. I Spy’s work with many clients has shown that conversion rates differ greatly for websites within the same industry. This highlights that not all sites are paying enough attention to the various elements that may affect on-site conversion rates. With simple adjustments, particularly with high traffic sites, a small increase in conversion rate can lead to a significant increase in ecommerce revenue. This article will examine how sites can be improved simply, using the following steps:

Is your web analytics package set up correctly?
This may sound like an extremely basic question, but it is one that is essential and all too often
overlooked. When taking on a project, assuming that a site is being tracked fully is a huge mistake. Common problems include:

- Lack of separation of paid and natural search traffic
- Incorrect tracking on websites spanning multiple domains
- Poor set up of e-commerce tracking

A full audit should be undertaken at the start, to clean up the analytics data and clarify which elements are being measured. Traffic sources also need to be measured correctly and segmented to ensure you are getting the most out of your analytics package, ensuring that reporting is as time-efficient as possible.

Have the conversion metrics been established correctly?
Having ensured that all traffic flowing through the site is being attributed to the correct sources, the next step is to establish clear goals and KPIs that will indicate the success of the site, along with e-commerce ROI. Your goals do not need to be transactional and can include newsletter subscriptions or contact form submissions. Funnels also need to be created to understand the key areas of the conversion process that are affecting performance. By doing this, a comprehensive set of information can be obtained that will ensure you can then move on to optimising and enhancing the content and structure which will ultimately have a hugely beneficial effect on your site’s performance.

Understand how users are interacting with site
Now that the complete consumer journey through your site can be tracked and analysed, you can now start to obtain data that will provide a clear understanding of how consumers are interacting with the content on your site and which elements are prohibiting the achievement of your KPIs. This will highlight both problem areas and opportunities. The best place to begin is to analyse landing pages that don’t perform well, or parts of the purchase funnel where users drop off alarmingly. Simple steps can then be taken to test different landing pages, or to amend an element in the purchase process which may be too time-consuming or detail-driven.

Vigorous testing and implementation programme
Tests can be designed and implemented relatively cheaply using free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser. Website Optimiser is designed to allow multiple combinations of content to be tested simultaneously to establish which combination of content leads to the highest conversion rate on site. While this has no cost to it, sufficient time needs to be spent designing and structuring the tests. This will ensure that the results achieved are valid and attributed to one variable only.

Continual testing and improvement is the key
The testing phase of the programme should be continuous, and if done correctly, is never complete. It should be thought of as a cyclical process where even optimised elements of the site are revisited at a later stage to ensure the most optimum content is served. Seasonality and economic climate will have a massive impact on consumer behaviour and your site content needs to keep up to speed with consumer appetite. Small improvements can have a large effect on revenue, so what may look like a small change should not be overlooked.

With marketing budgets under intense scrutiny, ensuring that your site is serving optimum content is the most cost efficient way to drive ROI and reap the return on adspend. If due attention is given to each of these steps, you can rest assured that all traffic is being analysed so steps can be taken to get the most out of your site and help it reach its greatest potential.

Author: Grant Muckle, Director of Traffic, Crowd and Journey Control, iSpy Marketing