NEW OR UNIQUE VISITOR CONVERSION
It is vital to know that the way in which a returning
visitor interacts with your website will be different from how a first-time
visitor will interact with your website. In order to be able to improve the
experience for first-time visitors, you must isolate the conversion rates from
returning visitors or loyal customers. You must determine what it is that they
see when they are first visiting the website, and how you can take action to
improve this initial visit and their overall experience. This is where
usability will play an essential role in decreasing the bounce rate of first
time visitors. You will have a low rate of conversion for new or unique
visitors if your website is not user friendly. These new visitors will be the
ones that are seeing everything for the first time, and will not be privy to
any “tricks” to better use the website. It needs to provide a great user
experience up front.
SOURCES FOR
INCOMING TRAFFIC
Ideally, your website would have incoming traffic
streaming in from a variety of sources. There are three categories for the
primary sources: direct visitors, search visitors, and referral visitors.
• Your
direct visitors will be those who have come to your site by typing in your
exact URL into the address bar in their browser.
• Your
search visitors will be those who have arrived to your website based on a
search query that they have entered.
• Your
referral visitors will be those who visit the website because it was mentioned
somewhere on another website or blog that they were visiting.
All three of the sources are very important, but they
have different levels of conversion. Because of this, you should be calculating
how much traffic each individual source is converting, and then take action
based on these numbers.
If your direct visitors number is low, is your website
easy for people to remember? Is it advertised in a way that is widely
available? If it isn't you may be losing direct visitors to search
visitors—those who had to remember details about your brand in order to find
your website.
INTERACTIONS PER
VISIT (PAGES/SESSIONS)
Even when there are visitors to your website that do not
convert, you must still monitor their behavior on your website. You will need
to know what exactly they are doing on your website, what you can do to get
them to do more of it, and how you will be able to influence their behavior
into conversions. As an example, take your unique visitor page view rates—track
the time in which they are on the page, reviews or comments that they make, and
the like. Each one of these interactions is very important and your end goal is
more than just increasing these interactions (which will increase the time that
is spent on the website), but you must also map out how you will transform
these increased interactions into actual conversions—purchases, subscriptions,
downloads, and the like. By tracking all of these things, you will be able to
determine how the visitor chooses to travel through the website to the various
content.
RETURN VISITOR
CONVERSION
When someone has returned to your website, there are two
very important questions that you should be asking yourself: why did this
person return, and did they convert the first time they visited—if they did
not, what can you do to convert this person on their return visit? It is
essential to realize that even though a visitor was not converted as a new
visitor, your brand did leave enough of an impression on them to make them to
return to the website. Now that you know that you can entice visitors to
return, your next goal should be to single out the conversion rate of return
visitors and figure out how to increase it.
Some brands opt to offer exclusive deals or coupons to
their return customers, while others ask their returning visitors to join their
mailing list or to complete a survey. How you choose to increase the conversion
rate will depend on the goods or services that are offered by your brand.
VALUE PER VISIT
The value of each visit is bound immediately to the
interactions per visit. This can be calculated as the total number of visits
divided by the total value that was created. Calculating the value per visit is
sometimes difficult because there are various intangibles that are involved in
creating value that are hard to exactly define. As an example, visitors of a
blog create a value each time that they add a page view onto your traffic
number, but they will also create an intangible value when they leave a comment
on your website. For those with ecommerce sites, website visitors create value
when they purchase a product, but they will then also create this value that
cannot be calculated when they choose to leave a review or spread the brand
name by word of mouth.
How would a website entice a visitor to create more value
during their visit? A brand may ask return customers to leave reviews on goods
or services that they have purchased in exchange for a coupon code, or they may
ask customers to share a link with their social media.
BOUNCE RATE
The preliminary goal when trying to increase the value
per visit, interactions per visit, return visitor conversion, new & unique
visitor conversion, and traffic sources is to minimize the bounce rate of
visitors. The bounce rate can be defined as the amount of times new visitors
visit the site and then immediately leave it without completing any tasks. This
will be indicated with very little time spent on the website and no
interactions. Having a high bounce rate will be indicative of several things,
including but not limited to irrelevant or weak sources of traffic and landing
pages that are modified for conversion—like landing pages that have low
usability, poor design, or load times that are high. E-commerce website will
sometimes refer to bounce rates as abandonment rates—the rate at which a
visitor will abandon their shopping cart and not make a purchase. This can be
the result of a checkout process that is too complicated, deals that are
expired or irrelevant, or forced cart additions (you must add the item to your
cart in order to see the actual price of the item).
Blogs will often times see high bounce rates. This is
because visitors will tend to only stay on the blog website in order to read
one single post and then they will move on.
LEAD GENERATION
COSTS (COST PER CONVERSION)
This is the effect of a value per visit, and perhaps one
of the more important metrics. Cost per conversion may also be referred to as
“cost per referral or “lead generation costs”. If you have a high cost per
conversion, it will not matter if your website is bringing in high conversion
rates with a high value per visit. Your website will be cost
prohibitive—meaning that your net income will be zero or into the negative.
When you are trying to increase conversion rates on your website, you will need
to keep the cost per conversion in mind, as well as the overall margins. Simply
put, this is when you are not breaking even for what you are paying in order to
gain conversion. When this number becomes a problem, take a step back and
evaluate where exactly the costs are hurting your brand.
EXIT PAGES
Your website's bounce rates are not totally derived from
the home page. Often times your brand's final call to action (or conversion)
will be on the second or third page of a process. In order to maximize your
conversions, you will need in investigate further into the exits and find out
at which stage of the process the visitors are leaving the website or
discarding their shopping cart. When you figure this out, then you may be able
to modify the process accordingly. The steps to complete your website's call to
action should be only to two or three pages from the content (or products) that
the website visitor was looking for. When the process becomes complicated, the goods
or services will simply become “not worth the hassle” to potential customers.
This is just one of these things should be tested in the research and data
collection phase of building a website, but sometimes it may be overlooked or
have room for major improvement.
PAGE VIEWS
One page view is a single view of a web page on your
website by a visitor. The page view metric will show just how often visitors
successfully access the content on your website. When there are a high number
of page views, this could be due to the quality and value of the content on the
website. On the other hand, it may also be contributed to visitors not being
able to find what they are looking for, so they keep poking around on different
pages, or they are trying to reload any pages that are not showing up
correctly. Other metrics will be able to tell you the reason for a high number
of page views. Keep in mind if one of your pages has been linked from another
website that gets a lot of traffic, only that particular page will have an
influx of views. Compare your traffic sources with the page views and this will
give you the insight you need.
AVERAGE SESSION
DURATION
Quite simply, this is the average length of time (in
hours, minutes, and seconds) that a visitor spends in a session on your
website. This has a direct correlation with how relevant your website is to the
visitor—the more relevant it is, the more time that a visitor will spend
accessing the information contained on your website that is of interest to
them. When the interactions per visit is low and the duration of the average
session is high, it could be indicative of a web page having too much
information—resulting in more time being spent on the page or the information
may be confusing to the visitor, forcing them to stay longer on the page to
sort out what the information means. When a brand is offering goods or
services, the call to action should be straightforward and it will affect the
average session duration.
Once you are aware of the metrics that are most important,
you will be able to better utilize Google Analytics to track the progress of
your website's own metrics. These stats will be able to provide your brand with
the knowledge that it needs in order to optimize each one, and will enable
these metrics to work together to accomplish your final goal. Because each of
these metrics has a direct effect on another, when you make the choice to
optimize one, you are taking action to optimize multiples.
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