Are you a stats junkie? Well… I don’t have time to be much of one, but I do enjoy looking a good batch of stats and seeing progress, don’t you? Google Analytics has been very cool to me and it’s getting cooler.
There’s now an “Intelligence” segment to your reporting. It will alert you if something out of the ordinary happens at your website. For example, if you have an outrageous number of new visitors one day or if people stay on the page longer than normal, you’ll get an alert. Significant if you’re tracking a new form of traffic or if you want to see how an ad swap did for you, for example. Not earth shattering, but kind of neat.
But a better improvement is the fact that you can now add a whole bunch of new goals to your marketing funnel. You can now add 20 goals as opposed to the old 4, which told you some stuff, but well… twenty can tell you a whole LOT! As long as you have Analytics code on every page, it’s a pretty good indicator of how successful your marketing is overall. continue reading »
How about the difference between a 2% and a 3% conversion ratio?
You may be thinking, Whoopee! A whole one percent.
Now, let’s make that percentage real.
If you send 1,000 people to your website and 20 people buy, that’s a 2% conversion. If you’re selling a $97 product, that represents $1,940.
But let’s say you send another 1,000 people to a page with a different headline, and 30 people buy. That’s a 3% conversion that just made you an extra $1,000.
What if your product is $497, and you only make a .5% conversion difference? You’re making almost $2,500 more money, just by coming up with a headline that was only .5% better.
Small changes to your site can make huge differences in your pocket. You should be testing at least one element of your page at all times, not two or three, or you won’t know what worked, unless… you use a tool like Google Website Optimizer. Then, you can work on several different elements of your page at the same time.
Here’s a great primer on website testing by Daniel Waisberg over at SearchEngineLand.com: http://searchengineland.com/a-primer-on-website-testing-25816
There are all sorts of things to test. So, what are you waiting for?
