Score! How to Reach your Website Goals Easily
Now that you're tracking your goals with Google Analytics, I want to share some elements you can use to better reach your website's conversion goals.
A conversion goal could be increasing sales or increasing traffic to your site. For example, let's say that you want to reduce a page's bounce rate; your goal would be to increase the percentage of visitors who visit another page on your site.Let's see how to reach that goal.
Tap Into your Networks
The Internet is all about social networks and connecting with people.Facebook is now the second most visited website on the Internet and Twitter isn't far behind at #9.Have easily accessible buttons so visitors can 'Like' or tweet about your products and services. If you are active on Facebook or Twitter, make that known to your visitors.Look on the right sidebar of this page and you will see a conveniently located Facebook box that links to The Mogul Mom's Facebook page. Having buttons where visitors can share information is a great way for your website to reach a wider audience.Apart from Facebook and Twitter, you should also find the specific social networks where your visitors are active.For example, every Mixergy post has a button for visitors to post to Hacker News, a popular social news website for the tech community. Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious are also great bookmarking sites to link to.
Highlight Social Proof
I believe that human nature dictates that we follow each other's behavior.In real life, people hesitate to be the first do anything – first movers and leaders carry an extra burden on their shoulders because other people are watching their behavior to see how the perform.On social networks, this behavior is on display when a person looks at the list of people a friend follows.While it would appear that a person is simply trying to find mutual friends, he or she is also looking to keep updated or learn from the same people who might be influencing their friend.Suppose your conversion goal is to increase the rate of visitors who submit a form to subscribe to your RSS feed or e-mail newsletter. You can use this to your advantage by introducing social proof:Share numbers that show how many exisiting subscribers you have.Through text or buttons you can display your subscriber count to new visitors to show that you produce quality content worth reading.Just like numbers on a resume attract an employer's attention, social proof numbers can also positively affect visitors' behavior.This social proof case study is a good example of the power of this principle.
Learn from Unpredictable Visitors
Once you're tracking analytics data on your site then you know how unpredictable visitors can be.Your best pages might not be as popular as an inferior page that attracts visitors through relevant search keywords.There might be more visitors to your site from unusual sources like your blog post comments than your advertising efforts. If you're running a website, you really need to study your visitors' unpredictable nature to improve your conversion rates and reach your conversion goals.Take a look at the the buttons below and study them closely. Which button do you think performed better?
Would you believe that the button on the right performed 28% better than the button on the left?Click on the link to read more about this newsletter signup test.By testing a different button, color and text, the folks behind The Social Man were able to learn about their visitors' preferences and leverage that knowledge to their benefit.Testing different elements is the most efficient way to customize and improve your website for your visitors. Here are more testing ideas that you can use to reach your conversion goals.
What goals do you have for your website? Let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to help you reach your goals.
Anish Kothari works at Wingify, the company behind Visual Website Optimizer, the world’s easiest split testing tool. Thousands of businesses worldwide (from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies) use it to increase their online revenue and conversion rates. {Top Image Credit}