E-commerce website conversions
Some information and statistics you might like to know
So you've got lots of visitors to your website by good use of offline marketing and a great SEO campaign from your friendly team here at Intelligent Retail... what next?
Well... you could do worse than have a look into the minds of your website visitors! Sound impossible? Well not really. There have been many different studies of user behaviour over the years, and the tools to measure the behaviour of people visiting websites is evolving on an almost daily basis.
Website conversion tracking
There are many ways to track what your users are (and may be) looking for when they visit your website. Conversion tracking is just one of the methods that can be applied to your website to see what (and why) your visitors do what they do.
Google Analytics gives a method to track exactly what your visitors are doing - you can apply goals for each page on your website you are interested in and get some interesting metrics which will show exactly what your visitors are upto. Setting up these goals can be a little tricky, especially for e-commerce websites, but once set up valuable information can be captured which can show which pages are selling your products and services the best, which pages are leading to people abandoning the 'sales funnel' and which pages are converting into enquiries and sales - you can even gather information on exactly how much your hard won customers are spending and which keyword led to the sale!
Google Analytics relies on a code snippet being inserted into the final checkout page of your shopping cart page - when this code snippet is read by Analytics then the system will register a count of the page.
Tracking user on-page behaviour
Want to know what people are looking at on your pages? Well believe it or not there are methods to enable you to do this as well. Click tracking software again relies on a small code snippet inserted into each page of the website being analysed. When users click on parts of your website, this click is registered and a heat map showing where your website visitors is built up. This gives a visual representation of the visitor data which is held in a statistics package such as Google Analytics.
If you want to go even more advanced than this, then eye tracking software and hardware is available which allows the tracking of a users eye movements on your pages. This equipment is used mainly in initial testing of website useability, but can be very useful for product testing and content readability tests.
What about search engine results?
Studies done by marketing companies suggest that the vast majority (around 98% [Source: De Vos&Jansen, February 2007]) of search engine users look at organic search engine results (the real listings in the body of search results) and the paid listings at the top of organic listings, whilst only around 35% of searchers look at the paid listings down the side of organic results in Google.
Researchers also found that people on average spent considerably less time scanning paid links compared to organic listings - a compelling argument for biasing your marketing efforts for your e-commerce website towards a good organic search engine optimisation programme!