This is the first in a three part series on the top Internet marketing mistakes.
The key to online marketing success is getting customers to your site, engaging them, and converting their interest into a sale. But a lack of conversion points, poor design and mismanaged analytics can deter that from happening. Here’s a look at why those mistakes happen, and what you can do to correct them.
1. The Leaky Bucket Mistake – Too Few or Incorrectly Placed Conversion Points
Every day, companies lose thousands of potential customers because of unoptimized Web sites. How would you know if this was happening to your company?
Chances are, if you’re not sure about conversion points and how they should be implemented, your company’s site is losing potential customers, like water flowing out of a leaky bucket.
The good news is that it’s not too late to fix the problem.
A ‘conversion point’ is any location on a site where a visitor becomes a customer or takes a step toward becoming a customer. The process of becoming a customer is referred to as “conversion.” Typically a conversion point takes the form of a name/e-mail capture field or a ‘buy’ button, but conversion points can be defined more generally as any location where a user performs an end result which provides value for the company. The best Web sites have dozens of strategically placed conversion points of different kinds.
To stop the leaky-bucket problem, a site must figuratively hold a visitor’s hand and lead him through a pre-determined thought process, the end result of which should be a conversion point. Along the way, the site must speak to the visitor in the manner that makes him most comfortable.
There is a variety of personality types for which a well-optimized site should accommodate. For each personality type, the site should offer: 1) a customized value proposition, and 2) a corresponding conversion point. By using a variety of strategically-placed conversion points in this way, each visitor is presented with the path of least resistance toward becoming a customer, and visitors don’t leak away from the site.
2. The Form-Over-Function Mistake – Choosing Design over Usability
Another common mistake of Web sites—particularly sites marketing software— is favoring aesthetics over usability. As discussed above, visitors are most likely to become customers if they can find exactly what they are looking for quickly and easily. In other words, visitors must be led gently but firmly to a conversion point. While this should be the key objective of the company, often this is not the mindset of the Web designer charged with the task.
Instead, it is often the case that a designer will lead a client to believe that the most visually-dazzling site will sell the most product, while the truth is that too many bells and whistles will actually distract a potential customer. To short circuit the form-over-function mistake, makes sure your designer takes a usability-centered approach. In the software world if a potential customer senses that using a company’s site is not straightforward, he or she will lose confidence in the company’s ability to provide an easy-to-use product, and will be less likely to buy.
3. The “Cross Our Fingers” Mistake – Not Using (or Under-Using) Web Analytics
It is an established fact that almost every aspect of a Web site visitor’s on-site behavior can be tracked by the site’s owner. But despite this capability, millions of Websites continue to underperform. Poor site performance (read: low sales volume or lead volume) is often the result of site owners’ lack of understanding of exactly which visitor behaviors should be tracked.
Three important factors that every website owner should track include bounce rate, path to conversion and traffic sources.
• Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of users who come to a site and immediately hit the back button and leave the site. A high bounce rate indicates a disconnect between what visitors expect the site to be and what it actually is.
• Path to conversion illustrates a visitor’s thought pattern before they convert. A site’s most common conversion paths should be noted, and the underlying logic behind these paths should be applied to under-performing paths to improve their performance.
• Traffic sources are important to monitor because they provide valuable insight about users. For instance, cross-checking traffic source against conversion rate will show which traffic sources are the most valuable, and thereby deserve more focus.
To take advantage of the trackable nature of the web, a company must not only monitor its site’s performance carefully, but must use the data gathered to formulate hypothesis about which aspects of the site could better achieve goals. Experiments must then be formulated which test a new version of one site-aspect vs. the current version. Multivariate testing can also be used to test several different versions of a specific aspect of a site.
Remember, it is important is that testing takes place continuously, to keep pace with the ever-evolving competitive landscape of online marketing. Continuous testing (also known as optimization) and close monitoring of site analytics are central aspects of managing a profitable website.
Alexander Kesler (Alexander.kesler@insegment.com) is president and co-founder of inSegment, Inc., Needham, MA.
