One of the most valuable assets that any startup has is the data the business generates as customers interact with your website. Data on what they click and which pages keep them hooked help you grow your site in tune with your audience. If you’re rethinking how you want to present data to your customers, or you just want to improve the conversion flow of your site, build tracking into your design and learn which stats will make the biggest impact on your work.
Create a Measurable Flow
Business executives are used to thinking about goals, and working towards accomplishing them. Apply that same strategy to your site and create a goal funnel. Funnels are a step by step flow that customers must follow before they accomplish a goal, like all the pages viewed before signing up to an email address.
Defining goals in Analytics helps you figure out whether the funnel works and where customers tend to bail throughout the process. One you have a flow defined, you can work on making incremental changes to improve it. One of the first things you can do is shorten the time it takes for a customer to complete an action. The more steps involved in doing something, the higher the probability of that customer bouncing from your site without finding anything of value.
Set Goals with Values
Defining dollar values for your goals helps you put the actions on your site into some monetary perspective. You can determine the amount of revenue generated per visit by looking at the revenue your site generates monthly and dividing that by the number of visits it receives. It’s a rough estimate, but it gives you an idea of the average amount each visit generates for you. Start with that baseline and increase or decrease the value of steps in your goal funnel as needed. If you see lots of traffic coming into a low value page, you can take steps to add goals to that increase the value of that page, or increase the time spent reading that page by giving customers something they want to see.
Test Landing Pages
The landing page you send someone to is the next most crucial step in refining the conversion power of your website. If you want to improve your landing page, you can focus on broad concepts like changing colors or adding images, but your best course of action is often falling back on data. Experts like Conor Goetz Cornell know by looking at the statistics for your site that when bounce rate is high, your landing page is weak. There are a few things you can do to improve the stickiness of your landing pages:
• Add headlines, using the H1 tag, that are keyword rich
• Use bullet points, bold and italic lettering to help identify key points
• Avoid flowery language, make every sentence punch
One of the most overlooked concepts, believe it or not, is giving customers something they can do. Giving them a button to click or a form to fill out that puts them on a mailing list is one of the most compelling aspects to your landing page. That call to action sums up the main ideas of your page behind one simple, impactful statement.
Brainstorm New Content
Google’s Analytics platform keeps a record of your all-time most visited pages, so you can use that data to help create new content that is guaranteed to see large volumes of traffic.
Publish Case Studies
Publishing a case study that looks at your site critically and shows how you improved based on data you analyze helps establish you as an expert. You might teach someone a valuable skill while presenting original data for research purposes. Google, and the community at large, will love you for it.