Great site designers do everything they can to make their sites engaging and prevent traffic doing a U-turn. Here are five ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Capture Attention with a Visual Site Map

Most web sites usually start simple but get pretty complex before long. They are a maze of pages, sections and links that leave users looking at the site map in order to find what they’re looking for. You can make their job a lot easier with a visual site map.

A visual site map is a pictorial representation of a web site and when you click on a part of that picture, a small display pops up describing what is in this section of the web site. For example, a home furniture web site may have a site map showing the various parts of a home, and clicking the living room would pop up a description of living room furniture section.

Visual site maps are vivid, memorable and easy to use compared to traditional site maps.

2. Enhance Engagement with Related Actions Suggestions

If you know the way people use your site, you probably know where they will go next. For example, someone that looks up pricing will likely go to the buy page. In other words, you can anticipate related actions from a given point. Use this knowledge of user intention and make it easy for the user to find the related pages quickly.

A Related Action Suggestion is an interactive element on your web page which suggests pathways to related pages. This can include a video, image or text with audio that optionally educates a user, helping him or her find parts of a site he or she may not be aware of.

3. Create Curiosity Using Page Peel Banners

You can often organise a message in two or maybe three layers. The first is something you would like to say to everybody that visits your web page. The second is something you would like to say to those who are interested. The third is to those who are really interested.

Peel-away banners work great in these situations. A well-designed peel-away banner can have attractive images, messages and even music that plays when the banner loads or when the user peels away the top banner to reveal what’s underneath. It is customary for the top right corner of the banner to appear in animation which suggests that you can drag it and peel it away. That's the teaser.

4. Build Credibility with a Quotes Flicker

In the age of instant credibility, you must verify the message on your website with customer testimonials, recommendations, reviews and other types of quotes. For best results, a quote should be short, story-like, easy to read, and preferably accompanied by a picture of the person providing the quote.

A single quote creates a lot of authenticity. If you have several customer quotes, even better. A good way to render multiple quotes is to make a playlist of sorts and render the quotes one by one. Depending on the section of your website, or seasonal merchandising focus, you may choose a different set of quotes. This not only adds variety to the site, but also focuses the right message to the right audience.

5. Build a Sense of Urgency and Drive Action

A web site is about driving user action. People will act if there is a sense of urgency: a deal that is only until the end of the month, a deadline for enrolling in an event, a special that lasts for only 24 hours and so forth. Highlight the urgency with a countdown timer that shows the days remaining and drive action by popping up additional media. The media could be a video, an image or text with audio, designed to issue a call to action.

Here, at Ph. Creative, we’re big fans of conversion rate optimisation and the bigger the increase, the happier we are. You can always improve your conversion rate, and even though 1% doesn’t sound a lot – how much would that be worth to you? Of course a 1% improvement is the lowest case scenario, on the other side of things Voice.com have recently quadrupled their conversion rate from under 5% to 22%.

Lucky for you, we’ve had a look at what they’ve done and put together some great ideas on how you can improve your site:

• Find out why customers aren’t converting; don’t just guess. If you know what their objections are, you’ll have more chance of overcoming them.
  
• Don’t try and be modest. If your company is the best at something then shout about it.
  
• If your visitor’s have many different intentions then try segmenting your messages. Beware that segmentation can create a lot of extra work, so only do it if you have to.
  
• People don’t buy what they don’t understand so make sure you clearly explain your service so your potential customer feels more in control and more likely to take action.
  
• A video is the best way for you to explain your service and provide proof. Web videos don’t cost a lot and can be very rewarding.
  

Unfortunately quadrupling your conversion rate isn’t quite that easy, so let me go into a bit more detail:

•    Really know your customers

We have a lot of experience in improving websites and the first thing we do is to understand what the customer wants. You need to be running surveys, speaking with existing customers and digging deep into web analytics. Eventually you’ll find all you need to know about what customers think when they visit your website.

•    Avoid the Spaghetti Strategy

If you to significantly increase your conversion rate, then you can’t expect to just test two new images with three new headlines like pieces of spaghetti and hope that they stick. You need to put thought into how you can improve conversion rate, and you need to know your customer.

•    Don’t stop at the first test

Increasing your conversion rate from 5% to 22% isn’t going to happen with one test, not even two, three or four tests. In actual fact, the 400% increase is the result of 11 tests. By continuing to learn more about your customer and methodically testing, you’ll achieve great results. Testing isn't a one time thing; it’ll take a few goes until you get your big win.

Everyone knows how important it is to make a good first impression, you’ve no doubt spent time trying on outfits, practising poses and checking you’ve got nothing in your teeth. First impressions are everything, for you and for your landing pages.

Even if you’re doing everything right in terms of SEO and PPC, if your landing page makes a bad first impression then it could prevent you from making a sale. Take a look at your bounce rate and you’ll see how good an impression you’re making; anything more than 50% is poor.

Your landing pages are crucial pieces of online real estate. Instead of a brochure that you hand out and hope people react to, a landing page can easily be measured so that you can use it as a really strong sales tool. A bit of changes in wording, in colour or font, and in the length of the page can make a big difference in terms of your conversion rate - you’ve just got to find your winning formula.

If you’re looking to boost your landing page conversion rate then you need to be thinking about the following things:

• Is Your Landing Page Appealing?

Look at your landing page from the eyes of your customer. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Do you feel a sense of familiarity or confusion? Take a look at your competitor’s site and see what their page looks like. What are they doing well? Try out a few of their ideas on your landing page and test, test, test.

• How Does It Read?
  

Are you throwing a mountain of sales copy into your visitors’ face? Are you offering anything valuable? You’ve managed to attract someone to your landing page and now you have a chance to really wow them. Our advice: avoid the hard sell and offer them a solution to their problem. Get your web copy right and see your conversion rate soar.

• What Do People Think?
  

Make sure you ask people for their opinion. If you have email marketing software, then why not send out a feedback for – how do you find our site? If you sit down with a client, casually ask them the question, ‘How did you find our website?’ Take feedback onboard and test the necessary changes.

• What Do Your Statistics Say?
  

Google Analytics will be able to tell you where your landing page traffic comes from and what they do once they’re on the page. You’ll be able to see what sorts of keywords bring people to your page and look to see what percentage of your traffic clicks off your page.

You’ll often have different visitors arriving to your homepage with different intentions and goals in mind. The key to a good homepage is to make it easy for visitors to find the quickest and easiest path to their destination.

As you can imagine, trying to find your destination is a lot easier when you have sign posts and a simple street layout. You need to make sure on your homepage you signpost the way for your visitors, keeping your layout clean and uncluttered.

Multivariate testing tools like Google Website Optimiser will help your develop a home page design so it makes it easy for you to land your visitors to their goal destination.

Let’s look at Debenhams as an example. As a leading department store group with a strong online presence at www.debenhams.com, they secure over 3 million unique visitors each month.

Debenhams has been using Google Website Optimiser to make online marketing decisions based on hard data and consumer preferences.

They have been testing creative design and placement to improve the sign up to Debenhams’ Beauty Club newsletter. Website Optimiser offered Debenhams’ Senior Web Manager, Brett Bennett, the ability to test and accurately measure the effectiveness of 4 possible combinations before committing to a final solution.

By using a new design for the promotional banner, and amending the layout for 2 of the variations, Brett set about testing. Within a week, a conclusive winner emerged from the variations.

The winning combination has since improved email sign ups by 89%.

So why don’t you identify an area of your site that you wish to test? This can be based on your analytics data, or a particular marketing or creative idea. By designing various combinations and running them through a testing platform, you’ll find a winning combination.

There is no point in having a website that you’re not monitoring – how do you ever expect to understand your customer better and increase your conversion rates. For those of you who have yourGoogle Analytics tool, take a look at your top ten entry pages and if your bounce rate is higher than 55%, change your page immediately. For those of you who don’t, why not?

In order to reduce your bounce rate and improve your conversions, you need to monitor your customers in order to understand their behaviour.

Could you imagine if you owned a clothes shop and you had a bounce rate of 90%... that means for every 1000 people who walk into your store, 900 are walking straight back out.

Tesco’s recently analysed their CCTV to see what it was that was making people walk in and straight back out of their stores. It turned out that there were six products that the majority of people were looking for and if they weren’t in stock then the customer left.

One of these products was broccoli, which you make think isn’t that big of a loss being a fairly cheap item. Wrong! The intention of most of these people who were shopping for broccoli was to buy a complete roast dinner, which meant a potential loss of a £20 sale. Not only that, but the customer will then have gone to a competitors store, risking the chance of the customer returning to Tesco again.

Now, Tesco’s continue to monitor their CCTV and their customer’s behaviour in order to better improve their service and increase their sales.

Our advice: Sign up for Google Analytics now and then think about how you could apply Tesco’s strategy to your website.

What everyone asks first is, how many visitors did we get to our website? 

No matter how long you’ve had your website, your analytics tool, who you are or what you do! This is always the first question, your natural instinct.  So let’s look at a couple of variations: 

Visits 

Also be known as ‘total visitors’.  Simply put how many people visited your website in a given timeframe.   But, in this metric the same person could visit you website 5 times in a day and it would be counted five times.  This leads me onto... 

Unique Visits 

This is basically home many ‘unique’ people have visited your website in a given timeframe.  So, it doesn’t take into account repeat visit, well it does but it won’t include users who visit your website, say 5 times in a day. 

For example: I visit the BBC website 5 times in a day (to keep on top of the sport of course!). This would show as: 

• Visits:     5
• Unique Visits:    1 

I do this for a week: 

• Visits:    35
• Unique Visits:    1 

Why should you care and what you need to care about? 

They provide the foundation of the activity coming to your website.  I personally consider ‘unique visitors’ as more important of the two, as this in ‘new’ people coming to you shop, business.  How do they react, what actions do they take, how quickly do they leave, and a host other insights can be gained. However loyalty and ‘recency’ are also really important in building relationships and selling more – but we’ll be talking about this in the next week or two. 

So, pretty straightforward but you’d be amazed how people can get confused, so let’s all get on the ‘same page’ and I’ll define some more basics over the next week or so and then we can get down to some real conversion busting tips. 

Google Dave 

PS...Remember post your comments; let me know what you’d like to know.   

Over the next weeks and months I’m going to take you all down the route of ‘how to make you website work harder’.  All websites want (and I’m sure you) 1 or some of these outcomes:

• Increase revenue
• Reduce Cost
• Improve Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty

Basically all goals or desired actions come under these three outcomes.  Whether you’ve got an ecommerce site, information, blogs etc.  So, my first question is:

Have you set any outcomes / goals for your website? Do you measure and track them? 

And second and most importantly:

Do you know what actions to take to improve them??

You can’t mange and improve what you can’t measure...so if you serious about winning online make yourself a brew and have a think about what it is your business needs from your website and online marketing.

• It might be that you want to generate xx amount of enquires or downloads per unique visit (or visitors – do you know the difference?)
• It might be that you’re looking at how many overall sales Or specific sales of certain products at a time of year
• It could be you provide fantastic information and you want people to visit xx amount of pages as they find what you offer so useful and informative
• You may have a target ‘bounce rate’ (this is fantastic measurement – a favourite of mine).  More importantly you might have a target bounce rate for specific landing pages within your site? (quick tip - bounce rate can be effected by the method of entry to it and source of traffic) 

You really need to think long and hard about what you believe are the KPI’s that will help you maximise the performance of your website.  Helping you to engage with your users and generate more business for you.

As always, it’s not the tools you use, but how you use them.

So yes, you can set and measure them.  But what really matters is what actions can you take that will improve your goals conversion?  This is where it becomes both a science and an art.

And what’s great about doing it online?  You can test, split test, multi test and 'win hard but fail faster'.  By doing this, you’ll learn what really engages your customers that visit your website.

So watch this space, subscribe to our blog and over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to help you ‘understand’ and give you ‘gold nuggets’ for conversion tactics that will accelerate your business online and help you stay ahead of your competitors.

It’s going to be fun!

Google Dave

PS...If you’d like me to answer any questions on how to ‘turbo charge’ you’re website; drop me a comment and I’ll look to answer it in the coming weeks.

I'm constantly asked questions about what is twitter and how best can we use it for business.  So I thought i'd put this short blog together on some of the 'twitter tips' that we've seen work for our clients:

• Protect your brand name – Make sure you have registered your company name.  For example twitter.com/youbusinessname. So in our case we have: twitter.com/phcreative.  Remember once it’s gone...it’s gone!
• You can also be clever with your account names.  If I call my twitter account “FreeSEOtips” then it’s obvious what information I’m going to provide to my followers
• Use images and photos on your accounts...bring your twitter page alive and you’ll attract more followers.  Meaning if you’re clever, more people and businesses will engage with you and thus help you build a relationship with them
  
• Think about your tweets as a news flash.  Making them compelling, provide links to landing pages within your website or your blog posts.  Don’t simply waste tweets about “going down to the shop” (unless you have a reason to do it).  The less relevant, interesting and engaging your tweets, the more likely your followers will be to ‘switch off’ and stop listening
• ‘Givers gain’ – retweet people's tweets and you’ll encourage others to help you spread your content out across the web.  Which in turn builds followers, traffic, and inbound links – helping drive enquires, revenue and money to you
• twitter doesn’t just happen overnight – like all things online, it takes time to build trust and authority.  You need a plan with a clear purpose on what you post and why.  Twitter becomes part of your online estate and is tool to help your engage, build relationships and drive revenue
• It’s very easy to start – sustainability is the key.  If you simple use it to stay connected with your friends, then it a simple task.  But if you want to maximise it as a business tool, then you’ll need to think and consider your approach

So there you go...some quick “twitter tips” helping your tweets to be hear and more importantly (and as always at ph towers), with business focus on helping you drive more results.

In the last few weeks, more and more statistics have revealed a surge in people shopping and buying things on the internet.

Big players such as Littlewoods, Argos and Tesco have seen the number of extra online shoppers increase by millions, but how is this affecting smaller businesses within Liverpool, and how does this change the way creative industries should be working?

I believe that there should be a more consultative approach – seek first to understand, then design a strategy, and then execute the plan.

As a company, we have recently been approached by a well-known business who had spent a lot of money on their website.

Their business model relies upon visibility online to generate revenue, along with some functionality.

We were amazed to find that what they currently have simply doesn’t deliver what they want.

Yes, they had a professional looking website and brand, but no attention had been made to ensure the site was visible to their target audience. Surely, as an industry, we can’t allow this to happen.

If we’re serious about helping local businesses make money online and thereby adding value through investment and creating more jobs in the city, we must help them win online.

A lot of work happening in our industry is too transactional, eg, “we provide this, you get this” without any perception of value or what the client will get during and after the work. The web is transparent. If people know what they are doing, we can track, test, learn and apply what is happening when we attract, capture and convert leads and customers for the site 

In the current climate, we have to go that extra mile and provide a service that delivers results more than ever, ensuring that local businesses have just as much of a chance as the big players

In the last few weeks, statistics from Nielsen Online have revealed that there has been a surge in people shopping and buying things on the Internet.

Big players such as Littlewoods, Argos and Tesco saw the number of extra online shoppers increase by millions, but how does this affect smaller business within Liverpool?

Although we keep hearing about the ‘doom and gloom’ of the credit crunch this clearly demonstrates that more and more customers are using the Internet to shop for products and services, whether they’re in research mode, or already well down the ‘buying cycle’.

Using the web is perfect in helping them find what they are looking for saving them time and money.

Here’s how many people searched using theses terms for services in Liverpool last month:

This is purely ‘topline’ data, but clearly shows what is out there for our local businesses; large numbers of people are already searching for what you offer, right now.

So how do you help them, find you?

Local listing in Google Maps is a priority as it is free and quite straightforward to set up.  Simply open a Google account and click the ‘local business centre’ and follow the instructions.  Tip here is to include ‘Liverpool’ in the title for your advert.

If you sell products, check out Google Base, we use this with many of our clients, one sells electric patio heaters and they’ve see seen a 17% uplift in traffic - all free clicks.

Create a Facebook group page for your business and begin to invite and add friends.  Some of our local hotels, restaurants and bars have already grasped the agility of facebook as a ‘keep in touch’ tool.

I bet many of you have had invites to events and nights out already; if not, I’m sure you’ll be getting something coming to your inbox about Valentines day.

Other results based marketing channels include Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising but be careful- we have many clients who come to us and have tried going this themselves, wasting a lot of money.  The campaigns must be built with the right structure. We have a Health and Safety client who has gone from a ‘couple’ of leads a week, to approximately 50 per day (and on a similar budget), simply by building and growing his campaign through a results driven, creative process.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Put the effort in to get this right, and you’ll be receiving free pre-qualified traffic to your websites for the long term.  Delivering a great return on investment.

Email Marketing – use it to build relationships with your new customers, build loyalty, cross sell and if you’re really clever, encourage them to recommend your services to their friends (now wouldn’t that be nice!).

Remember… people are ‘typing in what they are looking for’ and by using some tools of the trade, we can discover how many and what they actually ask for.  Then use the various online marketing channels to attract, capture and engage…making you more money, even while you sleep.