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.

Due to an increasing number of businesses using Google Analytics, Google will be performing a system upgrade within the next two weeks. The upgrade will aim to improve the scalability and reliability of Google Analytics.

You need not worry though, as no traffic data will be affected and there will no interruption in your data collection or processing. Reports will still be available but for a few hours, users won’t be able to perform administrative account actions such as opening new accounts, creating or modifying profiles, setting up filters and goals and managing user access etc.

So if you think you’ll need to make account changes over the next two weeks, then we recommend you do it as soon as possible to avoid any disruptions during the upgrade.

These upgrades prove the continued growth in Google Analytics and it’s good to see that they’re committed to delivering a top level service. We recommend using Analytics to everyone who’s looking to improve their conversion rate, after all ‘you can manage what you can’t measure.’ So with these latest improvements, it leaves you with little reason not to be using Google Analytics.

A lot of graphic designers don’t like using buttons to design a website. They believe buttons can look ugly if they are too large, too colourful, or too in your face. What they can’t ignore though is the fact that these kinds of buttons work.

Buttons are also known as a ‘call to action’. We’re calling the customer to take an action. Adding buttons or calls to action on not only your landing page but throughout your website can help increase conversions and conversion rates exponentially.

Launched in 2000, Rightmove.co.uk was the first property website in the UK to introduce paid advertising on properties for sale. They decided to plan a simple experiment using Google Website. Optimiser to test how changing the ‘Contact Agent’ button and removing the ‘Request Details’ link would impact the conversion rate of email leads to Estate Agents.

Using their existing Google Analytics account, Rightmove set up a multivariate test to experiment with different colours and wording for the ‘Contact Agent’ button, resulting in 16 button variations. Website Optimiser ensured that any changes implemented on the site would be based on actual user preference.

They found that by testing changing a single button they drove 33% more leads.

Now who’s saying buttons aren’t important?

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.

Online coupon could mean different things: A small clickable banner on a homepage, an email offer which is redeemable online, over the phone, or in-store; or a printable coupon consumer’s use in a shop or office. You can even an offer a limited-time deal to your company’s Twitter followers or Facebook fans.

Whether or not you’ve used online coupons before now is the time to test the waters. If your visitors need that final push to buy, then this could be the deciding factor. Try online coupons and see if your conversion rates increase.

First of all, you need to decide how much discount you want to offer and how long you wan the promotion to run. When you’ve decided, write it up clearly and directly, for example, “20% off this week” or “Buy one get one free today only.”

Next, you’ll need to create your online coupon. Smaller businesses will need to reach a targeted, local audience with their promotions so it’s best to create a coupon on a site like Craigslist or Local.com. This will allow you to create and distribute coupons with just a few clicks. You can also create a “coupon” by simply coming up with an offer to send out via e-mail.

Once you’ve created your coupon, you need to think about distribution. Here are some ways for you to distribute your online coupons.

1. Email a coupon to your client list. Allow recipients to print out your coupon and bring it into your store.
2. Blog about it. Even if you only have a few followers, posting deals may encourage recommendations and new subscribers.
3. Post your coupon on a social networking site that automatically distributes coupons to targeted audiences, such as Facebook.
4. Use your Twitter and Facebook accounts to offer friends and followers a special discount. Make sure the promotions you offer are compelling and make your followers feel special.
5. Film a short video clip showcasing your business and post it on YouTube. Add text to the video offering a discount to customers who mention they saw the clip.

Make your coupons shareable, allowing people to pass the deal along to friends. Each coupon you send out via e-mail, on Twitter or Facebook, or post online should include a link to “Share this coupon with a friend” so people can easily forward the discount.

Remember, always put an expiration date on your coupon and then, once your coupon promotion is over, don’t forget to measure how well it performed. If you have a transactional website, you can do this using Google Analytics.

Finally, don’t think that coupons have to be a one-off. This is your opportunity to create ongoing customer loyalty. Therefore each time a customer redeems a coupon, why not ask them for their email address, or encourage them to write a review of your products or services on local directory listing sites. Ask them to follow you on Twitter or join your Facebook Fan Page, and always follow-up with further promotions down the road.

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.

You might assume that top search terms would be good choices for keywords, as logical as this seems - it doesn’t take into account other competition.

By providing descriptive terms, you will attract a better quality of traffic. A phrase like ‘travel book’ will result in more conversions that ‘book’ because it will appear to people who are specifically looking for a travel book. Providing a term like ‘travel book India’ will result in even more conversions.

If you have a low conversion rate, then the majority of visitors who click into your website won’t end up buying from you – what’s the point in 100 clicks but no customers?

By focussing on very specific keywords, you will achieve much higher quality clicks. This will lead to a significantly better conversion ratio and a much higher ROI.

According to Google, it is a good idea to create a list of search terms that consumers might use when performing an Internet search for specific goods and services.

With Google’s conversion tracking tool and Google Analytics, you each track each of your campaigns and if you are disappointed with the clicks an ad draws then you can make the necessary changes.

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.