Increase Your Websites Sales By Optimizing Conversions

By Angus  |  23 Dec 2014 16:00:00

Once your website has been up and running for a few months, you have probably started to consider ways of optimizing conversions on your website. If you are currently running or considering a Pay Per Click campaign then you won’t need me to emphasise how important this is to the success of your ecommerce venture.

In this post I plan to go over some conversion optimization best practices with an introduction to Google Analytics.

So to begin with, what is it exactly that we are looking to optimise? It is too simplistic to simply say “increase sales” when there multiple steps leading to a sale that can be analysed and improved.

The great thing about Google Analytics is that it allows you to assess your ecommerce “funnel”, and discover which aspects of your websites experience are losing you sales.

The bounce rate is the first metric to consider and what this means is the percentage of users to leave your website after viewing only a single page without interacting with it. A poor bounce rate suggests that either there are problems with the content of your homepage, which could be due to vagueness, or more seriously, a generally unappealing appearance. 

“Pages / session” and “average session duration” are other metrics with similar causes, letting you see how many pages users view on average per session and average time users spend on your site respectively.

It is suggested that to improve these figures you should ensure that headings on your website are as clear as possible so that visitors believe that they will be able to find what they are looking for.  Auto role videos can be a great way to increase the average duration of visits, especially for larger more technical purchases.  

“New sessions” is the number of new visitors to your website and is a reflection on the quality of the copy on your websites description, as well as obviously your overall SEO efforts.

With Google analytics enhanced ecommerce tracking you can also monitor product views and “add to carts” so you can see your drop off rate. It is suggested that to improve this you should consider offering a price match and 30 day money back guarantee if you can. Along with this consider customer testimonials and trust awards.

These attributes will help a prospect overcome their reluctance to purchase through reassurance. With regards to this, having a phone number is essential although many experts would also suggest a live chat. Our opinion on this is that a live chat is great as long as it is consistently manned, which let’s face it, many are not. In this case it arguably looks worse than not having it at all and you should just stick with a phone number in a prominent position.

Whilst these are some best practices that you should implement from launch, many merchants are understandably reluctant to optimise once up and running for fear of changing something for the worse and losing sales. This is understandable, especially as most industry experts suggest testing over at least one month to get a clear idea of the results.

In response to this, the Sellr Business package now offers split site testing to show 50% of visitors an altered version of your website for a direct comparison. The best advice is to regularly monitor your Analytics account and make incremental changes based on this information.