In early 2003, Will founded Marketing Results. His vision was to leverage the successful concepts of direct marketing, along with emerging internet technologies, to create more efficient marketing processes for traditional offline businesses. He is also directs several internet business mentoring programs, helping members establish and optimise their online businesses.
For people who have a website that is not performing, what are your top tips for dramatically increasing its performance?
Although this question is very broad, there are a few core strategies I recommend for increasing the results of any online sales process.
If your website is not performing, there are two possibilities: something’s not right at the strategic level (your offering, positioning, targeting or business model) or you are not executing traffic generation and conversion optimally at the tactical level.
The following three ideas relate more to improving your sales process at the tactical level:
- Track your marketing spend properly – if you use Google AdWords to generate traffic, ensure that conversion tracking is installed and functioning correctly. Then look at how your individual advertisements, keywords and landing pages are performing in terms of cost per conversion. Cull your lowest performing advertisements and optimise what’s working. If you advertise with other services such as the online Yellow Pages, True Local, banner advertisements or e-zines, use the ‘cross channel tracking’ tool within the Google Adwords interface to monitor your progress.
- Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)– I recommend that you keep track of a range of KPIs including:
- site traffic from different sources (search engines, paid searches, referrals, traffic from other websites, and direct ‘type in’ traffic)
- conversion rates for key conversion goals (newsletter signups, white paper downloads, enquiry forms or shopping cart sales)
- usage patterns (one page visits)
Just keeping track of the numbers on a regular basis gets you thinking about how to improve each area. The free Google Analytics system can be used to do all of the above.
- Identify sticking points and focus your efforts – different websites under perform for different reasons. Many people assume that getting more traffic via search engine optimisation (SEO) is the most effective way to improve the performance of their site. In fact, the problem may be that many users are leaving your site immediately because they aren’t seeing what they came for. In this case, the ‘low hanging fruit’ may be to optimise your site content to engage more visitors.
For more of this interview and internet marketing strategies check out “Secrets of Internet Entrepreneurs Exposed!“
