Every good website has a clear set of goals. It may be to create leads, sell products, spread information, collect data or other tasks but in the end it has goals you expect it achieve. So how is your website living up to its goals? How many leads is it generating? How many products did it sell? How many people did it teach your initiative?

Most organizations keep track of this info but what they don’t know about is how many opportunities they are dropping. Yes that’s right how many opportunities is your website dropping? How many people leave your site in under 10 seconds? How many people reach your lead form and never submit a lead? How many people add products to their cart but never checkout?

Only about 15% of websites take note of these variables and the default response for increasing goal conversions is attempting to grow traffic to the website. Sure more traffic is always good but before you spend lots of resources doing so you should also be analyzing your current traffic and making adjustments to optimize your current traffic. In fact some websites have shown an increase in conversion rate as much as 900% just by making small adjustments.  

So here is the run down on what you should be doing.

Track your data and analytics
The first step is to make sure you know how many attempts your dropping. You don’t know how well your doing if you don’t keep score. Setup Google Analytics on your entire website and configure your conversion funnels. Next analyze your data see where users are coming from, how long they stay, where they leave your site etc. Use the data to see if users are reaching the areas of your site you want them to and when they are if they are doing what you want them to.

Make Adjustments
With analytics data now in hand you are ready to make adjustments but how do I know what adjustments I need to do? Depending on your issue you may have a few or many changes. Changes can include repositioning call to actions, changing layouts or visual elements, adding or removing links or menus, or many other variables. Many adjustments are strong educated guesses but there are some tools additional analytics tools that can help. Tools like Clicktale give you additional information like click heat maps to show you where users are clicking on your site, scrolling heat maps to show you how far down the page users scroll, and even let you watch movies of users using your site.

Testing your adjustments
Once you have made your adjustments you will need to test them. One of the quickest and direct ways to test a website is a user testing service. User testing services pair you up with average everyday users whom you give a list of tasks to perform on your site. As perform these tasks a video is created of them using your site as they talk aloud every move they make. This will very precisely tell you what is going on in their mind and allow you to see the actions they are performing giving you an exact answer to what goes on in your users heads. There are many other methods you can use in testing your site as well but for the sake of this article getting to long we will keep that for another article in itself.

Repeat
Once you have gone through the process give it 7 to 90 days (depending on traffic load of your site) for your new stats to build up. After your stats are ready you can repeat this process again until you feel your results have been maximized.
Typical outcomes

Like mentioned above paying attention to the traffic your dropping can have huge effect but what’s typical? According to studies done by usability king Jakob Nielsen analyzing your data and modifying it can increase your conversion rate on average by 233% additionally if you add usability testing to that you can increase another 70% on top of that.

How much extra revenue could your business bring in by tripling your conversion rate? Sign up for a free 1 hour consultation and let us show you how we can help you improve your websites conversion rate.