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The key to measuring your web design, copywriting & web marketing
The key to measuring your web design, copywriting & web marketing

Archive for February, 2008

eCommerce Website Benchmark – What is a visit worth to you?

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

One of the simplest metrics that you can use to benchmark your eCommerce website is the dollar value of a visit. Often this metric is called “Revenue Per Visit,” but I just find that it feels better if you put the $ sign in front of it. It’s an emotional thing. If your currency is not called a dollar, then insert your symbol here…

$ Per Visit = Number of Website Visits / $ Total Website Sales

If the number is high, then just concentrate on getting more traffic. If it’s low, then start asking questions about things like:

  • Order process conversion rates
  • The average number of items sold on orders
  • Your pricing 
  • The pages where most people abandon the order process.

There are many places to look for ways to improve you $ per visit.  

You should also look at this metric across the different sources of traffic. For example, look at the $ per visitor from Google organic searches as opposed to Google Adwords.

Dollars Per Visit is also extremely useful for setting bid limits in Google Adwords and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. For instance, if you know that you margin is 50% and your $ per visit is $1.50, then bidding over 70c a click will lose you money. Be sure to monitor this specifically for your Adwords and PPC traffic as it is sure to vary with different traffic sources.

How to measure your eCommerce Website

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

With all of the information that is available from measuring websites with tools like Google Analytics, it’s easy to get distracted. A typical eCommerce website has it’s own unique set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and conversion rates. These conversion rates will tell you where you can gain quick and profitable improvements from your eCommerce website.

So start with the basics. The touchstone metrics of your eCommerce website are the number of:

  1. Visits to your eCommerce website
  2. Shopping carts created
  3. Orders placed, paid, sealed and delivered.

From these figures you work out your conversion rates.

Visit to Cart Conversion Rate
Visits / Carts created = %

Cart to Order Conversion Rate
Carts / Orders = % 
(or subtract this figure from 100 to determine your cart abandonment rate).

IMPORTANT: The conversion rates tell you where to look for the answers. 

For instance, if you have 1000 visits to your site and yet only 5 people created a shopping cart (0.5% visit to cart conversion rate), then you will want to look carefully at the process that people have to go through to create shopping cart on your website.

If you were finding on the other hand that out of the 1000 visits to your website 500 shopping carts were created (50% visit to cart conversion rate), but only 5 placed an order (10% cart to order conversion, a.k.a. 90% cart abandonment rate), then you would need to carefully analyse your ordering process.

From these stats you might launch into your Google Analytics stats to find out what’s going on. From the clues that you find you could formulate a Google Website Optimiser test to prove your assumptions.

The rewards in this sort of work are high. While traffic may be getting harder to generate with increased competition, your conversion rates are likely to be an easy to reach and untapped gold mine.

Truck signage is a traffic oppportunity

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Truck Signage - With web address.Sure, truck signage is an great opportunity to engage your audience on the road, but what about creating traffic to your website?

A recent study* on radio advertising showed that 80% of listeners who heard a relevant radio ad with a web address mentioned in it went on to visit the website. We postulate that the same would hold true for other forms of volatile advertising like TV and outdoor (including billboard advertising and car, van and truck signage).

Warning: When advertising, make sure that your web address is memorable.

If your web address is not relevant to your advertising message, it may be too hard to remember. So make sure that your web address relates to the key theme of your ad. Think about registering a domain name specifically for you advertising campaign.

Truck Signage - Good sign, no web address.For example, for one of our clients - Superior Mobile Mechanics – we registered www.superiormobile.com.au for use in advertising and vehicle signage in addition to the domain www.superiormobilemechanics.com.au.

The first domain is easier to remember and spell correctly, but the second domain was better for search engine ranking… so we use both.

* Source: commercialradio.com.au

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