Affordable Website Promotion

30 Aug

Here is a true story for you of how important it is to look after the customers that arrive on your website and managing what they are seeing.

This website offered a fantastic deal of a £1 domain name & hosting offer. It is a great offer and one not to be missed.

Unfortunately, when they first started the offer the price of the domain name was shown as full, with the discount only being shown once the potential buyer went to the checkout. This led to a 30% drop out rate on the shopping basket.

Now they have changed the way the basket works so that the £1 price is shown the moment you add a domain (click the link and give it a go, if you have not already done so). This way it is obvious to customers straight away that they are getting the domain for £1, not £12.99.

The effect, well the 30% drop out rate became just 1%. For the sake of a simple change to their basket they had increased the uptake on the offer from 70% to 99% - near enough half as many sales again. And this is without having to invest time and effort into finding new people to visit the website.

That is why it is so vital that you check your website stats and make sure that the number of abandoned baskets is low and investigate why baskets are being abandoned!

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22 Jul

Should you look at hits, page views or unique visitors. What are bounces? Is it important to review how people are visiting your site and the browsers that they are using? How many more questions can you ask about traffic stats?

Website traffic stats can, at best, be a little confusing. What is the huge difference between hits, page views and unique visitors? Which is most important and what should you look at and how do you interpret and analyze web traffic views?

Hits, Page Views and Unique Visitors
Three simple terms that people often confuse! Hits are usually the count of the individual files that have been accessed on your website, so a single page load could include the html, several images and a css file or two.

Page views should be self explanatory - the number of pages that have been accessed by your visitors.

And unique visitors is the number of different people visiting your website, hopefully tracked over a decent time period so that people that come back each day and each week still only count as one.

Which of these is important?
Ignore hits - these are only usually available through server stats anyway, not through the major third party reporting. But page views and unique views need to be looked at together.

Ideally you want both figures to be high and depending on the size of your site there should not be a 1 : 1 relationship. The higher page views is compared to unique visitors the more pages each individual visitor is looking at. If this ratio is high, people are coming onto your site, finding it interesting and looking around. If it is 1 : 1, either you are a single page website or they are not interested in the site.

Obviously, the higher the unique visitors figure the more people that are visiting the site and that is certainly good! It is also interesting to look, if you can, at how long a time period visitors are returning over. Are you building a relationship with them so that they keep coming back?

Bounces And Time On Page
This is something else to look at and study carefully. A high number of bounces means that a lot of your visitors are reading one page and then leaving the website. Either they get what they want off that landing page, or they don't like the site or its information. Time on the page should tell you which. If they are there for seconds then they don't like the site, if they are there for long enough to read the page and digest it, then they are getting what they want.

Different Browsers
You should also look at the different browsers that people are using to view your website and see if any particular browsers have higher / lower bounce rates than other browsers. If one has a particularly high bounce rate then it could be a sign that there is a problem with that browser displaying a page properly. Likewise, does looking at people with different version of flash or javascript enabled show different bounce rates, if you are using either of them?

This is just a basic starter list of a few thing to look at when you try to interpret and analyze web traffic views. There are lots more, but follow these and take actions and you might just increase your traffic.

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20 Jul

A nice looking site can increase your traffic, whilst a not so nice site can cost you traffic. But why is this the case?

On the whole, it depends on what your site is selling how it should look. If yours is an information blog then the site should look friendly, clean and inviting, but if you are selling high end cars with price tags above the cost of an average house then you need a website that looks impressive, screams quality and shouts that you care about your visitors, who are your future customers.

A poor looking site chases visitors away.
Of course, it starts a long way off from matching the look to your customer. If you choose an horrendous colour scheme, mismatching fonts and generally a disaster of a website design, regardless of what you are selling people are not going to stay on your website for long. They will be reaching for the back button as soon as they see the page has loaded, before they have read any content or clicked on any of the adverts.

A good looking site builds confidence
So a good looking website builds the confidence that your visitors have in your website. Opening a shabby looking website is like walking into a shabby looking restaurant. It does not matter what the prices are or what the offering is, you are going to scare people away before they have chance to even think of buying from you.

There is one important feature that must look good to get more traffic
It does not often happen that a site is that well built that the design alone can create a flow of traffic. It is the features more than the look that attracts people there. But, there is one element of the look of the website that can directly influence how many people arrive from the search engines.

And this is the reverse of what most people do! Look at your website's Title and Description tags in the header of each page. Are they pretty and attractive? Use the site: search to quickly look through these on a search engine. Do they read well? Are they telling people what you are offering or are they full of spammy keywords trying to fool the search engines into sending more visitors? Forget spam. Change them now to make them read well and look good and you should, once the search engines have cached your pages, see an improvement in traffic.

Keep the pages fresh, not cluttered
After that, getting the look right is just down to not cluttering the page. If the page looks good and the visitors can find the information and the links that they want they will stay on the site for longer, reading more of what you have to say and finding the products that they want. With a busy site there will be too many flashing adverts and banners distracting people. With a good looking site everything is well organised and visitors can find their way around the pages.

So that is how a nice looking website can increase your traffic!

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12 Jul

You might experience occasional high levels of traffic, but you want to maintain these levels, even build on them. So if your traffic levels suddenly increase, how can you keep them up?

Working on getting traffic onto your website through paid advertising, Search Engine Marketing and other techniques can be time consuming and costly. So once these efforts start to show a reward, you want to make sure that you keep the traffic levels high.

It is not just a matter of pay for advertising or a Search Engine Optimisation expert to do his tricks and then sit back. The problem is that ultimately, these schemes dry up and you need to put in more effort to get the people visiting you again.

It is far better and far more efficient if you can make sure that they visitors that are driven to your web site now through your paid efforts are not one off visitors and keep coming back. So settle down and make some changes to your website to make sure it is sticky.

Analyse your traffic.
Do you have a decent website statistics package installed? I always use Google Analytics. With these, in particular Google Analytics, you can review various factors of your website. There are too many different checks to make but look at your bounce rates and exit pages - these are where people are leaving your site. If you find that a certain browser is more often involved in bounces, or an unexpected page is often used at the exit page, test the site in that browser combination or review that page. Work out what is causing people to leave the site.

Tidy your website.
How much advertising do you have on your website? I landed on a site this morning on which the entire above the fold area was advertising - banner adverts, large Google Adsense blocks, other Google search paid links and so on. Even the text had an advert dropped into it.

Yes, I couldn't miss the advertising. But does this mean the website owner wants me there to see their site or there to click on an advert? Make your visitors feel welcome and wanted and they will come back more often. Just put in one or two key advert blocks on the page in a position that is obvious, but not distracting.

Make it easier for them to come back.
If you run a blog, is your RSS feed button big, obvious and above the fold? Do you provide a link to a page where you give more instructions on following the RSS feed or signing up for a newsletter? Do you provide an incentive to sign up for the newsletter?

Ensure visitors can easily find more.
They might not know that the rest of your site is interesting, so provide links that are relevant for them to continue reading. In a blog this might be related posts at the bottom of the current post and popular posts in the side bar. In an ecommerce site this can be similar products or products that other people bought after looking at the item your visitor is browsing.

Make sure that your site is friendly, easy to come back to and gives a good reason to come back for. That way, when your traffic levels are high you should keep them that way!

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3 May

Do you look at your website traffic frequently? Do you monitor what is happening on the site, or just trundle on as you are? Monitoring your traffic daily could improve your traffic levels! find out why.

It is vital that you monitor your website traffic so that you know what is happening and can make the most of it. OK, I accept that for some websites and for people with a lot of websites that monitoring every day is impossible. But if you aim to monitor the stats once a month, you will certainly forget and end up monitoring them once a year at best. Aim to check them every day that you can and you will remember to check them frequently.

But what, exactly, are you checking for? Monitoring the total number of visitors a day goes part of the way, but here are the checks to look out for:

  • Traffic spikes - if the traffic goes up for a day, why? Look carefully at the other factors listed below and see if any of them are to credit for it!

  • Traffic drops - have a think if there is a reason that traffic has dropped. Check that your server hasn't bee down, or have other events caused a lull in the traffic, such as a huge news item?

  • Referring sites - who has sent you visitors that day? If you suddenly see visitors coming from a new source, or more than usual, then what can you do to encourage this? Maybe someone has blogged about you - in this case go to their blog and thank them. Do what you can to encourage a repeat. Or maybe you have been submitting articles and are receiving extra hits from the directories - if so, then you know where to submit your next articles to...

  • Search engine terms - again, watch for traffic increases that indicate a term has done well, but also look for those that are falling a little short. Go to the search engines and try the search terms and see what position you are in. Not quite on the top of the page? Then write an article for that keyword and move yourself further up that page. It is better than working blindly on random keywords.

  • Landing pages - what pages do your visitors land on? Is one suddenly becoming hot or is there a theme to which pages are often found? Maybe you have discovered a term that there is plenty of traffic on, but not much competition. A little more writing on what people are interested in could certainly improve your traffic levels.

These are all important factors that if you monitor them often enough, you can react to them and do something about them whilst they are still hot. There is no point in trying to repeat a search that sent you traffic last week, because the search results could have changed since then. Work out where you are getting traffic and nurture these sources. Quickly you can be building plenty of traffic.

Is there something else that you like to monitor on a daily basis that I have forgotten? Just leave a comment and I can add it to the list.

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