You don’t need visitors to be a success

We all get excited when we get visitors to our websites. We pour over the stats and look longingly at those sites that get thousands of hits each day. But does it really matter? If all those visitors pass by without availing themselves of your services then it was pretty much a waste of time.

So if the number of visitors doesn’t matter then what does? I shall reveal all.

A reason to exist

Every website needs a reason to exist. It doesn’t matter why you want a website but unless it has a purpose there’s not a lot of point in spending time and effort building the thing.

Once you have your website up and running then you will begin to see a trickle of visitors. If you run a PPC campaign or end up on the digg homepage then this trickle could be a flood.

Most of us would whoop with delight at the thought of thousands of visitors but wait, it’s not quite so simple. What happens if every one of those visitors left just a few seconds after landing on your site. Not one click, not one sale, 0% conversion. The number of visitors was irrelevant because nobody stayed.

But supposing you only get 100 visitors each day and 50 of the stayed on the site for a while and you made 2 sales every day. Even better, what if 25 returned and brought something on their next visit.

The actual number of visitors you get each day is not a good way of analysing how well your site is performing. Much better to break it down as follows:

Look at where each visitor land and how they got there.
Examine what they clicked on, follow this through to the end.
Measure how long they stayed on the website.
Identify where they left the site.

It’s this last bit of analysis that is probably the most important so it gets a heading all of its own.

The Exit Page

Now that you are ignoring the number of visitors and concentrating instead on their behaviour you need to look at why they leave you site without converting.

If you are promoting your homepage and everybody leaves without clicking on your links then you have a major problem. Try changing your copy, moving your navigation, changing the order of the navigation links, adjusting the colour, font size. In fact try anything, you have nothing to lose.

If a few visitors click on your links, you need to know which one’s are most popular and work on promoting these. Again, moving them to the top left, adding some inline links or rewriting your anchor text can all help.

Deeper into the site are your product pages, articles or whatever. It doesn’t matter if the visitor lands here or navigates here, if they exit the site without buying then once again the site fails.

With an open source e-commerce site making major changes to the layout is not the easiest of tasks but what you can do is work on your copy. Get rid of those boring old clichés and put some zing into your words. Go from:

200g tin of beans.

To:

A 200g can of succulent baked beans swimming in a rich tomato sauce. The improved recipe has a spicy zing along with reduced salt and sugar content.

Consider the colour and style of your ‘add to cart’ link. Try changing it to ‘buy this item’ or even ‘get it now’. Try moving it to a different position or making it bigger. Make sure the price it prominent. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to make a purchase.

Leaving without paying

So you fix all the above and now get visitors navigating to the product pages, selecting items and going to the checkout. And leaving.

Frustrating isn’t it.

Cart abandonment is still a major headache for all e-commerce sites. Not going to go into too much details here as this report has all the information you need:

www.tamingthebeast.net/cart-abandonment

The key point are as follows:

Keep it simple – only ask for the minimum of information
Try to reduce the number of steps to the minimum
Allow me to step back and change things
Don’t ask me to register in order to buy something.

And finally…

Don’t sit around moaning about your lack of conversions. It’s not google’s fault, it’s not the CMS you are using, it’s you. You need to change your site to meet you visitors needs so that they convert into customers.

There was a thread a few days ago on a forum where the poster was only concerned about getting to #1 on google despite the fact that not one of her visitors had brought anything. She just couldn’t see that it was the website that was the problem not her lack of visitors.

We can discuss how to get visitors onto your site another day…