Are You a Dumb Marketer? - “Metricsize” Your Landing Pages or Lose Money
Are you leaving money on the table with your site? The most common and daft statement i hear many site owners and marketers say is, “Oh…. But we’re not an ‘E-Commerce’ Site… We don’t sell anything…” Is that silly or what? Does that mean to say that only people selling products or services online should make use of web analytics or online metric tools? Watch what Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics Evangelist, has to say about how Web Metrics is a necessity for every serious business online.
With all that said, let’s introduce some basic, yet ever essential key metrics for your site.
Your Conversion Rate
Your Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that become your desired outcome, be it a sale, subscriber or lead. An Ecommerce site producing purchasing conversions of 5-9% is generally considered good by web metric standards while a lead generation site churning percentages of 15-20% is considered very healthy. Products spanning across different industries will of course generate different conversion rates, also, we must take into account that different companies will often have different definitions for conversions. Hence, we can say that there isn’t a definite comparison ‘chart’ that will gauge how well your conversions are doing.
How then can we best define and calculate your site’s purchase conversion? Using your web analytics tool, divide the number of unique visitors during by the number of sales during a given period. A conversion below 2% is not considered healthy, and you may want to study how to get those figures up. Assuming you jack the rate up by 1 or 2%, doing the math will shock you at the amount of money you’re leaving on the table.
The idea and brilliance of Conversion metrics is that you will begin to scrutinise and refine your strategy of ‘forcing’ your valuable traffic to bite!
Home Page Abandonment Rate
Your Home Page Abandonment rate is simply the percentage of people who leave your site instantly, upon reaching your home page. This is commonly caused by untargeted visitors (visitors that have no interest in your products, services), accidental clicks, or perhaps, a site design so repelling a stench came out of the speakers.
An effective solution to a high page abandonment rate, would be to create specific highly targeted landing pages that has content that will suck a prospective visitor in, and market or sell the hell out of the visitor. Of course this is assuming that at the top end of your marketing funnel you had created baits that were specific and relevant to your landing page.
Here are some figures for thought.
- 10% of visitors leave after the first click
- 55% leave after the second click
- 80% leave after the third click
Cost Per Sale
Your Average Cost/Sale is the Cost of advertising over the number of sales. Similarly Cost/Lead will be the Cost of advertising divide by the number of leads.
This metric if self-explanatory. I won’t dig deeper because there isn’t a standard to go by. The general rule of thumb is to ensure that you’re making more money than you’re spending. Some will argue that they wouldn’t mind losing some money upfront to ‘win’ a customer long term. But if you’re doing commerce online and offline has its differences. From my experience, online, your clients and competitors are less forgiving.
I’m going to direct you to a great Stephan Spencer’s podcast interview with Bryan Eisenberg where Bryan talks about converting your customers.
