My last article involved using Google Analytics to create a conversion funnel so you could measure drop-offs during the steps in checkout. With these statistics, you can track your checkout conversion rate. You can also calculate your overall site conversion rate if you know the number of visitors to your site and the number of orders you’ve gotten (Orders divided by Visitors).

So you know your conversion rate, but how do you know if your conversion rate is as high as it should be? Enter the Fireclick index, a free web analytics benchmark index. The Fireclick index tracks 12 key metrics and includes breakdowns by 6 market segments. You can use the Fireclick index to compare your site to others in your industry.

Metrics measured include:

• Conversion Rate: Global
• Conversion Rate: First Time Visitors
• Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors
• Cart Abandonment Rate
• Conversion Rate: Keywords (paid search like Google Adwords)
• Conversion Rate: Emails
• Conversion Rate: Affiliates
• Average Session Length (pages)
• Average Session Duration (min)
• Average Page Display Time (s)
• Average Page Read Time (s)
• Average Connection Speed (Kbps)

The site even graphs out the metrics so you can see trends. You can compare these graphs to your own to see how closely your site compares to the industry average.

How do you stack up?

For the smaller retailer without extra funds to spend on analytics, the advent of Google Analytics is a godsend. Google Analytics allows you to set up analytics for your site for free. Now, even the smallest retailer can afford a powerful statistics package.

It’s a fact that roughly half of all online retailers don’t know what their conversion rates are. Conversion rates are easy enough to calculate (customers/orders), but cart conversion can be a different story. Until now, only retailers with a complex tracking system could measure cart conversion.

Cart conversion is the percentage of customers that complete an order after visiting the shopping cart. It defines how many people start and finish the checkout process.

Cart conversion is important because it measures how effective your checkout process is at getting the sale. Google Analytics gives you a visual representation of your checkout conversion, one step at a time.

Enter the concept of a checkout funnel. A funnel is wide at the top and narrows as you go down, and an online checkout process tends to work the same way. The top of the “funnel” is the shopping cart (there’s some controversy as to whether the cart is part of the checkout process, but we’ll assume it is for this example). Only a subset of the people that hit the shopping cart will proceed to the shipping screen, and only a subset of those people will reach the billing page. At the end of the process is the order confirmation screen, which typically sees an even smaller number of people.

The ultimate goal, of course, is for 100% of your customers to drop through the funnel and purchase, but that doesn’t happen realistically for a number of reasons we won’t go into here. In a perfect world, the funnel would appear like a cylinder.

As long as you’ve added your Google Analytics code snippet in your pages to allow for tracking, you can create a checkout funnel. Google Analytics allows you to set up “goals,” so you’ll want to set up a goal called “Cart conversion” and paste in the URL for each step in your checkout process.

After you’ve set this goal up, you’ll find the report under Content Optimization > Goals & Funnel Process > Defined Funnel Navigation. Once you have received data for the goal you’ve set up, you’ll see the number of visitors that have hit each step and the success rate.

What you do with this information is up to you. Obviously, you want to reduce dropoff from one step to another. I’ve completed many checkout optimization studies, so if you’re interested in how to use this information, drop me an e-mail.

Google announced on its Inside Adwords blog recently that the quality of your landing page affects your ad’s position.

Since I have a creative background, I’ve been a proponent of landing page testing all along. Now, it pays off. Having a landing page that is relevant to the terms for which your ad is served is of paramount importance.

How does this affect Google Adwords advertisers? If you’re already sending your traffic to a relevant landing page, you’re ahead of the curve, and your ads may appear before those advertisers/competitors that send their traffic to their homepage. Many advertisers simply send their traffic to their homepage, which is not necessarily a relevant page.

Take the term “widgets.” Advertiser A bids on “widgets” and sends his traffic to the homepage of his site, while advertiser B bids on “widgets” and sends his traffic to a page about widgets. Advertiser B has a better chance of appearing first, all else equal.

I advise my clients to tailor their landing pages to their ads, and test different landing page designs to find the best solution for their business. The placement of key page elements can dramatically affect response rates, as can color and relevance to the search term.

If you pay for search engine advertising, let me show you how your landing pages can bring better results. Contact me and we can talk about your goals, your current landing page design, and how you can get better results.

If you are designing your site for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only, listen up. This year, 100 million people have downloaded the Firefox web browser, and up to 35% of your site traffic could be from Firefox users.

What’s the risk, you ask? First, Firefox is a standards-compliant browser, where Internet Explorer is not. Your pages may not render properly in Firefox. In addition, some shopping carts, interactive site functions, survey tools, registration functions and more can be rendered totally useless. That’s not good for business.

Redesigning your site to accommodate Firefox is something to budget for now, and it’s a necessity, especially if you have a cutting-edge audience. Even though Firefox users might comprise 5% of your total site traffic, Marketing Sherpa has published six business cases for redesigning your site to be Firefox-compliant:

1. Improve your search engine optimization
   Even if 100% of your site traffic uses Internet Explorer, a redesign presents the opportunity to re-structure your pages to make them easier for search engines to index.
2. Proper presentation, including key pages like shopping carts and contact forms
   You want your pages to look the same in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. After all, that’s how it was designed to look. Also, you don’t want to lose customers — contact forms and shopping carts that work in both browsers ensure maximum leads/revenue.
3. Decrease your development time and maintenance costs
   Using web standards-based pages, you can change the look and feel of your web site in 30% less time. In addition, you’ll reduce customer complaints because a standards-based site will render properly in all browsers.
4. Save money on bandwidth
   Because standards-based HTML code is shorter and cleaner, the core pages (not counting functions, Flash movies, etc.) don’t use as much bandwidth, saving you money if you pay for the amount of bandwidth you use.
5. Quicker page download times
   Because standards-based HTML code is shorter and cleaner, it takes less time to download. Less download time means a better customer experience.
6. Compatibility with wireless devices
   In preparation for the future of web browsing, your page display can vary based on the device people are viewing it on. Because standards-based pages separate the content from the presentation, you can easily set your site up for viewing on a computer screen, handheld, RSS reader, Blackberry or wireless phone.

Your action plan should be to assess the percentage of Firefox visitors that visit your site. Figure out how much a redesign is going to cost (consult a good web designer or your in-house staff), and try to assess how much you’re losing by not redesigning. You’ll then need to find a designer that can code a web standards-based site and get started.

Finally, if you prefer the look of your existing site, you don’t necessarily need to change the look and feel of your site to redesign it for Firefox using web standards.

Internet Retailer, citing comScore figures, said that online sales for the first three quarters of 2005 are up 24% from the first three months of 2004.

Keeping on top of these figures is important if you’re and online retailer, and comparing these figures to your own is a good benchmark for your site’s sales performance.

If your 2005 sales show below 24% growth, it’s time to analyze your business and figure out why. Do a higher proportion of your sales come at the end of the year (most sales do come during the holiday period, so this might not be the best indicator)? Perhaps your site isn’t converting visitors to buyers, or perhaps you can’t be found in the search engine results. Maybe you’re having an issue with your paid search marketing clickthrough rates or conversion from paid search ads.

If you’re unsure what the issues are, contact me and I can help you determine where the gaps are and how to get your sales up to snuff.

Today’s E-commerce Times contains an article that is worth a read if you are an online retailer who’s just starting out, or if you’re an entrepreneur thinking about starting an ecommerce web site. The article discusses your site’s response times and your customers’ willingness to wait to view your web site. The article is on the technical side for the novice, but underscores an important aspect of web usability. If a customer has to wait to see your site, they are going to go elsewhere.

If you’re not happy with your site’s performance or especially if you’re considering starting an online retail web site, be sure to do your research on potential hosting and ecommerce application providers. Find out who their clients are and visit the clients’ web sites to see what the performance is like. Too often, many people don’t consider this aspect when starting an online retail site, and it bites them later. Established sites often face problems when their product database grows to a size that bogs down the server they’re running on.

From personal usability lab experience, I can tell you that people are not patient when it comes to site load times. Long site load times will cause the customer to think negatively about your business, and if they are trying to purchase on your site and the purchase process hangs or is very slow, it can cause a great deal of confusion and frustration.