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.