Business online has changed from five years ago.  Website visits used to be the only way to measure online interaction with your brand.  Today, we have social networks, externally-hosted blogs and other interactions with our brands that occur away from our carefully-crafted websites. So is measuring website visits enough?

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Who needs a large sales force when your company website can do the hard work for you? Both B2B and B2C companies are realizing the need to make their websites more effective and optimize them to generate qualified leads.

So where can you start your optimization efforts? These seven universal optimization techniques will vault your online lead generation efforts into overdrive.
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If your company uses its web site as a marketing tool or sales tool, you can’t afford not to test new things. One powerful technique to help your company make huge site improvements with a relatively small effort is the incremental redesign.

Incremental redesign doesn’t involve a total overhaul of your web site — rather, just a single page or page template. It can involve your homepage, a landing page for a paid search campaign, your e-commerce product page or even your e-mail marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say your company runs an e-commerce web site, and you think you could improve your conversion rate. Use Excel to create a simple spreadsheet and log some “control” information — the date range and conversion rate. Pick one page — in this case, a product page. The objective for this page is to convince the customer to add the product to their shopping cart, so you hypothesize that the add to cart button isn’t large and colorful enough. Make a simple change to your product page template by making the add to cart button larger and more colorful. Next, log the test date range in your spreadsheet, what change you made to the template, and the conversion rate for the date range. Having this spreadsheet allows you to compare the before and after, and make a decision as to whether you’ll keep the new add to cart button. Keep this spreadsheet up-to-date over time and it will also serve as a log of what you’ve done in the past and what results you measured from those changes.

Of course, it may take many tests before you find the right page design, but this low-cost technique can be used on almost any page of your web site or even on a landing page.

It works. Last year, an online retailer hired me to improve their conversion rate. After looking at their site, I deduced that the single biggest barrier to conversion was their product page template. A large product image took up the entire width of the page, the pricing/value proposition wasn’t clear and users had to scroll before seeing any product information. With the old page template in place, the site conversion rate was 0.91%. After the product page was redesigned, site conversion increased to 2.76%, all because we changed a single page on their site!

Often, significant improvements can be made without redesigning your entire web site. I encourage small businesses to try the cost-effective technique of incremental redesigns to improve the effectiveness of their web sites.

There are so many features in Google Analytics that make it the best free web analytics package out there, and I want to take a minute to highlight one of my favorites — the often overlooked e-mail feature.

On any page of your Google Analytics reports, you’ll find a small “Email” button at the top of the report. Clicking this button allows you to e-mail the report to your inbox, or even schedule automatic delivery of the report.

Note that the e-mail feature is contextual. If you want to receive the dashboard via e-mail, just click the “Email” button on the dashboard page. If you want Google Analytics to e-mail the traffic sources report to you, click the “Email” button on that page, and so on.

I routinely use this feature to send weekly dashboard reports to my clients. While dashboards don’t take the place of in-depth analysis, the weekly e-mail helps clients identify trends or potential problems.

I wanted to post a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding shopping cart abandonment rate to provide a real-life example of why shopping cart abandonment matters.

I have a new client‚Äîwe’ll call them “Client A”‚Äîthat recently asked me to improve their conversion rate. There was one problem, though. Client A didn’t have a web analytics package in place to accurately measure their conversion rate. After installing Google Analytics on Client A’s site and configuring a checkout funnel, we found that their cart abandonment rate was a whopping 87% (industry average is about 60%). This is one case where higher-than-average isn’t better.

“Client B”, a long-time client, has a much better cart abandonment rate. We’ve worked for years to improve checkout and get it running as efficiently as possible. After all, Client B doesn’t get as much traffic as Client A, so stellar conversion is a must if they want to make money. Client B’s cart abandonment rate is currently 19%, so their site is getting 80% of their users that reach the shopping cart past the cart and into checkout.

Client A only sent 1 of 10 people through their shopping cart into checkout while Client B was sending 8 of 10 people through.

Knowing this, I can now turn my attention to solving Client A’s cart abandonment problem. We’ll try different page designs and process flows until we achieve Client A’s goal of getting 4 of 10 customers through to checkout, and this will have a huge impact on revenue.

This, in my opinion, is why monitoring cart abandonment is so valuable. Not only will your site generate more revenue per visitor as your shopping cart abandonment rate decreases, but your ad spend also becomes more effective.

I had the opportunity to listen to a Clicktracks webinar yesterday that discussed using Clicktracks to quantify your search engine optimization efforts. It was a rather enlightening presentation.

The presenter argued that “average time on site” is a good measurement of your search engine optimization efforts. It goes to figure that if your web page shows up in a search for a particular topic and the searcher spends a good amount of time on your site after clicking your result, your SEO efforts for that term have been successful.

You can improve your web site’s optimization and usability by writing content that is focused, helpful and on-topic. If you’re paying for search engine ads, write well-targeted ads, click the user to a relevant landing page and they’ll engage with your site.

So what’s a good “average time on site” benchmark? The presenter said that it’s impossible to come up with one benchmark, and that it’s difficult to compare sites. The best practice is to compare “average time on site” for all of the keywords that generate traffic to your site. The longer the average time on site for a keyword, the better the keyword is at captivating the web user. For those keywords with a low average time on site relative to other keywords, opportunities exist to further optimize pages for those terms.

The seminar presenter also confirmed that businesses should pay for advertising on terms they also optimize for. I’ve always agreed that this is a best practice, and you can read why in my post called “The search engine marketing mix: paid search versus SEO.”

During the presentation, one astute attendee asked the presenter why they would use Clicktracks when Google Analytics was free. The presenter explained that Google Analytics uses Javascript to capture information while Clicktracks Pro Server Edition uses the server’s raw logfiles, and this type of data can only be retrieved through logfiles. I later confirmed this through a Google Analytics message board.

Full disclosure: I used Clicktracks Hosted for approximately 6 months until Google Analytics was released. I endorse Clicktracks as the best paid web analytics service but I personally use Google Analytics for my business purposes.