Internet Marketing Metrics

3 Easy Ways To Making Your Website More User-Friendly

Google is constantly changing their metrics for ranking sites based on SEO searches. As a business owner, this constantly means you have to keep up with those changes to outrank competitors. Is a site which is SEO (keyword) friendly, and mobile navigability still a top priority? Or, has making a site easier to manoeuvre, and having faster loading rates more important? Regardless of the industry your business is in, if you want to rank atop the search engines, you need to make your site user-friendly. These are a few ways in which you can do just that, and improve site rank on Google, and other search engines.

1. Limit restrictions –
You know those annoying popups which require you to input your email before a visitor can actually view your site? Or those annoying banner ads forcing visitors to click a link to move forward? Well these are things which are restricting your page from being user-friendly, and are in fact turning visitors away. Make the site as “limit-free” as possible. Remember, you are dealing with people, not programmers. Make the site as easy to use, navigate, and find content as possible.

2. KISS (keep it simple stupid) –
In terms of having to create a username, make sure you make these easy for visitors to create. If they need to include: numbers, letters, symbols, etc, certain people are more likely to avoid creating a username. Also, make using features on the site simple. Allow visitors to “checkout” as a guest, rather than having to create an account when shopping online. Or make it easy for them to save usernames (and passwords if they choose to do so). This limits how much work they have to do when visiting your site, and makes it more likely they are going to visit again in the future.

3. State it up front –
Lets take a shopping site as an example here. If you sell goods to consumers online, but do not ship to certain countries, clearly list this on the main page. Or if you only accept Paypal as a payment form, inform visitors of this on the homepage. It not only limits visitor frustration (who can’t order after having gone through several steps to reach the checkout page), but lets visitors know what is required, before they can shop on your site.

Regardless of your niche, industry, or end-customer, user-friendly sites are desired by all site visitors. In order to make your site a little easier to navigate and use, consider including a few of these programming features, when developing your online site for visitors.

3 Mistakes To Avoid In Internet Marketing

When it comes to internet marketing, there are things that you simply need to avoid so that you will not waste your time.

Unfortunately, these are very common mistakes and if you are able to avoid these, you will be able to have an edge on your competition.

If you are serious about being a successful internet marketer, then you need to focus on these mistakes and to remember to avoid them.

Not having a niche

Making your presence known online is all about having a niche. If you fail to choose a good niche, you will never be able to really succeed.

This is because the internet already has a lot of competition and so you need to find a niche where you can excel and actually get traffic to your site.

Rushing the process

Too many people simply try to get overnight success and this is not going to happen. If you are serious about being able to succeed in any aspect of life, rushing things will only make things worse.

You need to take it slow and focus on long term success. Once you realize that patience really is a virtue, you will see that your online journey will only get better.

No originality

The internet has a lot of content and so you can’t be a copy of other things. You will need to be original and have your own style on the internet.

Once you are able to do this, there is no stopping you from succeeding.

If you are able to avoid these simple things, you will be able to really make your presence known on the internet.

Most people will admit that these are the simplest mistakes to create and if you avoid these from the very beginning, you will be able to really prosper online.

3 Ways to Get People to Buy Your Products Online

An online business, like any other business, is driven by profitability. Profits for most businesses are generated through sales. Below are three ways to get more people to buy your products:

1. Imply scarcity

There are reasons as to why such a strategy will work.

First, proven economic models such as supply and demand have highlighted that fact that the value of a product increases when it is unavailable, rare or scarce. The opposite is also true. Scarcity will make people subconsciously attach more value to the products being sold.

Second, human nature has it that potential buyers procrastinate until the ‘right time’. A bird in hand is worth several in the bush when it comes to sales. Scarcity let’s the procrastinating buyer know that the product will not be available tomorrow or the day after.

You can use scarcity of time or scarcity of product. Create scarcity by giving your website visitors a time limit on their offer. This will give them the extra push needed to make quick decisions. You can also create scarcity of the product to make it ‘exclusive’ so that people feel the need to have it before it runs out.

For example, you can use phrases such as:

· ‘Don’t miss out on this offer, only 2 days left or use a countdown

‘Get yours before they run out… Only 5 pieces left!’

2. Use Social Proof and or Testimonials

Making public the number of sales made and the people flocking to you creates massive amounts of appeal. You can therefore share statistics and numbers to indicate popularity of your product.

When a potential buyer feels like other people are using your product, they gain confidence it and are therefore more likely to buy it. Product popularity is proof that what you are selling actually works and is valuable.

3. Provide a simple and safe payment process

An online buyer is someone that appreciates convenience, privacy and security. For this potential buyer to finish the payment process, you will need to provide an easy and safe mode of payment. Avoid a payment mode that is too lengthy because those ones tend to make your buyer uncomfortable or irritated.

Debit or credit card fraud is unfortunately part of the reason why people fear shopping online. You need to acknowledge that submitting payment details together with personal information is quite an ask from potential buyers. Use a reliable and safe mode to help the clients overcome this fear. Also, contact your supplier on the safety and various seals you can get for the buyer.

4 Simple Yet Effective Tricks To Increasing Website Sales

An ecommerce site may rank high in search engines and get a high flow of traffic but have low conversion rates when it comes to online sales. Increasing online sales being the primary goal of every online business, knowing the simple tricks for increasing website sales is imperative. Here are four effective techniques that you can use to increase your website sales

1. Improve your website navigation

In order to encourage users to purchase from your website, it should be well laid out, clear and clean. If visitors find the website cumbersome and difficult to find what they want, they will go and look for it somewhere else.

Keep everything consistent, professional and simple. Correct all spelling errors, for example and keep things as intuitive as possible. You should use obvious sections for your form and keep reminding the visitors where they are on the site.

Also, minimize the number of clicks from the landing page to the checkout which means the purchasing process should be as quick as possible. Do not force the buyers to open an account before buying and if they have too, include only the necessary information.

2. Build trust with the website visitors

Online businesses do not have face to face contact with the clients which makes it difficult to build trust. However, there are other ways to convey that you are trustworthy such as including trade body and association membership. Also, try to get as many accreditations as possible.

You can also join a community group and include case studies and endorsement testimonials from previous customers on the website.

Personalize your website as much as possible and include real people.

Since there is no face to face contact, human element on the website will help build trust

3. Be transparent

Openness and honesty is very important for any online business. Always be clear on all prices and delivery charges and include any other details that may be helpful to a buyer.

A FAQs section is a good way to answer all customer’s questions. Be sure to also display your contact information and be easy to get hold of.

4. Think about the target market

You should remember who you selling your product to. If it is the older group, you only have to make them feel safe but the younger market is web savvy and it will take much more to convince them to order your products.

Make a point to analyze your website as well as your competitors, run user surveys, ask feedback from the customers and keep contact with them with helpful information, not spam.

Your aim is to create a process that enable you to find out the likes and dislikes of your customers.

5 Tips To Increasing Website Conversion Rates

One of the most important metrics to any online business or marketing campaign is your website’s conversion rate. It doesn’t matter if you drive millions of people to your website if none of them convert. What constitutes a conversion will depend, of course, on what your goal is. It could be content downloads, purchases, sign-ups to your email lists and more. However, in all cases, these conversions will either create immediate revenue or will push prospects to another phase in your funnel so that they convert into revenue later on down the line.

So, conversion rates will translate into revenues eventually. And that means ensuring you generate the best possible conversion rate, which shouldn’t be too difficult, right? Well, not really. Things are never that simple because there are so many factors to take into account that will affect whether or not a prospect converts. Here are 5 tips to help you improve your conversion rate.

Increase Your CTAs

An action is made up of four elements, namely opportunity, ability, willpower and incentive. In other words, you have to present users with the opportunity to convert, give them the means by which to do so, provide them with an enticement and then ensure that they carry through.

The first step is to provide them with the opportunity to convert, and that means having multiple calls-to-action on your website. Though quality is usually more important than quantity, in this case, both are equally as important. Providing plenty of opportunities is one of the simplest things you can change but it’s also the most overlooked.

So, make sure you post plenty of CTAs, providing visitors with the opportunity to sign up, purchase or download. Put them in the sidebar, in your posts, as popup offers and more. Don’t go crazy, though. You don’t want to alienate your prospects. Finding the sweet spot might be difficult but it’s nothing a little split testing won’t help you with.

Position Your CTA At the End of Compelling Content

One study discovered that conversion rates increased by 304% when the call-to-action was placed after a piece of compelling content. So, make sure your sales copy is stellar and then place the CTA at the end as your visitors will be more motivated to follow through once you’ve convinced them with your copy.

Make Conversions Easy

Some people just seem intent on sabotaging themselves. They force their users to fill out lengthy forms or their site is full of bugs, making it impossible for someone to convert. And most people will give up within a few seconds because our attention spans have shrunk to ridiculously low levels. So, to avoid your visitors jumping ship, make sure that your site is easy to navigate, functional and that all forms are easy and quick to fill out. It takes the tiniest obstacle for visitors to give up, losing you another conversion, so don’t give them the opportunity to bail.
Offer a Distraction-Free Environment

We’re already surrounded by myriad distractions, so the last thing you should be doing is providing your visitors with even more distractions when you want them to convert. Instead of placing your calls-to-action among a ton of other content that engages your visitors, try to keep the surrounding area as clutter-free as possible. Don’t stick it next to links for related content or next to a banner ad because your visitors’ attention will be divided and you could come out on the losing end. Remember, keep it as distraction-free as possible if you want to see your conversion rates increase.

Don’t Give Them Too Many Options

While options are usually a good thing, offering your prospects too many options can backfire. The more options someone has, the more likely they are to freeze and get stuck in analysis-paralysis mode. Generally, stick to two or three options at most, because it will be easier for your prospects to make a decision. Also, make sure the middle offer is the one you really want to sell because people generally tend to choose the middle one, a fact that has been proven by retailers and marketers repeatedly.

There are many other strategies and tactics to help you increase your website’s conversion rates, but these are certainly a good starting point. Beyond these, remember that the key is to actually work at it and once you’ve done your testing and established the best methodology, you can move on to other tactics to drive those conversions even higher.

How to Calculate Sales Conversion Rate

In marketing terms, a conversion is when an individual acts in response to your call to action. For instance, most websites have a form where visitors are asked to sign up in order to get weekly newsletters. Any individual who signs up to the newsletter is a conversion. However, a lot more goes into it. When an individual actually clicks and reads the newsletter, it qualifies as a conversion. A conversion can also happen when a client takes advantage of a discount coupon sent out by the site owner. Pretty much every response to your call to action is a conversion. The real conversion rate, however, is the one that results in a sale hence revenues for the business.

What is conversion rate?

It’s pretty easy to track your conversions. It’s as simple as tracking the number of customers who have called you, picked up the phone, filled out the form or signed up for the weekly newsletter. Tracking your site’s conversions will assist to have an idea of which marketing tools offer optimum conversions. Using that data, you can easily and quickly calculate your conversion rate.

How to calculate your sales conversion rate

There are basically two methods used to calculate sales conversion rate. The first approach is to sum up the number of sales over a period and divide that by the total number of visitors and then multiply by 100%. For example, if the total number of sales in a given period was 200, and the total number of visitors was 5,000, then it would appear like this:

Sales conversion rate = 200/5,000 = 0.04 * 100% = 4% sales conversion rate.

This ideally means that 4% of all the visitors to your website actually lead to a sale. The second method of calculating sales conversion rate involves the use of a unique set of site visitors. For instance, visitors emanating from search engines, particularly, those accessing your site via a special keyword, sometimes known as organic visitors. You can calculate using both criteria and determine which is more accurate. However, calculations based on organic visitors almost always give accurate results.

Conversion rate is a vital topic for online businesses in the modern world. It precisely calculates the percentage of customers who actually buy products and services on the site and enable the site owners to measure customer decisions accurately. These days, conversion rate optimization enables a structured approach to boosting the performance of your website. It is an important tenet when it comes to evaluating your current standing and making future decisions.

How To Measure Your Opt-in Conversion Rate

An email list is a powerful marketing strategy for any website owner. You can have many visitors to your website, but not all will subscribe to your email list. The percentage of visitors to your site that subscribe to your email list is known as Opt-in Conversion Rate. This means that if you want to have a lot of email list subscriptions to your website, considering that it’s voluntary, you must offer a good reason or incentive to persuade your visitors to subscribe. Most website owners increase subscribers to their email lists by offering free valuable reports or extraordinary discount codes. However, the approaches here are not cut and paste so you will need to stay creative and follow your gut.

Opt-in conversion rates are vital tools to your online campaigns because they enable you to have a clear picture of how many visitors saw your offer (commonly known as lead magnet) and found it valuable enough to provide their email addresses. If the Opt-in conversion rate is high, it means you’ll be able to convert more visitors into subscribers, hence, faster growth of your email list and website.

What is the best Opt-in Conversion Rate?

Your website’s Opt-in conversion rate can be determined by numerous factors. The factors can differ depending on the industry you’re operating in, the techniques you’re using to lead traffic to your site, and the kind of offer you’re incentivizing visitors with to attract them to subscribe to your email list.

A website owner can also considerably enhance his or her opt-in conversion rate by leading visitors to a dedicated email capture landing page, frequently known as ‘Squeeze Page.’

How to measure your opt-in conversion rate

To calculate your websites Opt-in conversion rate, take the total number of people who subscribed to your email list, divide by the total number of visitors to your site and multiply by 100%. For example, if 100 people visited your website in a particular period and 20 visitors actually subscribed to your email list, then your Opt-in conversion rate will stand at 20%.

Every marketer must initiate rigorous and attractive marketing campaigns to be able to increase the number of subscribers to his or her mailing list in order to realize any meaningful sales. Otherwise, the website might end up just being just that.

How To Speed Up Your Website’s Performance

As a website owner, you should never underestimate the impact site speed has on traffic, conversions, and revenue. Research conducted found out that 47% people expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of those participating in the survey said theyÕd likely abandon a web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

So, before you release your website to proverbially Òfend for itselfÓ out there, follow these quick steps to improve its performance.

Top 5 tips to boost website performance

1. Use CSS in place of images: It doesn’t come as any surprise that high-quality images cause a dip in loading speed of a page. However, using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will enable you to create highly quality preview visuals without the need for images. As a result, your website will load faster due to less load coming from rendering large images.

2. Optimize images: As a general rule of thumb, it can be said that larger the image, lower is the load speed. If the area where the image is to be placed has a maximum width or 300 px, you should crop the picture to 300 pixels wide and save it at 72DPI. Then save your image in an appropriate format including, JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF based on whatÕs needed.

3. Optimize for mobile users: Mobile users are different from desktop users typically want data in bits and pieces that make sense. Optimizing design for mobile devices is a great way to gain a competitive advantage since there are so many websites that are failing to keep up with expectations of mobile users.

Here are few things you can do to make your site friendlier:

¥ Use CSS3 instead of image graphics to stimulate effects

¥ Eliminate all unnecessary image assets

¥ Use adaptive images fit for smaller devices

¥ Make design to be mobile-centric

4. Simplify code my minimizing the role of HTML, CSS, Javascript: To enhance your websiteÕs performance, itÕs crucial that you get rid of line breaks, extra spaces, and indentations in your code to make the pages as lean as possible. Do these tasks by using tools like YUI Compressor, css minifier, Google Closure Compiler, etc.

5. Make Javascript External and CSS to improve load speed: By using external files, you can use the pages load faster because CSS files and JavaScript are cached by the browser. Alternatively, if you utilize CSS in a page, place the CSS in its HEAD element. This should make the page appear as if it’s loading faster while it loads progressively.

How To Test And Track Your Website Using Google Analytics

Did you know that a whopping 93 percent of all online experiences start with a search engine? Or that 75 percent of online users never scroll past the first page of Google? It’s stats like these that can make or break your success on the Internet. If you want to track the number of consumers who visit your page from search engines, social media sites and elsewhere, you need a powerful analytics program that provides you with real-time insights and unparalleled intelligence. Here’s how to test and track your website using Google Analytics.

1. Measure Traffic Sources

Google Analytics is one of the world’s most popular analytics programs and boasts powerful metrics that pertain to your Internet presence. Use this tool to gauge the amount of traffic you receive on your website and where your visitors are coming from. Google Analytics displays key performance indicators — like the location of traffic sources and the number of people who visited your page within a given time frame —from a personalized dashboard, so you can access the latest insights all from one place. What’s more, all of this information is displayed through graphs, charts and other graphic elements, which makes it easier to consume the data.

2. Improve Sales

Google Analytics is a powerful marketing platform. Use it to find out how customers engage with your site, and which content is the most popular. Once you have discovered what consumers want from your site, you can make changes that increase the number of people who visit your pages and accelerate revenue. Countless studies have shown how analytics prove lucrative for lead and sales generation, and Google Analytics is ahead of the rest of the pack when it comes to delivering insights that you can count on.

3. Boost Your SEO Credentials

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a fundamental part of your digital marketing strategy. It lets you increase the rankings of your website on search engines like Google, so more consumers end up on your pages. Google Analytics is a great way to improve SEO because you can discover what changes you need to make in order to boost your rankings on the search engine results page. The vast amount of data at your fingertips lets you make small adjustments that will slowly increase your traffic stream over a period of weeks or months. You can change your meta-description, for example, or contact information, and see if there are any changes to your SEO.

Top Tools For Testing And Tracking Website Conversion Rates

Driving traffic to your website is not good enough to sustain your online business. You need to complement your effort with top tools to help you test and track your website conversion rates. If you want to stay competitive in the online market, you need to know the geographical location where most of your client come from, the pages that receives most views as well what visitors normally look for when they visit your website. In this article, we are going to review top tools that will help you track and test your website conversion rate.

1. Google analytics

Google analytics is tool that has been provided by search engine giant Google to help website owners test and track conversion rate. It is a very effective tool that can show you if visitors completed goals from certain path, how long it took for visitors to bounce from one page to another as well as sources that brought visitors to your site. What makes Google analytics stand out is that fact that it allows you to see keywords that people are searching to find your website, the devices that they are using as well as their demographic data. This is very important because it enables you to effectively track your website conversion rate.

2. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is a very complex yet effective tool that integrates your website with your email provider to enable you analyze your client base as well as enable you to email them from specific cohorts. This tool can also show you the path that your visitors have taken on your website, build data sets without SQL, conduct A/B tests as well as show you your return on investment from your marketing campaign.

3. HubSpot website grader

This tool is very effective when it comes to showing you a quick snapshot of your website overall performance. It will give you an insight of your website overall performance (website speed, page request and page size) search engine optimization (SEO), mobile responsiveness and appearance as well as security. In addition to that, this tool also provides suggestions on what you need to do improve your website conversion rate. This is crucial because it helps you make effective changes quickly to boost your website performance.

4. Clicky

Clicky is a free and premium analytic tool that helps website owners to analyze their website performance and conversion rate. This tool can help you know people who are visiting your site in real time, action that they are taking as well as how they got there. In addition to that, when a visitor leaves a comment, you can track them the next time they visit your site using custom cookies.