• Easy Implementation
• Keyword and Campaign Comparison
• Create Custom Dashboards
• AdWords Integration
• Trend and Date Slider
• E-commerce Tracking / Funnel Visualization
• Email reports
• Improved Site Overlay / Heat Mapping
• Improved Traffic Segmentation e.g. GeoTargeting

All of these are extremely handy especially when you have the ability to track the results on your own to make sure everything is kept honest. I’m looking forward to a hands-on test drive. Check out the tour now.

In part one of this two-part series we reviewed the basics of conversion rate optimization and how Google’s Web Optimizer — a free tool from Google — can help improve your conversion rate, making tire kickers drive off the lot. We also examined some of the tests that GWO performs to deliver useful conversion rate analytics. But there are additional benefits to using this performance assessment tool. Let’s have a look:

Test Problems Identified During Usability Testing
In part one, we urged you to undertake usability testing — sitting actual humans in front of a monitor to move through your site identifying anything confusing. From usability tests, you should have a list of problems and issues identified by your testers (or your observations of them). Then move on to use GWO to analyze anything other problems.

For example, if several people thought the checkout was confusing, test it after site launch to see if the checkout page is where many visitors bounced (opt-out of the sale). If so, you need to make the checkout more simple, don’t make visitors think. Remember, usability tests identify why visitors aren’t buying and that’s one thing you want to know now!

Test Your USP
Your USP — your unique selling position — is what sets you apart from the competition. It could be your low, low prices or the assurance that high cost means high quality. In any case, describe your USP in a few words. Then, look at the competition to see what they use as their USPs and conduct some A/B splits to see if, maybe, your current USP could be changed, clarified or refined.

What Do Visitors Take Away From Your Site?
Make a list of priorities — the five messages or sell points you want each visitor to remember when s/he leaves the site. Then, run GWO tests to determine if these five points are clear. You’ll be able to tell with the reporting GWO provides which messages stick and which are lost on visitors.

Characterize Your Ideal Buyer
Male, over 30, income over $50K annually — make a list of the characteristics of the ideal buyer. This is who you’re trying to reach. Your copy, site design, graphics and images should be directed straight at your target demographic — the market segment you most want to reach.

Test Headlines
Headlines are critical to site success. If they don’t motivate buyers to action you won’t make sales. So try different headlines in A/B splits to see which headers pull best. Headlines should describe the benefits of products or services (not product features), they should emphasize ease of use and finally, they can’t be overblown bombast, i.e., headlines must be believable. In fact, all site text must be believable.

Test Your Tagline
The tag line is the phrase that follows your site or company name, e.g., Dow: Better Living Through Chemistry. The tag should express the essence of your site and, in a few words, the site’s USP.

Test Pricing
Cheapest isn’t always best. Many consumers take comfort in knowing that they’re getting better quality at a higher price. This “velvet rope” approach to marketing is what makes haute couture so expensive. Test pricing to find the comfort level of your target demographic.

Also, drop prices a penny. $24.99 sounds so much less than $25.00. It’s a strategy that’s worked for decades and all of us fall for it because we tend to round down not up.

Promotions and Give-Aways
Buy one get one free. A one-month free subscription. Enter our Island Hide-Away Sweepstakes. Test these one at a time to see which promos have the greatest impact on your site’s bottom line.

Make the Call to Action Link Really Obvious
A colorful button labeled “Order Now” tells the visitor what’s expected and how to complete the most desired action. Don’t let them guess. Tell them what to do next.

Other ways to make points stand out? Bold type face, italics, high-lights, arrows — anything to grab the readers’ attention — quickly.

Test Site Layouts
A single-column layout gives you greater control over the order in which information is presented to visitors. Make sure the most important information comes first.

Also, studies show that people read from upper-left to lower right, stopping at the headlines. That makes the upper-left corner of each page prime site real estate.

Critical Information Goes Above the Fold

Some visitors don’t scroll so if they don’t see it above the fold they don’t see it at all.

Test Images
A picture is worth a thousand words — sometimes. Test various images and color usage to see what pulls best: a tabletop product image, product in use by happy customers, etc. A/B splits will tell you what you need to know, here.

Typography
Critical to site success. Don’t overwhelm visitors with pages of text. Use enough to make the pitch then get off stage. Know when to stop selling.

Use simple language to describe product benefits not product features. Make sure visitors have all the information needed to make a buying decision and address common buyer objections, e.g., too expensive, etc.

Test font sizes and colors for readability and use bulleted lists for quick delivery of key points. Refine after each test.

Accessibility
Accessibility is closely married to usability. Start by testing your site in different browsers and at different screen resolutions to get a “customer’s eye view” of your on-line business. What looks good in FireFox may not look so good in IE.

Keep download times as short as possible. 90% of visitors will sit through a 10-second download. Only 10% will sit through a 30-second download so keep site pages light on graphics, Flash animations and other bells and whistles.

Activate Google’s site search feature using Google Mini and Google’s Free Web Search tools. These make your site more accessible to search engine users.

Create “clickable” features. Users click on anything – links, pictures, graphics — anything that captures the attention of the visitor should be clickable.

Test on-site adverts such as Google Adwords. Adwords allows you to split links into various channels for A/B split testing. Test for: ad size, shape, positioning on each page and color formats to make ads pop out or blend in with the rest of your site design.

Finally, establish and record baseline measurements for comparison purposes. Compare test results to your baseline findings to determine what’s working and what needs more work.

Google’s Web Optimizer is a terrific tool for improving your site’s conversion rate and improving your bottom line. However, be patient. It may take several refinements before your site is fully optimized to convert visitors to buyers.

Also, remember that conversion optimization is not a goal. It’s a process — one that continues even as your site sees improved traffic and sales. Optimization should take place regularly and every change you make should be tested for results. Does the change improve conversion? If not, go back to what you had and try again.

Conversion optimization is a little bit of a science, a bit of an art and a whole lot of trial and error so keep at it. With Google’s Web Optimizer, you have the tool to test how your site is doing.

Use it to grow your site to profitability faster. Use it to achieve site success. Use it to make your site the best it can be. After all, that’s what we’re each trying to do in the world of e-commerce — and Google wants to partner in your success.

Within the e-commerce sphere, the “mind games” between site owners and search engine designers have focused on search engine optimization (SEO). After all, you can’t make a sale if visitors aren’t reaching your site. However, as the web marketplace grows exponentially more competitive, attention among webmasters and site owners has turned to conversion optimization — converting site visitors to buyers.

Conversion optimization has nothing to do with SEO. SEO is designed for spiders and bots. Conversion optimization is based on two factors only: the needs and motivations of human site visitors and persuasive site content and design to encourage humans to make a purchase or perform some other action. Any other considerations are sub-sets of these two factors in conversion optimization strategies.

Measuring Human Motivations and Site Effectiveness
SEO is based on the development of numbers (metrics) that are immutable. Numbers are numbers, there’s no debating that. The interpretation of site metrics, on the other hand, is a true combination of art, science and testing.

Assessing conversion rate optimization must apply a completely different approach to data gathering and the accurate, actionable assessment of the cold hard facts (percentages and such) that are the basis of SEO.

The Google Website Optimizer (GWO)
Google owns SEO (sorry Yahoo). It is now moving into eyeball optimization (EBO) to help site owners improve conversion rates. It’s got lots of features, it’s totally flexible in designing useful tests for human reactions and it provides data using simple to read and understand charts showing what’s working and what would work even better.

One key point here: after indexing billions and billions of web pages, who is going to know better what works and doesn’t work for solid EBO? After all, all the Google gurus have to do is evaluate their top performing sites to develop measurement criteria and tools to improve conversion optimization. Google is going to know what works.

One other point worth mentioning — it’s free. A flexible, user-designed test engine developed by Google and available free. It’s a must have for any site owner, site designer, webmaster or SEO.

What Can Google Website Optimizer Do For Me & How Can It Do It If I Don’t Know the Difference Between a Statistical Mean and a Statistical Average?

Multi-Variable Testing
Got to have it. When quantifying human motivations and the effectiveness of a site page, you must have data to compare — data based on site variables such as a different home page image or revised site text. There are hundreds of variables within any website. Color selections, type font, type color, navigation tools, product images and descriptions — literally an endless list of variables.

Google’s Website Optimizer allows you to design tests to compare variables to see which ones work best. Often called A/B split tests, these simply compare a change or two to see which performs best. For example, you might have a picture of your product on test site A and a photo of the product in use by a human on test site B. Simply by comparing visitors’ reactions to pages A and B, you can make refinements to your site.

Another useful A/B split test to check the success of your Adwords placements is to create two identical ads with two different destination URLs. You’ll quickly discover which placements pay for themselves and which should be dropped.

Easy Analytics
The information gathered by Google during testing is delivered in an easy-to-understand format. You’ll see, in graphic form, where visitors go and where they don’t go when on site. Taking a good hard look at your bounce rates and possible paths-thru-site are essential parts of your ongoing conversion optimization diet.

Usability Testing
Real humans navigating your site. Get as many people as you can to site down and click around — from your computer-whiz 12-year-old to mom and dad who still use dial-up. These tests provide the reasons why visitors take specific actions — over and over again.

Eyeball Optimization
GWO shows you what attracts eyeballs but doesn’t generate a click. It also shows what visitors miss entirely because it’s misplaced or mislabeled. Every page should undergo an “EBO” to improve conversion rates.

Follow the Leaders
You can’t copyright an idea so use the same features and techniques employed by higher ranking competitor sites. Then, conduct A/B split tests to see which changes show improvement in conversion optimization.

People Are Still the Same
There’s nothing new about direct response advertising, which is what successful sites use. Infomercials, newspaper ads, TV 30-second spots — these are all examples of direct response advertising and the same motivators that work in other media will also work on your website. Once again, you can’t copyright an idea and the principles of direct response marketing haven’t changed one iota.

Determine and identify the buyer’s needs; provide the solution to meet those needs. It’s worked for the past few millennia and it’ll work for you today.

Small Steps or One Giant Leap
Do you make incremental improvements or try to fix everything all at once. It depends on where you are right now. If you’ve optimized your site (or paid to have it optimized) a small step here and there can make a huge difference, and a major revamping of your site may actually set you back in the optimization race.

On the other hand, if you’re just launching, run a couple of A/B splits and other analytics to see which site pages are hot and which are not. Adjust accordingly. The point here? The more optimized the site, the less optimization is needed so if you’ve been at it for a while, take small steps and assess improvements. If you’re just starting out, launch, track and adjust as needed — whether it be small steps or the proverbial giant leap.

Create a Diagram of Your Marketing Funnel
Start with placed adverts (Adwords, paid links, etc.) Add your home page, each product page, the checkout, automated order conformation, customer care and order fulfillment. Each one of these is a component of a sale and, from the list and with the help of GWO, you’ll be able to more clearly identify holes in your marketing funnel — those areas most in need of improvement, i.e., optimization.

Now, this is just the beginning. Conversion optimization is an on-going process and there are additional steps you can take based on test results delivered by Google’s Web Optimizer — steps that we’ll look at more closely in part 2 of this series.

Continue reading part 2 ›

Whether you’re planning the launch of your first site, or wondering why your site counter is actually moving backward, stop. You need a strategy to promote your site to search engines and to visitors. A plan of action based on five key factors, all of which should be weighed carefully before you take another step. Here are the five, most important considerations in the development of any search engine promotion.

1. The Site’s Objectives
What are your expectations for the website? These will usually point you to the site’s objectives. In the case of commercial sites, the broad objective is straightforward — to sell enough goods and/or services to become profitable.

However, you might also want to educate, motivate, persuade and inform in addition to, or instead of, selling. A top-down analysis of your site’s objectives is the place to start the development of your action plan.

Once you’ve determined the site’s objectives, keep them front and center during the entire development of an SE promo strategy. It’s important that any search engine understand your site’s objectives on the very first spider visit.

2. Market Analytics
Essential. Who are you trying to reach — your sales demographic? What do the members of your demographic need? How do they make purchase decisions? Are they computer savvy? Critical to the design and implementation of a search engine promo strategy is to know your market.

And the best place to learn is from the competition. Pull a Google on the competition to see how the successful sites do it. Perfectly ethical and a measurable, absolute guide to what works and what doesn’t.

But you can’t stop there. Market metrics are also a part of a successful promo strategy. The development of multi-dimensional metrics will be useful in virtually every step of the design, development and SE optimization phases. There are plenty of metrics software packs on the market. Some are even free.

The problem with these number crunchers is simple: all they do is provide the raw data. Number of hits. Average number of pages viewed. Ratio of visitors to buyers. Just stats, not strategy.

Analytics gathered using a variety of apps and tools must be properly correlated and analyzed to develop an effective search engine promotion. It’s not enough to have the data. You must interpret the numbers in order to take actionable steps.

3. Techno-Factors
An over-achieving website doesn’t just happen. It must be crafted. It requires highly-specialized knowledge of everything from HTML, SEO and CSS to human nature and purchase motivators.

Search engines spider sites in a variety of ways. The simpler and clearer your site is to an SE spider, the greater the likelihood that your site will be assessed and ranked properly. Conversely, if the technical design of your site isn’t dead on for search engine spiders, a site may be mis-indexed or even banned from SEs altogether for what spiders perceive as black hat tactics, though it’s simply inept (and therefore costly) programming. You might as well hang out the ‘Going Out Of Business’ sign.

Techno-factors come into play during the design phase, the development and testing phases and after the site’s launch when refinement, optimization, content updates and routine site maintenance are undertaken.

Any well-considered strategy must provide the means to design (or redesign) the site, develop it, promote it to the SEs and optimize it over time. Search engine promotion and site optimization aren’t goals. They’re part of the process.

4. Plan Your Presentation Layer
Once the technical aspects of the site have been incorporated into your promo strategy, turn your attention to the presentation layer. The presentation layer can make or break a site, regardless of how well-designed the technical structure supporting the site’s skin.

Navigation should be simple. Buttons and links clearly labeled. The user should always be able to go ‘Home’ from any page. Check-out should be clear, uncluttered and instill buyer confidence. A site map is useful to visitors and SE spiders. Anything less will hurt the bottom line.

The site skin also presents the look, feel and tone of your on-line enterprise. Stately and dignified, WiLd & KraZy, helpful and concerned — all determined by the look of the site. Color combinations, type font and size, type placement and the tone of the content make up your public persona.

And the skin is spidered right along with the back office so it should appeal to eyeballs and make spiders happy, as well. Header placement, number of headers above the fold, keyword density and other SE search parameters must be fine-tuned for successful search engine promotion.

5. Promotion and Optimization
Once you’ve gone live with your site, you’ve only just begun. The world of ecommerce is fast-paced and cutthroat. And if you don’t promote your site to search engines and to potential buyers your chances for success diminish accordingly.

Today, site success depends on promotion — search engine promotion and eyeball promotion. You can promote on a shoestring or you can launch a pedal-to-the-metal campaign with banner ads, Google Adwords, links building and opt-in cultivation. If you aren’t SEO-experienced, you’ll be best served by professionals who can track site activity, develop useful metrics and devise and implement a strategy for improved site performance.

The same goes for the process of optimization. Sites must be search engine optimized and conversion optimized — two very different things. Much of SEO takes place behind the scenes. That’s why it’s essential that you use SEO pros to actually build your site. This is not where you can cut a few corners.

Then there’s conversion optimization — converting visitors to buyers. Most of this takes place at the presentation level. Does the site meet or exceed the visitor’s expectations? You have 6.4 seconds to convince a visitor to explore your site. That’s how much time web users devote to site evaluation.

DIY or Go With The Pros?
94% of all ecommerce ventures tank. Down in flames. Many of these failures are based on poor business models, but just as many are due to poor site design, lack of SE recognition, an off-putting presentation layer or a home page that looks like a carnival midway.

If you’re a start-up and you don’t know much about SEO and SE promotion, do not let your teen-aged nephew design your site. And if you’re the owner of an underperforming site and you can’t figure out why, don’t waste your time tweaking. You’re losing sales every day.

If you know ecommerce, develop a strategy that encompasses all five of these critical facets. If you don’t know ecommerce, hire somebody to do it for you.

It’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

Numbers.

It’s all about the numbers. Site metrics. A fancy way of saying all of the numbers associated with your site’s activity. Have a counter somewhere on the site? Sure, most site owners do, hidden or visible for all to see. And from this, you determine how many visitors you’re getting.

But is that all? Hardly. In fact, as a site owner you want to know everything about your visitors. That’s where visitor tracking comes in. By tracking the movements of visitors over time, you’ll greatly improve the performance of your site. Here’s how.

Site Metrics
Everything from how many visitors and how long they stuck around to how they found your site and where they went when they left. Why? Let’s look at just a few of the things this kind of information will reveal.

Visitor Confusion
A confused visitor is a no-sale visitor. Too much information or not enough. Dead-end links. Undecipherable navigation. When you track your visitors’ search patterns, you’ll immediately identify pages and entire sections that need to be revamped.

Visitors who are constantly hitting the back button, or who visit the ‘shipping costs’ page three times, aren’t getting the clear picture. Clearly.

To keep customers and to build repeat traffic means keeping the visitor moving forward through the buying process. And if this isn’t happening, you’re losing sales.

Intrigue
Always nice to know what catches the eye of visitors. Do they park on the homepage to watch your Flash animation? Then maybe you should consider adding more.

Do they take the time to read the eloquent product descriptions you so carefully crafted, or do they just click on through?

Anything can grab visitor attention. Cool graphics. Compelling prose. Animations. Music. When you start tracking visitor activity, you’ll have a much better feel for what those eyeballs find most appealing.

Then, just do more of that.

Homepage Success
The World Wide Web is a cruel business environment. Visitors, on average, give you less than 10 seconds to grab them by the lapels and encourage them to stick around. Maybe even buy something.

So, how many visitors find your site, give your home page a quick scan and click themselves on to something more…engaging?

That homepage is the most valuable real estate in your entire e-store. It’s what turns window shoppers into browsers into buyers. And, if your follow through is as good as your home page, these buyers will soon become repeat buyers.

Copy Success
Do visitors take the time to read your text, or do they look at the graphics and click thru. If they aren’t taking the time to read your pitch and your product catalog, it’s time for some serious revision.

Do You Know What You Need To Know?
You can learn all kinds of valuable information tracking visitors’ movements.

How do they find you? Through a search engine? A link? A Google contextual ad? Obviously, you put some more marketing and promotion dollars into those efforts that are actually delivering traffic to your site.

How many pages do visitors actually look at? If they get past the home page, do they stick around, or do they encounter a landing page that resembles a Chinese puzzle box. If you’re losing visitors on a particular page, pull it, redo it and watch your sales increase.

What route do most visitors follow? If the majority of visitors click on the ‘Products’ link on the navigation toolbar, put that link in a different color or in a larger box somewhere above the fold.

What do visitors search for? Larger sites, those with numerous products, often have a ‘Search’ feature. This information is pure gold.

First, it tells you the products that people can’t locate by any other means than to search. You don’t want visitors searching for products. You want them to find them quickly and without having to track them down.

Second, these search queries may reveal additional products that visitors expect to find on your site. If you’ve got an on-line bike shop and a lot of visitors are searching for accessories, perhaps you should expand your product line to include what your customers are eager to buy from you.

Do they put something in the shopping cart and then leave without buying? Okay, they liked the product, but was there something about the checkout procedures that caused the loss of the sale?

How often do repeat buyers come back? You may only see them during the holidays, or they may be regulars. In either case, repeat business is much easier to maintain than finding new customers. Building customer loyalty isn’t easy, but it sure does work. (Just ask the folks at LL Bean.)

Where do most visitors go when they leave your site? An absolutely critical consideration. Where visitors go after leaving your site may be the most revealing and important site metric you can develop. Why?

Your site sells scented candles. If a large number of visitors head off to another scented candle web store, you just lost motivated buyers searching for scented candles. So, why did they leave your site? What needs did your site fail to meet? Absolutely critical information.

On the other hand, if visitors are clicking thru your site to visit a gift shop link, you can chalk it up to “Just browsing, thank you.”

Metrics Analysis
Analyzing all of the numbers associated with your site is part science, part art and part instinct born from experience.

First, remember that regular analysis isn’t something you use to measure success against other sites. After all, you can’t track the competition’s visitor traffic patterns.

Metrics analysis is a relative index. You measure your site’s improving or declining performance over a period of months. The comparisons aren’t to other sites. The comparisons are made against last month’s data on your site.

The initial metrics analysis produces the baseline against which all future metrics will be measured. This is the real value of data collecting from your own site.

Why You Need An SEO/SEM Professional?
Your on-line business is a serious investment of time, money and your unlimited ambition. In other words, it’s not something to fool with.

SEO/SEM firms have the information gathering tools. But more than that, they have the experience to analyze the data and develop design changes to address issues and problems. If you’re plowing through sheets of metrics and you still don’t know what to do, call a professional.

Think of site tracking as a valuable marketing and promotion tool that provides endless amounts of useful SEM information. Don’t you want to know what your visitors think and do and where they go and why?

Tracking visitors and developing comprehensible site metrics, along with a plan of attack to fix glitches, will boost your conversion rate and, consequently, your site’s bottom line.