It’s All About The Numbers!

Everyone knows that you simply can’t be in business without looking at the numbers that make your business work. Things like accounts payable, receivables, etc. but what about the other investments within your business?

It used to be a no brainer to get yourself into the yellow pages and the cost was worth it.

The ROI was easily measurable because you pretty much knew when the phone rang that they found you in the phone book.

Wow, have things changed!

Now the best place to get that exposure is a website listed on google and bing, but I am always amazed at how many people don’t even care to know how well their website investment is performing.

For most businesses, their website is an essential part of how they get leads. Those leads are what helps drive the business forward but often times the numbers around this process are ignored.

In other words, what is the ROI and how effective is it at getting someone to pick up the phone or email?

Ignoring this process is like driving a car with a blindfold on, but don’t worry we are here to help.

If you know how many visitors you are getting vs the # of leads that are coming in…this is your conversion ratio.

If you have a good design then there’s usually just 2 things that will affect your conversion ratio.

1) Is your design & copy effectively communicating your company’s message and value proposition?

2) Is the prospect specifically told what you want them to do? Does it have a good call to action?

The first thing is important because if your prospect gets to your website and doesn’t know what you’re about or why he/she is there, they will bounce and they will bounce fast.

And no, bounce isn’t some hipster street lingo, its actually a very important metric to pay attention to, called bounce rate.

What pages are your prospects ‘bouncing’ from and how fast is it happening? This tells you whether or not they are identifying with your sales copy.

With some simple A/B testing on your landing pages, you can refine your sales copy to increase conversions. More conversions means more $$.

The second thing is the most important and can almost always be tweaked to perform better.

Your call to action literally needs to tell the prospect specifically what to do… fill out this form, call this number now, etc.

Some funny history… seo people would scoff at links that were simply ‘Click Here’, and not keyword optimized, but the people that study their conversion ratios know that telling the surfer to ‘Click Here’ drove conversions higher.

Your call to action should be prominent and you definitely don’t need to limit yourself to just one.

Ok, so what tools are available to figure this stuff out and where to start…

The first step is Google’s webmaster tools. Here you can submit your website and see some basic info from their end.

The next thing is Google’s Analytics tools.

This shows you a lot more information because it tracks the user while they’re on your site.

The last tool you need is inside of google’s adwords under tools/conversion tracking tool.

This will give a bit of code to add to your website’s ‘Thank You’ page.

The page people are directed to after they fill out your contact form… a conversion.

There are some commercial tools out there that are nice but these are free, provide critical data, and will definitely give you all the information you need to measure your ROI effectively.