OK, you have your brand-new sparkling site shimmering in the internet-sphere but how do you know how well it is performing for you?

In order to maximise the returns from your website, it is essential you know how visitors are interacting with your site. At the very least this will mean tracking the numbers of visitors and which pages they visit. From our earlier article, you’ll also be tracking the Conversion Rate of customers whether in Sales or Enquiries, but if these fail to materialise at the expected rate then you’ll need some options to improve performance.

Firstly, carry out a non-technical sense check. Ask some basic questions such as:

‘Are visitors making enquiries / sales via another medium ( direct e-mail, phone calls) and are you counting these correctly?’
‘Are there any direct comparisons with the Rate of Return versus other media?’
‘Are all obstacles to conversion removed, are you asking for only the minimum of information?’

If you are satisfied that the fundamentals for these are in place then the next step is to dive in further to some of the visitor data. There are many advanced statistics packages, but one of the best Free packages is Google Analytics. Using these packages you can view items such as Bounce Rate (how many visitors leave your site as soon as they arrive) , Time Spent on Page and even where customers drop out during your sales process.

By analysing these items you can identify which pages are underperforming and address these issues, maybe by rewriting copy or making the next steps move obvious.

Finally you should ensure that you are gathering customer feedback at all levels. Try to include a feedback form or contact detail on every page and actively encourage feedback using appropriate incentives. This feedback can be invaluable in optimising your site for visitors and can often throw up some interesting input that slipped by in the design process.

Once you’ve been through these processes you’ll be approaching a fully-effective website, but don’t sit back. Keep trying new ideas, keep monitoring and you’ll always be one step ahead of the competition.

Managing Google Adwords is one of the many things that i find myself playing with on a daily basis and over the years, I have learnt of interesting tips on how to affect your all important enquiries.

The 2 main aspects of Google Adwords are the Conversion Rates which show how many of your sites visitors via Adwords have made an enquiry on your site and the CTR (Click Through Rate) which shows how many visitors have accessed your site via your Google Adwords add.

Both of these are important and ultimately affect the cost you will pay to have your site listed via the Google Adwords advertising medium. Over the coming months I will go in to more detail about the various ways to manage a Google Adwords campaign. Today, i will keep things simple and start with the useful basics.

To start with, you need to consider your budget. This is the amount you are willing to spend on Google per month. If you set this to a realistic amount, you know that this is the maximum you are willing to pay to list your site. There are a few factors which determine your position but mostly this comes down to your budget. If you pay more, you pretty much appear higher up. However, being No 1 on Google Adwords or being No 50 is pretty irrelevant providing you are getting enough visitors to your site to warrant the budget you have specified. To many Adwords users worry about being No 1 when it is your budget and click expectations that should be your main considerations.

Once your add is being displayed you can monitor on a daily basis the performance of your add. If you are receiving lots of visitors then you may decide you can lower your daily budget and or monthly budget. If you are not receiving enough you may decide to use different keywords or increase your budgets. Again, these are all aspects of Adwords which i explain in a later post.

To make things even more interesting there are the Conversion Rates to consider and if anything, these are the most important statistics you should be looking at. You may very well be receiving hundreds of visitors to your site but if these are not turning in to actual business or enquiries, something is wrong.

Google Adwords has a clever system whereby you can at least monitor your websites conversion performance with regard to online enquiries. This can be setup with some simple code which any website design company can assist with including of course, WebCreation UK. Once the code has been added you can monitor which of your visitors actually turn in to enquiries and even which keywords they used to find you and make their enquiry.

I hope the above has helped explain the difference between Conversion Rates and CTR’s. Later on i will explain further about the Google Adwords system and ways to utilise this fantastic marketing tool.

If you wish to discuss Google Adwords in further detail, by all means contact our team.

Cheers!