We talked about using site metrics earlier, in a general manner. Here, I would like to provide some practical uses for site metrics to help you increase your sales.
“If you don’t have documentation, then it didn’t happen,” is what my boss used to say when I worked in a warehouse. What he meant was, if I didn’t have a receipt for every time a customer checked out a specific product, it would be essentially my word against his when it came time to report on inventory. I’d be out of a job and he’d be a few hundred bucks worth of merchandise richer.
The same thing applies to your on-line business. If you don’t have a paper trail (or electronic trail, as the case may be), you can’t prove anything. Did a customer visit your site three, five, or zero times? You don’t know unless you keep track with some kind of analytics/metric tracking program. The more detailed the program, the better.
The total number of visitors you get in a day, week, or month may look impressive on your annual report, but it usually won’t help you figure our things like: How many are repeat customers? How many pages did they visit? What days/times did they visit? These are things you need to know.
Details
What are your most popular pages? That’s typically the best place to put ads and announcements.
What pages are not getting enough traffic? The fix could be as simple as changing the text in your menu system.
Maybe people are starting to buy from you but get confused with your shopping cart. They may be getting frustrated and leave your site entirely.
This actually happened to a friend of mine. The company she worked for gave out a lot of coupon codes – you enter the code during checkout and get 20% off. This was a great promotional tool. The problem was, many customers didn’t trust that the discount would be properly applied and didn’t want to give out their shipping address (on page 2) until they saw their discounted total. She didn’t even ask for the code until page 3, when they had to put in their credit card information.
As a result of not seeing the discount until the confirmation page, they were just leaving the site completely and abandoning their purchases. She moved the coupon code field to the first page and there was an immediate bump in the number of successful checkouts.
A few months later, a new pattern emerged: People were getting to page 3 of the checkout process, not entering their credit card info, hitting the back button, and then leaving. As many of you know, going “back” during a purchase transaction can give bad data, which is what was happening.
My conclusion was that they’d overlooked the coupon code on page 1 and they were trying to go back and enter a code. When people realized that they’d have to re-enter their shipping information they gave up in frustration, 20% off didn’t seem worth the hassle.
The solution was to include the coupon code field on all pages along with the modified total. The shopping cart abandonment rate went down by about 30%.
None of the above solutions would have been possible without a long history of solid metrics to help define the actual problem. But metrics alone aren’t the answer. It still took human imagination to envision the root cause and more ingenuity to produce a cure. Without the factual numbers to look at, she just as easily could have imagined that the problems were due to a poorly located “Buy Now” button and the resulting change could have further impacted her sales.
This is just one example of how site metrics and using the data provided along with knowing your customers produced positive results and increased sales. With just a little time and a few adjustments, you may be able to make your site easier for your customers. You may also be better able to target your customers by finding out their visiting habits.
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