No, not the milliliter, centigram, kilometer they taught us in school, I’m talking about a measurement of your website traffic. Actually, I mean more than that. Just like you need to be able to break down kilometers into decimeters, meters, and millimeters, you need to be able to drill down your traffic into meaningful units. After all it does nobody any good to know that my thumb is .000000245 kilometers wide.
Say you’re getting 5,000 visitors a month, which would be pretty good. At a 2% conversion rate, that’s 100 sales, which may or may not be enough to run your business depending on your product’s price point. Presumably, your product is excellent enough that at least half will be so satisfied they’ll come back for more. That’s another 50 sales spread out among the next six months. Good so far.
But what about the other 4,900 visitors? How can you convert more of them into paying customers?
By first understanding them.
For instance, how many of the 4,900 are actually the same person, checking back once a week to see if something new has gone on sale? Maybe it’s time for a coupon or discount. How many are reading your blog but not browsing the catalog? Maybe you need to put banners for your own product on the blog pages, or maybe you shouldn’t. Without looking at the numbers, it’s hard to know.
There are a lot of systems for gathering site metrics and many hosting companies will supply you with one as part of the package. These are usually good for getting an overview, but poor for teasing out important details. Some commercial products exist that can show you more detailed information. For example, you could see that there was a spike of returning customers 3 days after a new product launch. Using this to time new offerings or sales can result in increased sales.
You can compare the numbers from your host’s server log. Let’s say that it turns out traffic always peaks on Wednesdays, sale or no sale. Also, there tends to be more visitors earlier in the month than later, so it probably was not just coincidence that a sale starting Sunday the 2nd got a lot of traffic on Wednesday the 5th.
There are two lessons to be learned from this:
- To make really meaningful conclusions, you need a lot of data from over a long span of time. Your business might be a lot more or a lot less seasonal than you think. As a rule of thumb, I’d say that it takes at least six months before the numbers will really add up to anything really useful.
- It’s really easy to misinterpret the information, sometimes. Google Analytics, for instance, tries to drown you in data. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since you’ve got six months to teach yourself which reports will be relevant to your own site.
Paying attention to your customers’ habits is just one tool you can use to plan your marketing and sales.
Further Reading and Helpful Links:
