More Ways to Convert Internet Traffic to Sales

As I have mentioned in previous articles, e-commerce websites typically convert only 2% of their visitor traffic into sales. What a waste, for your customers as well as your business! The vast majority came to you knowing what they wanted, and yet they left your website empty-handed, moving on to try your competitors — the last thing either of you wanted.                                                    

Think of your e-commerce website as a sales machine. If you could get 8% sales by running the machine better, you would have four times the profit with only incremental product costs — no additional marketing, administration, commissions, etc.

We assume that your website is already employing the following: keyword analysis (the exercise of figuring out which are the best keywords to use to bring traffic to your website); product search, shopping cart and website directory (designed to present customer-targeted value); and keyword e-marketing (which is search engine optimized, or SEO). If not, make sure to go back and read our e-marketing series at www.nyreport.com/emarketing. To keep your sales machine running strong, you need to continue to improve each step in your customers’ buying process.

Use your Web analytic reports. Virtually all website hosts and/or ISPs provide excellent and inexpensive Web analytic reports to measure every step taken by visitors. Every visitor to your website leaves numbered electronic footprints that are recorded on your Internet service provider’s (ISP) server log. Analytic programs such as WebTrends, NetTracker and Urchin translate your log traffic numbers into visualized charts and graphs for every aspect of your website’s traffic. Most ISPs that host e-commerce websites use one of the Web analytics programs and provide reports free or at a low monthly cost.

More sophisticated Web analytics tools can give you even better information. Google, Yahoo and most search engines that offer pay-per-click advertising give free software that lets you track each keyword ad click-through to see if the person who clicked on your ad actually bought something from your website. This lets you measure the payback on your ads, identify your best keywords and identify those Web pages that are costing you sales. Session identification (SID) programs are tools you can incorporate into your e-commerce website that track each individual customer’s path and actions (rather than the paths used in the aggregate), so you have specific visitor and page ROI information in addition to your critical ratios. If you are really into measurement, ask your website developer for more information on SID systems.