Improve Your Conversion Rate: Monitor Your Website Traffic

Millions of surfers today visit countless websites during their web surfing time. They come across blogs and forums to share their expertise and solve their personal/professional problems. Many of them just happen to click on a shopping portal to buy a product that appeals to them. Many visitors are attracted only because of the nice graphics on the site. Whether planned or out of sheer boredom, the visitor gets the bargain he is looking for. The site owner heaves a sigh of relief as the customer base is enhanced promising a growth in business.

A repeat customer is always better than a one-time visitor though. Besides, the visitor can also be a source of 'silent' and 'word-of-mouth' publicity for you. So once your site visitor is done with first visit, you will definitely want the visitor to come again and become your source of repeat orders. So how do you differentiate between a one-timer and your brand loyal customer? You will do so by tracking, testing, and monitoring your site traffic on continuous basis.

Your sure shot strategy: Track and Test your web traffic

Tracking your website traffic is a simple and effective indicator of website growth. It augments your business growth by giving you valuable insight into consumer behavior, their tastes, and purchase patterns. You can follow your consumers from where they entered into your site and where they are leaving for. You can even have the programs that, to a certain extent, will figure out your consumer's behavior even before they entered your site and thus, will enable you to predict their possible interest on your site well in advance. You will say good bye to the guessing game for your inventory-related decisions or how to survive your blog under fierce competition. Instead, your valuable energy and finance will be diverted towards more important task of harmonizing your site with the consumer trends. Doesn't it make more business sense to you? Definitely!

Testing your website traffic - How?

Testing is the process of making little innovative changes to your website and then 'testing' the result in the light of consumer behavior. The objective is, of course, to increase your profitability exponentially. There is a plethora of options available when you are looking for a testing solution. The most effective one is 'A-B split' test and is industry standard today. Basically in 'A-B split', you are comparing initial version with the modified version to analyze which one is yielding better product purchase outcome. You can choose from several testing methodologies: from price and headline tests to guarantee and payment plan tests. Let's first define the conversion rate so that we can evaluate the performance of each.

Conversion is the rate at which your visitor makes a purchase decision at your website. For example, if 2 out of 100 visitors actually buy something, you have a conversion of 2%. Employ any of the tests above and assume an increase in conversion by 0.25%. The increase will entail a growth of 1% in your sales. Congratulation! Together with your existing rate, the conversion has now improved to 3%. You can also add an average 0.5% improvement caused by indirect publicity.

Another simple mechanism is "Advertising Link Tracker". The tool analyzes the purchases and subscriptions resulting from advertisement clicks on websites. An advertisement can be displayed in several forms including a banner or a hyper link. Such tracker is available in the form of server-side software, or through hosted services. Let's take a look at the merits and demerits of both.

If you opt for the software version, you will enjoy the tracking control at your own pace and will. There is a low probability of a possible ban. However, you will have no expert consultation at your disposal should you need one.

With the hosted services, you will get easily installable tracking which is outsourced and hence leaves you with enough energy to concentrate on core business issues. However, your site may be banned as a subsequent impact of your provider being banned for malpractices.

So what are waiting for? Start tracking and testing your site today. Explore your options and make monitoring site traffic an ongoing process to ensure business growth, and enhancing and reinforcing your customer base.