Online conversion rates

[amica_webmaster]

There have been a number of postings lately regarding conversion rates and website tracking. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I wrote an article on the basics of conversion rates. I hope it will be useful for your businesses, and I'd like to hear about what kind of information I could offer to help others get more involved in using measurement techniques to evaluate performance of their websites.

The article is posted here:
http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7690

Meta

[scottiecl]

Hi Meta-

Great article! I used to help design campaigns for clients where we built specific landing pages or tracking URL's for e-mail links in a viral marketing campaign in order to track the ROI. I had forgotten about that. I'm sure there are much more sophisticated ways to track campaigns than that.

What is out there that can follow a visitor through from start to finish and give you some clear reports on which referrals turned into sales/signups/whatever ? I would be curious to test something like that.

[amica_webmaster]

Tracking urls are a useful device, and that alone is probably more than most business websites are using.

Since I work for a company that develops web analytics software, I'm not in a position to provide product comparisons. But I can tell you some basics of what is technically possible and some hints on critical shopping.

Is is possible to track a visitor from initial visit to eventual purchase, or whatever actions that visitor may take. It is even possible to do cross-site analysis for a business that operates multiple sites. Web data can be integrated with other business data. All of this information can be used for a wide range of analysis from simple counts to OLAP to data mining. For those not familiar with those terms, OLAP stands for on-line analytical processing, and it refers to providing detailed data summaries for an organization in a flexible, easy-to-use form. Data mining refers to a mix of methods for exploring data to uncover meaningful patterns, and includes such things as sequence analysis (what series of site areas does a user pass through on the way to a purchase?) and decision trees (what combination of indicators are associated with a likely purchaser?).

It isn't realistic or necessary for everyone to do all of this. So each site needs to identify its own needs and define reasonable goals and strategies for meeting them. Most of the sites that I see mentioned on this forum are related to small businesses, so I would not expect that they are going to take on really elaborate web analytics strategies. But it is reasonable for a small organization to start using basic methods such as tracking urls and promotion codes, and to seek tracking software that will provide much better information that who the last few referrers happened to be.

Whatever your goals, there must be some method of identifying each visitor through a series of multiple file requests, return visits, and possibly even several machines used to access your site in order to do this. This means that you must expect to have a strategy for using methods such as cookies and site registration to identify that user with each file request. The strategy is something that you will create, possibly with the help of a web analytics software vendor or other partner, in order to meet your specific information goals.

I recently saw a web tracking product recommended on this forum, took a look and the website, and saw that the vendor promised "walk-through-analysis" without cookies. That claim is very misleading. The only information in a simple log file that identifies a user is the IP address. IP address is not adequate even to track a user in a single session. One, but not the only, reason for this is that some ISPs use dynamic IP addresses, so the same user may appear with many different IP addresses during a single session.

For those who are getting their toes wet with this sort of thing, I'd suggest first looking into what can be done with tracking urls and approaches like the simple example that I put in the Conversion Rates 101 article. At the next step, have in mind specific goals you'd like to reach and take a look at some web tracking products that interest you (in the article I suggested some ways to find these in web searches, and you can also ask around and see what your colleagues like). Examine software sales pitches critically. You'll have to live with your choices, so make sure you examine the "hows" of your options, and try to talk with others who have used the product.

My company's product web analytics product, NetGenesis, is the industrial-strength stuff. It's used by large organizations with very high volume web traffic, sometimes multiple sites. It can integrate with our other products to provide extremely deep analysis capability. Anyone who needs something up this alley is welcome to drop me a line and I'll make sure that they get any information that they need.

Meta

[Matt B]

Good article, Meta. I appreciate your effort. I will check out the white paper, also. I think I can use some of your suggestions right now.

We do a lot of conversion tracking, some to the extent that you suggest, other, well it is an effort to get the client on board. Believe it or not, there are many marketing departments that simply write off conversion tracking because they say "it's too complicated."

[amica_webmaster]

SEO Guy, I believe it. Every year, I speak with hundreds of people who are spending a fortune on marketing campaigns and doing very little to measure what what those campaigns do for them.