Traffic is just the beginning
The Five Stages of Website Performance Improvement
The Fact: Many site owners believe that the only way they can increase the revenue their site generates is to increase its traffic volumes.
The Reason for this blog post: Site owners frequently come to us with great domains that have great rankings and significant traffic volumes. Yet these same domains fail to generate sales and enquiries.
The Challenge: Helping these site owners understand that focusing solely on increasing traffic is unlikely to be the most cost effective method of increasing the sites performance.
“Would you persist in pouring water into a bucket that’s riddled with holes?”
Of course you wouldn’t. So why would you continue to drive traffic to a website that has fundamental problems that are driving your visitors away?
To address this problem a carefully structured approach is needed. An approach that is designed to firstly identify the best technique for a specific domain and then structure a plan that results in the most cost effective method of increasing that domains performance. This approach can be broken down into five key stages:-
Let’s take a look at the five stages:-
Pre-requisite: Set targeted goals and Conversions
1) Traffic Acquisition - A site is only as good as its traffic. There are multiple methods of generating traffic nowadays including traditional SEO/Content augmentation, Pay Per Click, Banners, emails and more.
2) Traffic Measurement – Now that you’ve got some traffic you’re going to need a mechanism in place to record the effectiveness and quality of that traffic. Due largely to the availability of Google Analytics site owners now have access to a fully featured Analytics package free of charge. This system provides more than 80 reports about your site and its traffic.
3) Analysis – This is where the magic really starts to happen. You’ve got your traffic and a mechanism in place to track that traffic. Now you need to start examining this information and identifying problem areas within your site.
However, data is meaningless without context. Make sure you don’t look at single set of figures in isolation.
For example, you have used your analytics data to compare your sites traffic sources and subsequently identify that one source generates a lot of visitors but none of these visitors complete your pre-determined site conversion goals. Are you going to continue to invest in this source of traffic? Not likely!
Or perhaps you’ve looked at your analytics and discovered that site visitors progress through your site, take one look at your checkout process and then leave, highlighting a problem with your checkout process; perhaps it’s simply too long or too complicated.
Simple changes based on insight gained from this data can often have a profound positive impact on the performance of your site.
4) Test and Improve – You are now ready to “fix” the problems pages you have identified. You’re going to need a method of measuring and tracking the changes to these pages in order to determine the effectiveness of the changes you are making. To do this you’ll need to run either traditional split testing or a more complex multivariate test to identify the changes that have a positive effect on your sites performance.
5) Repeat – That’s right, repeat steps 1 to 4. Assess how the work you have performed has impacted you’re goals and conversions and continue optimising.
Sounds simple? In practice it’s not often as straightforward as the above paragraphs suggest. However, this method does provide a solid platform for site improvement. As with all data driven processes the real skill lies in the ability to analyse and interpret the data and subsequently identify the right changes. If you can do that, you’re onto a winner!
