So you have plenty of traffic to your website but you're still not seeing any sales. Well, selling anything on the internet is all about numbers, and the number that matters most is your website's conversion ratio. This is the number of people who buy from your site divided by the number of people who visit your site. But how do you increase your conversion ratio?
The traditional method of conversion enhancement is split testing. The process of split testing involves making two different versions of your home page and switching between them. After you have run the two pages separately you can compare the results between them and see which one performs better.
The problem with split testing is that it is random. Split testing tells you which page works better, but it doesn't tell you what doesn't work on your current pages. As a result, split testing usually involves small changes tested side-by-side over a long period of time.
The solution to this problem is to analyze your site with a web trailer. A web trailer is a piece of JavaScript code that you embed into the pages on your site. The web trailer code will record the activity of users as they visit your website and uploads it to a server where you can analyze it. The web trailer records things like where the mouse moves over the page, where the page scrolls to, when the page was opened or closed, when the user switched to another window and back.
With this information you can systematically review the activity of every visitor to your site that did not make a purchase. This should point out the problem areas in your site that you should target for enhancement in a split test.
There are a few things to keep in mind when you review the activities of users on your site. Do most of the users stay long enough to read the first page of your screen? If they leave within a second or two and don't even scroll down to see the whole page your website has big problems. Most likely the website design or content puts off users. Research has been done to show that most users form an opinion of websites within the first second of viewing it. If this is your situation you may wish to consider redesigning your site.
Other times, you may find that users stay at your site and actually read your sales copy. This is a good opportunity to watch users behavior on your site and see how they react. Sometimes users will scan over a confusing line of text several times with the mouse. This lets you know which sections of text to consider clarifying.
Frequently, you can see a user scrolling up and down a page and rapidly clicking on navigation links over and over again. This user is looking for something and having trouble finding it. Perhaps the navigation links on your site are improperly labeled. Maybe your site could use a search feature, or it has a search feature that does not work properly.
Some users will actually go through all of the motions to purchase something from your website. They fill up a shopping cart and then they mouse hesitantly over the checkout button. This user is ready to buy but having second thoughts. If the user is mistrusting your site, you can help assuage them by making sure to use a secure e-commerce system and make sure this assurance is visible on your site. If this user has doubts about the quality or usability of the goods, you may need to make any guarantees you offer clear at this location. If the user appears to be sensitive to the price, you may want to offer some freebies with purchase and point them out now.
To give a real example has been one of our early testers. Watching users visit the site, we see that they are presented with a long page with several large images that show the CrispyPix software in use. The images differ only slightly and most of the users can be seen to be scrolling back and forth between the images trying to discern the subtle differences between them. Now knowing that this is a problem for visitors to the site, CrispyPix is planning to collapse the images into one using an animated gif or a flash demo.
With all of this insightful information you can collect on your users, it should be an easy task to find the problems with your website and fix them. Go to and get a web trailer for your site today and start boosting your website's conversion rates.
