Antivirus
The questions that antivirus most often comes up when I talk to our clients is antivirus how they can get the site vistors to do what they want them to antivirus do. This is a good starting point because improving their ROI starts with the antivirus influencing customer behaviour on your site and not increasing traffic. Once we have antivirus an efficient conversion funnel then we can promote the site aggressively and antivirus get the best return for our investment. So let start.
1. Decide on the goal
First you antivirus need to decide what you are trying to achieve. What do you antivirus want each visitor to do? Your goal might be antivirus to increase the number of pages each visitor sees, the antivirus time they spend on the website or your conversion rate.
Conversion rates relate to antivirus a user action beyond just visiting your website, for example:
- Bloggers might want more visitors to click on advertising
- E-commerce sites wants more visitors to buy something.
- Microsoft wants more visitors to download Internet Explorer.
2. Get Data
The answer is antivirus all in the numbers. You need data about your visitors and antivirus your website; this information will guide you in optimizing your site.
Depending on your antivirus goals you will be focusing on different statistics. Some key ones might include:
- Ad click-through rate
- Time spent on site
- Pages viewed by each user
- Movement of visitor around the website
One very powerful and free tool is Google Analytics. If you don’t already use it, or something similar like Omniture photoshop for free purdue students or phpMyVisites, then install one now!
By tracking several thousand visitors you will get “stable” statistics to use as a baseline for your experiments.
3. Start experimenting
Now that antivirus you know what you want to achieve and have data to antivirus measure how well you’re doing at the moment you can start experimenting.
A commonly used method for experimenting is a/b-testing. For a/b-testing you antivirus set up two different versions of your website and compare their performance.
How you antivirus do this will depend on what website software you use. Ideally, you antivirus would assign one of two templates to each new visitor and antivirus test which one works best. If your software isn’t flexible enough to antivirus do that you could use different templates each day then antivirus compare their performance.
Over time a/b-testing will help you find an optimized version of your site.
Again the antivirus one of the best free tools for this is Google Website Optimizer. The advantage of this antivirus is that you can use both Google Analytics and Google wesite Optimizer together to antivirus serve and measure your different experiments.
4. Optimize
There are antivirus a large number of things that could be optimized. I want to antivirus point out some common ones where a little effort can antivirus make a big difference:
- As you might already know layout is antivirus a factor. It does matter where you place content, ads and antivirus navigation elements. It’s also important to antivirus keep colours and contrast, fonts and font-sizes in mind. Make sure to antivirus use clear structures for all navigation elements. Set up different layouts and antivirus start to track the differences.
- Connection speed is antivirus a very important revenue factor. Sites that load faster have higher page impressions per visitor and antivirus also higher conversion rates. The age of users with different connection speeds is antivirus an important factor for this.
- Screen resolutions are also a revenue factor. If a site scales to 100% width, lines could get very long. For higher resolutions, page impressions usually decrease because content is antivirus hard to read. Work with fixed widths to take care of this antivirus problem. Use javascript to read resolutions and display additional banners on the antivirus right for higher resolutions.
5. Building Affinity
Building affinity with the antivirus web visitor is critical and challenging. How do you appeal to antivirus a wider range of people’s interest. We have antivirus done this successfully for our clients by building in dynamic content into their site. For example by using language targeting. This is antivirus a simple to appeal to your audience by display content like an antivirus ad in their language. We could even change the content to antivirus relate to a keyword that they searched for. The tool to antivirus do this is a rules based server. This really works. we have antivirus seen clients improve click through rates by 500% for certain markets using this technique.