Website Conversion Rate

This article will discuss what a test market is and how to create a game plan for covering a test market. Prior to releasing a product to the market, get the opinion of a small group of people known as a test group and then make changes based on their input. This will be done to anything new coming out, from a bag of chips to a movie, and a website is not going to be any different.

Before opening up the floodgates and driving all the possible business to your site, make sure that it is a site that is going to convert sales. The goal is to take the findings from the test group and make changes as needed to increase the conversion rate by two percent. Two percent may seem a bit low but for online businesses that is actually a very healthy conversion rate. Compared to direct mail or other forms of marketing that have a much lower conversion rate it looks very appealing, especially when you take into account how relatively inexpensive it is to drive traffic to a website.

Getting feedback from an online test group will not be as simple as going up and asking them. There will be some guessing in looking at your website stats and seeing what traffic is doing when they come to the site and then making changes based off of what traffic is doing and then either keeping the changes that have been made or making more changes or new changes to try to improve the conversion rate even more.

Since the guessing game of optimizing the site can take a while, it is important to have a game plan together of the steps to take to get going on it as quickly as possible once the site is live. Now the test group game plan should include both how to get traffic to the site and the tools needed.

There are a lot of different ways to go about getting more traffic. The goal is to get about a hundred to a hundred and fifty visitors per day. With that amount of traffic and a two percent conversion rate, it should yield anywhere from two to three sales once it has been optimized. If there are only ten to twenty hits on the site, make a change and then let it ride for two or three weeks to see if that change has had an impact.

Among the things that we have seen work to get the one hundred to one hundred fifty visitors a day is article submission. Write articles to be submitted to various article submission directories. Another thing is blogging. Set up a blog which will help increase rankings on search engines and get traffic to the blog so it can be redirected to the website. Other good ways to increase traffic are vertical portal submission and forum membership. Start with these now but also have a game plan for what to do once the site has been active for a while. After a couple weeks, see where the traffic is at.

Tools

Use built in site statistics, which will be built into the builder, and implement your Google analytics account. These two tools combined are huge factors in seeing what traffic is doing. Next, get a fresh pair of eyes. After looking at the site for a long time, find a fresh pair of eyes to look at the site for usability. Put them on the home page looking for a certain product and see how quickly they can find it. If it is taking a long time to find the product, get some input from them to give a good idea of what the one hundred to one hundred fifty visitors are thinking as well.

The great thing about this industry is that it is always changing. For more information please follow the links provided. Thrive Learning Institute is a business consulting firm that specializes in helping people start their own online businesses. To learn more, visit www.thriveli.com or the Thrive Learning Institute elibrary.