Are you selling products or services on your website? One of the best ways to increase your revenue is to increase your traffic, right?

Not necessarily. Before you increase your traffic, you should make sure to optimize your shopping cart. Why?

Let’s say you have 1,000 visitors daily to your site and 1% (or 10) of them order. Increasing your traffic by 5x or 5,000 visitors a day would only increase your orders by 40 from 50.

But if you first optimize your shopping cart and increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2% and then increase your traffic by 5x, then you’ll be driving 100 more orders daily.

Eights steps to shopping cart optimization:

• Find your baseline #’s
• Decrease the # of steps
• Shorten every page
• Add links and logos to reassure buyers
• Leave no button unturned
• Remove unnecessary fields
• Adjust your shipping costs
• Email those that abandon their carts

#1 Find Your Baseline #’s

Before you do any optimizing, figure out some basics numbers for your site. 

Here are a few that are important to know:

• Site conversion rate = # of conversions / # of visitors for a given time period
• Shopping cart conversion rate = # of people that finish orders / # of people that start orders for a given time period
• Abandonment rate = % that abandon from each shopping cart page

Knowing these metrics, will give you something to compare against, after you make changes.

#2 Decrease the # of Steps

Many websites make visitors go through too many steps to check out. With every new page you add people will drop off.  If you’ve got 5 different pages in your check out process, could you make it 3 or 4? Combine pages, take out all unnecessary steps. All of this will help.

#3 Shorten Every Page

Look at every page. Is there a way to move the content up without crunching it all together too much? Can you remove extra graphics or make them smaller? The whole idea is that less might just be more. Pretend for a moment that you are a visitor and go through each page. Go to some of the best websites and go through their order process.

#4 Add Links and Logos to Reassure Buyers

Especially if you are not a major online player (i.e. Amazon, Best Buy, etc), visitors might be wary of ordering from your site. By adding a BBB (Better Business Bureau) logo, a Versign Secured logo, or a 60-day money back guarantee logo, you will help users feel more comfortable with your site.

The more they trust you, the more likely they’ll be willing to order from you.

#5 Leave NO Button Unturned

Two notes about buttons:

• If you use unprofessional looking buttons, you’ll look like a fly by night site, and users will fly away from your site.
• You should consider adding “checkout” or “continue” buttons at both the top and bottom of every page so users won’t have to scroll so much to get to the next page.

#6 Remove Unnecessary Fields

Many, many times when a shopping cart is created it’s over done. In trying to cover everything, you end up losing sales.

Here are fields to avoid:

• Asking a bunch of marketing questions (do this via surveys or on the thank you page after the order is complete)
• Making them fill in a separate shipping versus billing address. Have a check box to click in if they are the same.
• Give them the option to create an account, but don’t force them to. It’s more fields. It takes more of their valuable time.

#7 Adjust your Shipping Costs

Couple of notes on shipping:

• Show it upfront. Some sites force you way into the order process to see the shipping charges. Not a great customer experience.
• Make it simple. If only PHDs can figure out shipping on your site, only PHDs will be buying!
• Do you have to charge for shipping? Do the math. If you can include it in the cost of the product do so.
• Test offering free shipping and see how it impacts your order rate.

#8 Email those that Abandon their Carts

Ever get distracted when you are about to order something online? The door bell rings. The dog throws up (ugh). Maybe you just aren’t sure you need that turtle neck in July. If you’ve collected their email address, test sending those folks a free shipping coupon and a link to your customer support line. You might be amazed at how many come back and complete orders.

Finally

Couple of final thoughts:

• If you’re the marketing person, work to get buy in from those coding the changes, by sharing how these changes might impact revenue.
• Think about when you’ll make changes. Try to limit the #’s of variables. For example, don’t change the # of pages AND the shipping cost at the same time.
• If it’s fiscally feasible (say that 5 times fast) add online chat or an 800# to your order pages.

Have questions? Let me know. Best of luck!

photo credits:  Auswandern Malaysia

Do you use online ad networks in your advertising mix?

If so, I found an article called Pros and Cons of Online Ad Networks that I think you’ll find interesting.

Here are my personal pros and cons.

Pros of Online Ad Networks

Here is what I like about online ad networks:

• Pricing: you are buying remnant inventory and getting a deal
• Time savings: you don’t have to deal with a bunch of niche websites
• Better technology: Ad networks tend to have better technology than small sites

Cons of Online Ad Networks

Here are my cons:

• ROI: often times the ROI just doesn’t work
• Targeting: many of them have really broad category targeting
• ROI: back to the first bullet point…it’s about the ROI!!!

By the way, ROI means “return on investment”.

Being a marketer, I love to test, but in the end if the ROI isn’t there (which in my experience it isn’t often times) then you’ve got to walk away.  For me online ad networks would almost always be behind things like search marketing and affiliate program because of how the ROI stacks up.

Finally, test them! That’s the only real way to know.

Photo credit:  momentcaptured1

Do you dream about acquiring more customers?

If so, you need to be tracking some key numbers.  In this post, I’ll cover some basics and some more advanced pieces of data you should consider tracking.

Before we get into the details, ask yourself an important question:

“WHY TRACK STUFF?”

We marketers track stuff, so that we can determine what works and what doesn’t. In the end, we do more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn’t.  Make sense?

Basic Metrics

I consider these numbers below a must have for you to run your online or mobile business.

For your website:

• Visitors – how many unique people visit your website daily, weekly, and monthly
• Revenue – daily, weekly, and monthly $$$
• Conversion rate – if 100 people come to your website how many buy?

You may say I’ve oversimplified this first list, but if I could only track three things on my website, these would be it. 

For your iPhone app:

• Downloads (from App Store reports)
• Registrants – how many of these people register?
• Rank – track your apps rank each day
• Rating – what is your apps rating out of 5 stars?
• Revenue – from app sales or ad impressions

For online or mobile campaigns:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR (click through rate)
• Sales
• Conversion Rate
• Cost
• CPA (cost per acquisition)

More Advanced Metrics

So those are the basics. Here are some more advanced metrics that are very important as well.

For your website:

• Traffic sources
• Pages per visit
• Bounce rate - % of people that leave your website without doing anything
• Average time on site
• Most clicked links on your homepage
• Entry/Exit paths
• Shopping cart abandonment

I find traffic sources to be a very helpful metric to follow for this blog.

For example, I noticed when I first launched, that a website www.iphonekicks.com was sending me some traffic.  Knowing that, I now submit all my iPhone related stories to that site. That’s just one way to use data to help you do even better in the future.

For your iPhone app:

• Comments – what are people saying about your app?
• Registrants per hour – when you spend ad dollars, does it drive registrants?
• Rank by hour – when you spend ad dollars, does it help your app store ranking?
• Upgrade Downloads - when you release a new version, what % upgrade?
• Revenue – from app sales or ad impressions

For online or mobile campaigns:

• Tracking CPA across different campaigns
• Conversions and CPA for individual keyword
• Conversions and CPA for categories of keywords

Summary

Couple of final thoughts:

• Tracking is key to success
• Don’t just track, learn
• Don’t just track & learn, act on what your learning

So there you have it.  Know you know what I know.