Converting visitors to buyers is a metrics session. Brian Eisenberg spoke first (and I missed that part but i’m pretty familar with Brian’s work and have met him several times - so I knew what he was going to say. Brian wrote a book last year with his brother, Jeffery Eisenberg called Call to Action.
Here’s the description of this session
Converting Visitors into Buyers
getting visitors to your web site is only half the battle. To be victorious, you need them to convert into customers by making purchases, signing up for services or fulfilling whatever are your goals. Learn about making this conversion. The latter part of the session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about changing them to improve visitor conversion.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Executive Editor, the ClickZ Network
Speakers:
Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder and CPO (Chief Persuasion Officer), Future Now, Inc.
Michael Sack, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Inceptor
Michael Sack gave an very good presentation that I’m going to talk about here. First, homepages. Homepages are a problem and many homepages are information overkill. Many of my own clients have this problem and it’s not that easy to fix (too many links on a page, confusing navigation, too much information - hard to segment visitors with such a page).
The problem of the homepage was solved in real life physical world by Supermarkets, for example. A Supermarket could be an analogy for a crowded home page, but as soon as you go into the supermarket, you find the right isle where a conatainer of milk is located. But in a website, having a door into the crowded supermarket (the site) does not work so well because we can’t tell why the person came to the site in the first place or what level of the buying cycle they are (yes, you can look at the search query, but tying that query to a location in the buying cycle - tracking it as a conversion is much harder if you have a crowded supermarket home page).
The solution Sack showed was having different points where your customers at different stages of the buying cycle arrive. In orde to do that, you home page becomes something much simplier than it usually is and it’s purpose is to identify the company and segment your traffic - nothing else.
The rest of the session covered the familar topic of The Long Tail of Search, how longer search phases and more of them can raise conversion rates. When running a keyword campaign, the more keywords that are in your campaign, the more you will raise your conversion rate. Also, conversions can vary by time of day and time of the week and the dynamics of that will depend on what your selling at to whom your selling it.
Sack also talked about connecting a search phrase with an ideal path for conversion on the website. For any search phrase in your campaign you need to bring up the right landing page and have the right actions on the page that a visitor can take - and have the choices very visible.
Also, sometimes a pages convert differently and you need to do A/B testing to find the best page that converts well. It’s hard to figure that out without consulting your audience - who your trying to sell to.
Right pathing can also be A/B tested - you can have more than one version of a buy page and test which one converts the best - then use that page.
And here are the things you need to be able to track
1.Must be able to track by specific keywords, at specific engines
Here are the key metrics
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