First, why should you care about that monthly analytics report you receive? (And if you’re not receiving it, contact support@websiteondemand.ca and let us know!)

Because your analytics report is the best tool you have at your disposal for getting more leads, sales or donations from your website.
Now that you’re all excited to start using your analytics reports to boost your sales and leads, here’s how to get started:

1. Choose ONLY one or two ‘metrics’ (measures of performance) that you can improve and that will make your website generate more leads and sales. If your website currently receives less than 500 visits per month, I’d recommend choosing monthly visits as your first metric. You’ll need people coming to your website to get business from it!
2. Choose your benchmark or goal. A metric without context is useless. Let’s say your chosen metric is monthly visits. Last month you received 120 visits. Your goal might be a 20% increase every month. So next month you plan to get 120 visits plus an additional 24 visits.  
3. Decide what actions to take to ‘move the dial’. Where are these additional 24 visits going to come from? Fortunately you have lots of options. The ‘best’, more affordable way is to add new content to your website. If your content is ‘optimized’ for search engines (contains keywords used by your potential clients), then over time these new pages will naturally attract more search engine traffic. There’s also paid methods like pay-per-click ads, banner ads and more. And let’s not forget social media! Create a Facebook page for your business, spread word about your business through there and get your Facebook fans to come check out your website.
4. Schedule your next steps to ‘move the dial’ and follow through. Will you be adding 3-4 pages or getting that new Facebook page going? It’s up to you what you try, just be sure to add performing this next step to your calendar and follow through.
5. Set a note in your schedule to check your analytics next month.
6. Evaluate your results and repeat the cycle next month starting from step 2. Be warned, many changes like adding a new page to your website will take a couple months to see results (increased traffic) from. Others, like using Facebook and twitter, may deliver results sooner. When you receive your next analytics report, look at your chosen ‘metric’ (in our case, we wanted to increase site visits by 20% (120 to 144) and see how well you did. Maybe you only increased visits by 10%. The important thing is to keep at it, adjust your strategy as results come in and don’t give up. Remember, that 10% increase in visits is 10% more than you had last month, and with every additional visitor comes the chance for increase your sales, leads or donations received from your website.

Tags: small business website, how to use google analytics, google analytics, key performance indicators, google analytics metrics

Our goal at Website On-Demand, and my personal goal as its founder, is to make sure our Clients are as successful online as we can make them!

To that end, I'm happy to announce the start of our Rising Star Rewards Program.

Get Paid to Increase Traffic to Your Website

If you improve the amount of traffic your website receives, Website On-Demand will PAY YOU as our way of congratulating you on your success. By meeting certain requirements, Clients are eligibile to receive 50% off one month of Website On-Demand service.

For full details, please visit the Rising Star Rewards Program.

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For those of you looking for an affordable way to bring visitors to your website (this should be everyone!), the time to try out Facebook ads has come! Why is now such a great time to try out Facebook ads?

1. CHEAP cost per click. For those of you experienced with Google Adwords, Facebook Ads run at least half to a third the cost of the equivalent ad on Google Adwords. Also, the minimum allowed daily budget
2. SUPER targeted. Want to target females aged 30-35 with a bachelors degree and an interest in scuba diving? Facebook’s demographic targeting gives you unparalleled ability to specify exact who you want to see your ad.
3. EASY to get started. Facebook ads are far easier to use than Google Adwords. No need to compile massive keyword lists with Facebook ads – just select who you want to see your ad and you’re good to go.

How to Get Started?

So I’ve convinced you – great! To get started, go to facebook.com/ads, if you have a Facebook account, you should be able to jump right into it from there after entering your payment information. Facebook has excellent resources for creating your ads, and so I refer you to those for instructions on creating your ads.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Facebook Campaign

1. DO NOT just send visitors to your website’s homepage. Create a special page (called a landing page) on your website relevant to the Facebook ad you put out. For example, if your Facebook ad is about a special on Prada shoes, you would send them to a page on your website about Prada shoes showing your special promotion. Visitors WILL NOT spend time searching your website for whatever you may have mentioned in your Facebook ad.
2. DO A-B testing on your Facebook ads. A-B testing means running two versions of the same ad but making one small change in one of them then seeing which ad works best. For example, your first ad might have a headline, “Special Deal on Shoes”. Your second ad might have a headline, “Shoes 80% Off Now”.  Facebook can then run both of these ads and you can see which has a higher clickthrough rate (% of visitors that click on the ad) as well as which sends buyers to your website that are more likely to buy.
3. DO check the bounce rate (% of visitors to your landing page that leave within ten seconds) on your landing page. Are 80% of the people you’re spending your hard earned dollars to bring to your landing page leaving immediately after arrival? This is important info to know! If that is the case, you’ll want to make a change on your landing page to try to bring that bounce rate down.

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More and more of your website visitors will be coming from people using their mobile phones to surf the web.

Is your website mobile friendly?

Maya Pande over at the Pande Family Wellness Center (highly recommended for all your Chiropractic needs!),  pointed out a fantastic new service called Duda Mobile (dudamobile.com.) They have a FREE automated tool to create a mobile version of your website that should work great in smartphones like the iPhone and Android-based smartphones. Head on over to Duda Mobile’s website to see what your mobile friendly website would look like.

Contact us if you’d like a mobile-friendly version of your website set up.

For Website On-Demand monthly plan clients, the process will take 30 minutes of your free monthly updating time. For non-monthly plan Clients or monthly plan Clients that have exhausted their free upgrade time for the month, the cost for us to set this up on your website is $36.

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Is your website sending you as much business as possible?

Probably not. Building a website is not a one-time job. Despite our best efforts, the content and promotions we put on our website may not be what customers need and want.

Only by experimenting, putting new promotions and content on our website then measuring visitor response, can we truly get inside the heads of our customers and improve our websites.

10 Ways to Boost Conversion Rates on Your Website

To get you started thinking on ways to get more business from your website, here are 10 ideas you can experiment with. Put one on your website for a month or two and see if it makes a difference in business generated from your website. If it does, great! If it doesn’t, you can always move on to the next.

1. Put your top sellers on your homepage. If most of your customers gravitate towards one or two offerings, you may also find that your website visitors will be more interested in them as well.
2. Stoke visitor desire! Make your services and products look even more compelling to visitors. You can do this by: using larger product pictures, headline the results your product or service promises, use bullet lists and short sentences and make sure your content includes benefits of your product or service (and not just its features!)
3. Add a limited time promotion. What better way to motivate potential customers to act then giving a deadline on a great deal!
4. Use slash through pricing. Alright, some may think this is a bit tacky, but it’s been shown more than once that showing original and then discounted prices encourages buyers. Be warned though that if you’re pitching your service as a premium or boutique service, this sort of pricing scheme may clash with your upscale branding and image.
5. Show competitor comparisons. This is great for two reasons. First, if you’re not even aware of what your competitors are offering, doing this forces you to get out there and do a bit of research on who your competitors are and how you stack up. Second, if you offer a superior value, this is your chance to highlight that to potential customers.
6. Add a call-to-action on every page. Almost all of my Clients have probably heard me say this at least once or twice: make sure EVERY page on your website contains a call-to-action. A call to action may be something like a ‘Book Appointment’ button, a newsletter sign-up form or ‘Buy Now’ button. There’s virtually no downside this but lots of potential upside.
7. Inspire trust. Testimonials, reviews, affiliations, privacy policies and more make your business seem more credible and real in the eyes of visitors. Make sure these appear at times when trust is most needed (e.g., right before they book an appointment, enter checkout or provide their credit card information.)
8. Offer free shipping! If you can afford it, offer free shipping. It’s been proven to be the MOST effective change a company can make to increase conversion rates.
9. Add a moneyback guarantee. Making doing business with you as risk-free as possible and you should notice a slight uptick in the percentage of business you’re able to close.
10. Add a phone number to every page. Not everyone is big on email or contact forms. Make doing business with you as easy as possible for those that may not be very technically inclined – particularly important if your clientele may be older.

If you find these tips useful, I’d recommend you check out a book called Call-to-Action by Bryan Eisenberg. For those interesting in boosting conversion rates, it’s practically the Conversion Optimization Bible. You can pick it up from Amazon - only $10 for Kindle owners!

A Few Final Words of Advice

On measuring the impact of your changes:

• Decide on how you’re going to be measuring change before starting the test. For example, will you be looking at conversion rates on your website, calls to your phone, etc.
• Be sure to record business generated from the website before and after the change so you know if the change has had any effect.
• Be aware that seasonal holidays like Christmas, Valentines Day, etc may throw off your measurements.

Also, for those of you keeners out there, the best way to do this sort of experimentation is with what’s called A-B split testing. This technique lets you run two different versions of a webpage simultaneously. Google offers free software called the, “Google Website Optimizer” that you can use to do this testing. We’re happy to help you setup these sorts of tests on your website, but because of the time involved we do charge our hourly rate to all Website On-Demand Clients for this service.

Tags: Google Website Optimizer, A-B Split Testing, slash through pricing, limited time promotion, bryan eisenberg, call-to-action, call to action, boost website conversion, trust symbols, moneyback guarantee, free shipping, conversion optimization