People are not cookie-cutter replicas of one another - something many website managers forget. I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me about the actions of their website visitors based on their own browsing habits.
“I never use onsite chat. People don’t like that.”
“I hate form Submissions. No one will fill out a form.”
I am sure that if you are reading this, you have your own opinions about your website as well. You are, of course, right to a degree. There are a large group of people out there who would rather pick up the phone and call you before they bother with a form on a website. But there is a group of people who prefer on-site chat to calling or filling out a form.
Just like we don’t have cookie cutter people… we don’t have cookie cutter browsing habits either. It’s important to appeal to your entire audience rather than going by your “gut feeling” on user habits.
The More Conversion Opportunities the Better.
The most popular conversion options are forms and phones. Onsite chat is another one that has come a long way. I also see people offer an SMS number. The more avenues you make available for your visitor, the better off you will be.
You don’t just want to make it available though, you want to track its use.
Conversion Tracking Strategy
As a business, you are paying for your leads. You are paying by the budget allocated to get those leads and the time it takes to generate them. A lead has value to your company. Using Google Analytics goal tracking, we can assign a monetary value to each lead.
One way to do this is to calculate (or estimate) your close rate based on a set of leads from a given source. For example:
100 Phone Calls for a product with a margin of $100.00 leads to a 25% close rate – Value is $2,500.
vs
100 Form Submissions for the same product at a 15% close rate – Value is $1,500.
You will probably want to include some cost-per-lead adjustments. Say, the average cost of a website submission (PPC budgets, Display Spends, TradeShows, etc.) is $1000.00. We can modify our lead value based on that data.
Goal Tracking Scope
The reason we track goals is to see how effectively we are spending our resources. For example, Pay Per Click marketing may seem extremely expensive if you look at one goal conversion per $100.00 spent. However, if you are only tracking web forms and not phone calls, or if you are not offering onsite chat, you don’t have the full picture. Depending on the industry, phone calls may be out performing your web form submissions, and if you are not sure what is coming from PPC you are missing a lot of insights. I have seen onsite chat increase website conversion rates by up to 30%. It is certainly an avenue that is often overlooked.
Just as people aren’t cookie cutter replicas, neither is your website or industry. If you would like a one-on-one consultation to go over your goal tracking strategy, feel free to contact me today.
