If visitors to your site aren’t buying, your website needs some work. At the very least, a website should promote awareness of your business, but ideally, you should see measurable increases in sales with a well-optimised website.

Here are a five of the most common mistakes when it comes to conversion rates. We see these mistakes time and time again that drain profits…Even on large corporate websites!

1. Making “gut-based” decisions

You know your website better than anybody else, but that doesn’t mean that you know 100% what your customers want. The only way to truly know what they want is by giving them something, and seeing how they respond. Everything else is pure speculation, but with advanced software, tracking the movements, understanding habits and buying behaviour of every single visitor to your site is now a reality.

When you change something on your website, you want to know with 100% certainty if it is increasing your sales or not. Guessing what works, and what doesn’t, is definitely not the best tactic in a technological, online world.

2. Focusing on the minute details

We sometimes hear success stories about a fellow Webmaster who changed the colour of the border around his shopping cart button, and he made a fortune. The truth is however, that very seldom do micro decisions such as this impact the bottom line much, if at all. The major aspects of your website such as your headline, your call to action, your website layout and your copywriting are where the big money is at in terms of increasing sales.

3. Neglecting the back end optimisation

Often the focus is on the sexy parts of the website — the images, the headline, the call to action etc., but no thought is given to the “behind the scenes” processes that your customer goes through. For example, you can test your follow up email series, or the length of your guarantee, to see what effect these might have on your revenues.

4. Using free software to track your performance

If you are relying on a single program to show you who has clicked where, you are bringing a stick to a machine gun fight. There are countless free options out there to help you track your conversion rates such as Google Analytics, but they are free for a reason…

If you are spending a lot of time and money on your conversion makeover, you don’t want to try and save a few pennies on the tracking and testing phase. When we optimise websites, we use specialised and sophisticated software that shows exactly what measurable impact a certain change has on the bottom line.

5. Only testing “on-site” metrics

One of the most important things that need to be tested is the quality, quantity, and conversion rate of your traffic sources.

  • Do you know what your “earnings per click” are?
  • Do you know which one of your traffic sources is the most valuable?
  • How many sources have you tested?

When it comes to optimising a website, it is truly a specialist field for analysts with experience. For more information on how to improve your conversion rate and turn more visitors into leads and sales, call Brisbane’s leading PPC, Social and SEO company on (07) 3216 1151 today. 

Photo Credit (Flickr)