Staring at Traffic
by Dan BurbankI once worked in a building where the offices were perched high enough so that you could sit at your desk and watch the traffic roll by on a busy highway a few hundred feet away. You could see the morning rush fade, a speeder get pulled over and a fender-bender set off afternoon gridlock during the course of a normal workday. It could serve as a nice distraction, but you never really learned anything staring out those windows.
Do you do the equivalent with your Web site traffic? You're a savvy webmaster so you avoided an amateurish counter on your site and went straight for some decent tracking software. You're getting some good data about your site - pageviews, unique visitors, referrers. So what? Are you staring or do you analyze?
Here are some tips to help you take action on facts that might reveal themselves after you stare at your traffic.
No traffic here
If your numbers are so low that you know you personally accounted for six of your site's seven pageviews this week, then analysis isn't a problem. First, at least you know the reason the site isn't generating interest or sales is because no one is finding it. Hold off on the emergency redesign and start marketing. Get listed with search engines, try swapping links, add your URL to your business cards, buy keywords on Google, just get that traffic started.
Some site I never heard of is linking to me
First, do your research. Some log analysis tools are particularly susceptible to referrer spam. This technique amounts to getting a bogus reference to pop up in your logs to drive traffic to the referring URL. That web site specializing in penny stocks and mail order brides isn't actually linking to you, they're just using a different spamming technique to fool you. An upgrade to your analytics tool will usually clear this up.
If the link is legit, what is it about your site that made it worthwhile enough for them to post this link? It could be your great content, unique products or unbelievable deals. Thank them, then look for similar sites and ask if they'll do the same.
Visitors go to pages that aren't important to me
That list of 100 lawyer jokes seemed like a funny addition to your site. Now it gets 500 pageviews a day while your homepage sees a fraction of that. Maybe it's not that irrelevant, maybe it's the very personal tale of why you got into business for yourself.
Either way, this page is a distraction that deters the visitor from doing what you want them to do. You have two choices; if the page is related to your business, redesign it to push more traffic to an important page. If it was posted as a joke, get rid of it (assuming your site isn't all about jokes), the visitors it attracts aren't interested and it wastes your bandwidth.
Traffic seems to spike on a consistent day or time
Many major web sites report that their busiest time of day comes around noon. It's lunchtime and office workers take a minute to check their email, read headlines or find out if there are tickets left for tonight's game.
Seize your most popular time. Post your best offer, get your best content ready, and make sure something fresh is available. Besides that, does the time tell you anything about your visitors -- are they noontime office browsers, late night teens, weekend warriors?
There doesn't seem to be any growth
You've been looking at the numbers for months and while you're satisfied with the amount of traffic, there doesn't seem to be any growth. Now you've got a marketing problem, but you've got some data to work with. Who are your top referrers? Is there anything they might do to promote you more? Are there sites similar to theirs where you could get listed? Have any recent activities or changes generated spikes in traffic?
Maybe it's time to try an email newsletter or some advertising. Now that you're analyzing your traffic, you'll know if it works or not.
Comments (1) 07.05.2007. 23:58
Look Big on the Web
by W. Lee Steele
Quickly establishing credibility and confidence with potential customers is the number one priority for a successful web site. Without credibility and confidence, prospective customers will be reluctant to buy from you. A significant factor in building this trust is the design and content of your web site. Here are a few tips to help you make your web site look like a BIG established, respectable company that prospects will want to do business with.
Do's
- Emphasize your industry knowledge and years of experience
- Provide a list of satisfied clients/customers
- Include testimonials from satisfied clients/customers
- Reference your membership in your local Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau and/or other respected organizations
- Emphasize your product or service warranties and/or guarantees of satisfaction
- Provide your product return policy
- Accept all major credit cards as method of payment
- Provide a physical address and a phone number for prospects to call with their questions
- Provide multiple email addresses for specific customer inquiries, e.g., info@, accounting@, custsupport@, techsupport@, returns@, sales@, etc. (even if all email addresses are forwarded to the same email account)
- If you sell products, you'll want to provide online manuals and/or installation instructions or trouble-shooting tips
- Spend the time and/or money to invest in a professional-looking site design
Don'ts
All of the following are dead giveaways that you're a small company with limited resources:
- Spinning logos and dancing icons on your web site
- Opening splash pages with no apparent purpose
- Annoying background music
- Membership in a web ring
- Obvious affiliate program links
- Your web site address is a sub domain (e.g., www.maindomain.com/user/mydomain.htm)
- Your email address doesn't correlate with your web site address (e.g., your email address is myname@yahoo.com, but your web site address is www.mydomain.com)
- You only accept PayPal as a form of payment or you require a personal check to clear the bank before you'll ship the products ordered
- You take more than 48 hours to ship all orders
On the Internet, potential customers judge you and your company by how your web site looks. If you don't look like a professional, established, trustworthy company, then your odds of success are greatly limited. After all, you want people who have never met you to send you their money. That requires a great deal of confidence and trust on the part of the buyer. Your goal is to quickly establish that important confidence and credibility with potential buyers through the look and content of your only contact with them - your web site. Do it right, and you'll reap the rewards.
W. Lee Steele is the President of Strategic Insight, Inc., a marketing consulting firm based in Tempe, Arizona. Mr. Steele can be contacted at leesteele@strategicinsight.com.
Comments (0) 03.05.2007. 00:15
Combat Web Site Clutter
by Dan Burbank
No one launches a cluttered web site. A cluttered web site, like a messy house, gets that way slowly. It escapes the owner's notice at first. Then one day, as you're throwing away two tons of old magazines you think, "where did all this junk come from?"
The web site you started off with was clean, well organized and simple. But a new section there, an announcement here, a few swapped links and your web site's overall usability and effectiveness begin to deteriorate.
Tell Tale Signs
How do you know it's time to take on your site's clutter problem? When any of the following apply, it's time.
1. Excessive Scroll. If your homepage, or any other critical page on your site, scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, then scrolls some more -- it's cluttered. It's time to delete or move some of that information.
2. No Categories. When you add a new page to your site, do you have specific folder where all of that type of information lives? And does your site reflect this organization? If pictures of all the products you have on clearance are saved in the same directory as the copy you used for a coupon eight months ago … and it's all appearing on your homepage - it's cluttered.
3. Navigation Problems. You added four new pages to your site last week but only linked to them from your homepage. You'd link to them from your site's other pages but there are 12 of them and you haven't had time to download each one, edit it and upload it. There's clutter here.
4. Here's a Map. If you find yourself giving potential visitors to your web site explicit directions about where they'll find the product or information they need on your site you've probably got clutter. It's the "there's a system to my mess" syndrome and none of your visitors see a method to it.
Restoring Order
The site has been online for years and taming it simply seems out of reach. Relax, there are techniques and tools you can use to regain control.
1. The Site Map
Catalog every single page that exists on your web site. Next, group like pages together and begin to sort them into an outline format with categories and subcategories. If a page doesn't seem to fit neatly into one of your categories, consider splitting it into two pages if you can. Or, allow it to live in two distinct categories.
After the site is outlined convert it into an HTML document linking up all the pages and publish it to your site. Without embarking on a full-blown redesign you've added structure to your site. As an added bonus, search engines love site maps.
2. Divide and Conquer
Your site map has already helped you establish a good set of categories and subcategories, so why not put them to work? Use the groupings as the basis for a new navigational menu for your site and publish it on every page.
Just use the highest-level categories for the site wide navigation. When you get to categories with several subcategories add a secondary navigation to guide visitors.
And don't forget to break up those long sections of content with lots of bold headers.
3. Search
Google and Yahoo have made names for themselves by being able to organize the Internet's clutter. Why not put search to work for your site? By simply copying and pasting a few lines of code from Google into your site you can allow users to search your site easily.
Visit www.google.com/searchcode.html and be sure to grab the code for web search with site search.
4. Go Dynamic
Is your site is growing faster than you ever imagined? Do you find yourself creating page after page of static HTML or having to tweak dozens of page to make one change site wide? It may be time to pursue a content management system or shopping cart software.
Using a database like MySQL along with PHP scripts can simplify the process of updating and maintaining a large site. Luckily you don't have to start from scratch. There are a variety of PHP/MySQL content management systems available online (some for free). Sites like Open Source CMS are a good starting point for exploring the possibilities.
Comments (2) 03.05.2007. 00:10
