Connecting with your visitors/customers to boost conversions

I’m a big fan of Bryan Eisenberg and the way he makes visitor behavior and its relation to web analytics understandable. I learnt quite a few things on behavioral analytics from reading his books and Future Now’s blog and one of the most important lessons has to be the importance of making a connection with the your visitor/prospective customer.

In a nutshell, this concept goes as follows: Your site’s visitors all have goals and don’t have endless patience – They will spend less than 10 seconds evaluating (scanning) your site’s landing page. They have a need and hope your site will fulfil that need. It’s your job to help your visitors by turning the table around when you look at your website to try and see things from the visitor’s perspective. The better you manage to understand your visitors and what they want, the better you can connect with them and the better your conversion rates will be and the lower your landing pages’ bounce rate will be.

Let’s take a practical example. You run an online vegetable business (eVeggies) and optimize your landing page on broccoli and cucumber to attract visitors for keywords ‘broccoli’ and ‘cucumbers’. You pull up your keywords report in Google Analytics to check out how well the page does for both keywords in terms of goal conversion. You find out that your landing page for broccoli and cucumber brings in relatively equal traffic for the keywords ‘broccoli’ and ‘cucumber’, but for some reason the bounce rate of broccoli is double that of cucumber and the conversion rate looks hopeless. What’s wrong?

You’ve managed to create a page that made the search engine think your landing page provides info  on broccoli but your visitors seem to disagree – the majority abandons the page upon entry. Look at the landing page: Broccoli isn’t mentioned in the font size 18 page title – potential cause! For starters, test a title which includes ‘broccoli’, subsequently you could revise your content and create a separate paragraph with heading on broccoli, to try and further optimize the landing page to connect better with your visitors’ needs. Ideally, of course, you’d have separate landing pages for broccoli and cucumber but in any case testing, tracking and auctioning changes will provide insight on how to optimize all your landing pages to get closer to your site’s “ultimate conversion formula”!

This example works for both organic as well as paid traffic - the visitors behave very similarly and connecting your landing pages to their need (keyword used) works equally well in both cases.

If you haven’t read any books by Bryan Eisenberg (co-authored with his brother Jeffrey) you need to order Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? The Eisenbergs make part of a select group of people in the web analytics world that “just make sense” and I believe they deserve every bit of praise they get.