1. Stop relying on discounts: Pretend that for the next year your business had to survive selling only full price products or services. Would you survive? What does your answer say about the health of your brand? Kevin Hillstrom reminds us that “discounts and promotions are taxes placed on brands for being unremarkable”. What truly sets your business apart? Why would a customer choose you over a competitor? If you’ve been overly reliant on deals during last year’s economic debacle, ask yourself when enough is enough. The sooner you start weaning customers off discounts, the sooner you’ll begin cultivating healthy, long-term business.
2. Stop relying on “best practices”: Internet business is maturing. It’s not good enough anymore to simply follow the wisdom of the crowd. We all know we need fast loading pages and easy to use shopping carts.  Now is the time to start testing bigger and bolder ideas. It’s ok to imitate for so long, but you can’t always play follow the leader. This year, be the one who makes best practices instead of the one who follows them.
3. Stop relying on “more”: When sales are slumping, the most appealing solution is often “do more”. That means more emails, more promotions, more ads, whatever. But more is a slippery slope, and only digs you into a hole for next year. What if your marketing budget was cut in half this year? How would you adjust? Start obsessing about doing better, not just more.
4. Stop drinking the feedback Kool-aid: Many businesses think they’re getting good feedback from their customers. The problem is the people who are most likely to give feedback (your best customers) are the ones you need it from the least. Start thinking about how to get the painful, yet necessary feedback from ex-customers or non-customers. Why have they not considered you or stopped shopping altogether? This year, do everything it takes to reach the people you really need feedback from.
5. Stop the analytics overload: Dozens of advanced web analytics tools have sprung up over the last few years. Yet we seem to be drowning in data and thirsting for meaning at the same time. How can we make sense of this paralyzing analytics overload?  For many etailers, it really all boils down to a few metrics worth tracking: visits, conversion rate, and average order size. Start with these 3 fundamental KPIs and move backwards, asking yourself what the root problems are preventing these metrics from improving. Take your top ideas and start testing now.

Have you made any new years anti-resolutions for your online business? Share them below.

Remedy #1 – Focus on the Few, Not the Many

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” — Mother Theresa

People know millions of children are starving in Africa, yet rarely act on this knowledge. But what if one of these children showed up on their doorstep? Who wouldn’t act to help this child? The emotional connection with a single child trumps the astonishing, but paralyzing knowledge that millions of children are starving.

Sometimes we’re so fixated on the mass of data before us we forget there are people behind the pageviews. Have you ever stood behind someone as they used your website? Don’t just watch how they interact with the site, watch their demeanor. Ask them how they felt about the experience. Clickpaths rarely tell the whole story. What happens between the clicks matters. How the customer feels about the experience matters even more. Try focusing on just a few experiences, whether by observing people directly, or using a visual analytics tool such as Clicktale.

Remedy #2 - Ditch the Averages

General averages are often used for high level KPI reports for management, and rightfully so. Your CEO doesn’t want to know the conversion rate of your blue widget page, he wants the big picture. However, focusing solely on averages without extracting specific segments often results in information you cannot act upon.

Consider the following metrics and their usefulness:

• Useless: Your website bounce rate is 25%
• Better: Your website bounce rate from first time visitors is 40%
• Actionable: Your blue widget landing page bounce rate for first time visitors is 70%

The problem with general averages (the first example above) is they hide specific problems (the last example). By making the data more granular, you discover that a specific landing page is problematic. You now have information you can act upon. By tackling problems on a granular level, you’ll slowly improve the more broad averages as well.

Remedy #3 - Let Business Needs Drive Strategy

A trap I often fall into is wasting hours scouring analytics reports for that one business-altering, earth shattering insight. Unfortunately, excessively mining analytics for insights is often a waste of time.

For instance, suppose your international conversation rate reports shows unusually low conversation rates from visitors in Mexico. While you may think you’ve found an action item (increase Mexico visitor conversion rate), this may not be inline with overall business objectives. Sometimes going after international business is very expensive (due to shipping, customs, and customer service costs). There are often unknown variables as well, such as a low credit card adoption rate in Mexico)

Here’s a different approach:

• Start with a known business problem or opportunity, and consult the analytics for the solution

Rather than:

• Consulting analytics reports find business problems and opportunities that don’t align with strategy
  

Contrast the prior example with this. Your company has made a strategic decision to sell more blue widgets because the margin is better than green widgets. Upon research, your analytics reports show that repeat visitors buy green widgets at twice the rate of blue ones. This discovery can now be made meaningful by optimizing clickpaths of return visitors towards a green widget purchase. Based on this knowledge, you begin marketing your green widgets to your sources of repeat traffic, such as visitors who come through email newsletters.

Conclusion

There’s other great ways of getting your analytics unstuck, but I hope the ideas above will help you make sense out of the madness that confronts you each day. How about you, what are your methods of dealing with an analytics overdose?

You.

As much as we want to believe website optimization is all about tactics and strategy, often the key to success lies in our own behavior. In order for optimization to occur, we first have to properly collect and interpret data about our websites. However, if the daily processes which we use to collect data are overly systematic and rigid, inevitably out of the box thinking will cease to exist.

Let face it, we all get into ruts by doing things in the same old way. So how can we change perspectives and see our website through a different lens? Here’s 12 ways to help you look at your website as if it were the first time.

1. Stand Behind Someone Browsing your Site: One of my favorite ways to inspire ideas is to hand my laptop over to my wife, and have her browse through a client’s website. As she does, I watch her browse the site and ask her questions. Because she interacts with the website as a much less experienced user, she often does things I wouldn’t expect.
2. Stand Beside Someone Browsing your Site: Want to perform a low budget eye tracking study? Perform a similar experiment like the one above, yet this time focus more on the person than the website. Stand beside a friend or family member as they maneuver through your site for the first time. Pay close attention to where their eyes go as they browse. Are their eyes attracted to the page elements you would expect? Interact with them and quiz them on their impression of the website.
3. Record Your Visitors: Screen recording allows you to see your website through the eyes of your visitors and offers an experience that traditional analytics software just can’t. The ability to see micro-actions, such as the cursor moving or visitors interacting with a form, is absolutely priceless, and something you will never glean from log files or Javascript based programs. ClickTale offers a free version of their screen recording analytics.
4. Change analytics programs: Using the same analytics tools over and over can get you into a repetitive rut. I’ve found that looking at the same data with a different analytics program can yield insightful results. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft’s new Adcenter Analytics.
5. Try a slower internet connection: We forget how using a slower internet connection creates a shockingly different user experience. When page elements, such as images, embedded videos, or flash files hesitate to load, visitors may think your website is broken. For a disturbing reminder of a slow internet connection, check out this free application.
6. Get an Analytics Buddy: Give a trusted friend or colleague access to your analytics data for an hour or two, and offer to do the same for them. They’ll likely interpret the data a much different way than you, shedding light on previously unnoticed trends.
7. Use a Different Web Browser: As much as I love Firefox, I intentionally use other browsers on occasion. Sometimes even simple design modifications can cause rendering problems in less fortunate browsers such as such as Internet Explorer. Regularly viewing your website in multiple browsers will prevent simple rendering issues from going unnoticed for very long. Try BrowserShots for a quick screen shot of your website in all the popular browsers or give Google’s new Chrome browser a spin.
8. Change your Screen Resolution: Using your web analytics, take a look at the 5 most common screen resolutions of your site visitors. If possible, adjust your screen resolution to that size and take a spin through your website. You might be surprised that certain mission critical site features such as add to cart or checkout buttons are obscured or below the page fold. Webconfs.com offers a nice little tool to simulate different screen resolutions.
9. Adjust your Color Settings: Color settings on monitors vary greatly, frequently causing certain colors to have insufficient contrast with the background. Try adjusting the settings on your monitor, or using another monitor altogether.
10. Browse with Script Errors On: You know those ugly little JavaScript errors that popup now and then? Make sure your internet browser it set to display them so know when one of your pages is broken.
11. Use a Mobile Device: How usable is your website for a mobile user? Does it render properly? If not, try using a service such as Mofuse that can generate a functional mobile site based on an RSS feed.
12. Work at a Different time: Apparently, I’m not alone in discovering creativity late at night. Taking a hard look at your website or your analytics reports when you feel the most inspired can yield surprising results.

Think about how you would react if you were actually able to visit your website for the first time? What would you tell yourself? Hopefully the tips above will help you uncover previously unknown issues with your website and improve upon them.

Have you used any of the tactics above? What other methods can inspire out of the box thinking and creativity?

What is your site’s stumbling block? Confusing navigation? Broken links? A tedious checkout? Odds are, there’s something hindering the performance of your website. Since it’s usually challenging to catch our own mistakes, here’s 6 ideas for how to discover them with the help of others.

1. Use Screen Recording Software: One of the most powerful research tools I use for companies is in-house usability testing. Here’s how it works: First, we obtain a small number of users willing to be part of the research, ideally people who are unfamiliar with the company’s website. Then we sit them down on a computer and ask them to perform actions on the site. Common actions include making a purchase, contacting customer service, or looking up order tracking info. We record their on-screen actions using free screen capture software by CamStudio. Then we review the recordings, noticing how long it takes for visitors to complete an action. Using this method, it’s easy to observe when customers are lost or confused. On each and every occasion we’ve used this method, we’ve discovered a problematic issue needing attention.
2. Use Visual Web Analytics: Traditional analytics are great, but alternative web analytics solutions offering a more visual approach are becoming increasingly useful. Google Analytics offers a sometimes overlooked Site Overlay feature that does a decent job of showing site owners just how people travel through their site. Visual analytics allows you to see where people go and under what conditions. This approach creates big picture perspective of how customers are interacting with your site.
3. Ask Your Customer Service Team: Don’t forget that your customer service team usually has the best read on the pulse of your customers. They hear day-in and day-out what people complain about. Make sure there always exists a feedback loop from the customer, to customer service, to the management of your operation.
4. See What Others See: Not everyone who visits your site is using Internet Explorer, a Windows machine, and 1024 x 768 resolution. BrowserShots.org offers a free, innovative way to see your site in dozens of different configurations, including different browsers, OS’s, and with or without Flash and JavaScript. You might be unpleasantly surprised by the differences in the way browsers render your site. Users with smaller screen resolutions will often not notice site features that are below the page fold. Seeing your site in a variety of perspectives will help you cast a wide net, optimizing for as many user configurations as reasonably possible.
5. Setup Error Notifications: The larger your site, the more likely you are to experience errors resulting from broken hyperlinks or programming issues. Talk with your web developer and ask him to setup a system that notifies you every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they discovered the disconcerting fact that they were receiving hundreds of errors per day.
6. Ask an Expert: Lastly, it never hurts to get the opinion of another professional. While many small businesses can’t necessarily afford a full or even part time web usability consultant, hiring an expert for a few hours to review your website can be eye-opening. Many of my customers who purchase MySitePlan do so in order to get a second opinion in preparation for a site redesign, or they’re just looking for ways to improve that they haven’t considered before.

No one loves a shocking revelation about a dysfunctional website feature. To make matters worse, it’s usually someone else, a customer or a collegue that discovers these issues and informs us. Hopefully, the suggestions above will help you discover any existing problems with your website and resolve them quickly.

I was surprised by how much I learned from this simple situation. As I thought about it, I realized that my Google Analytics are not telling me the whole story.

In my opinion, traditional web analytics fail in the following areas:

1. They do not record micro actions (movement of the mouse, interaction with forms, etc)
2. They do not show where the user is looking (eye movement)
3. Most do not record users clicking on non-linked elements
4. They only show where the user has gone, not where they intended to go

When you begin to watch a user actually engage a website, you pick up on clues that you would never have learned from your analytics. You notice when they are lost. You notice when they are frustrated. You notice when they want to click on something that wasn’t intended to be clicked on.

With these weaknesses in mind, I started researching alternative web analytics solutions. Below are some great solutions I’ve found:

1. Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg offers heatmap visibility, a unique confetti map, and extremely easy setup. The confetti layout allows you to see everything a user clicks on, including non-hyperlink elements. Their pricing is pretty decent, and they offer a free account for up to 5,000 monthly visits.



2. ClickHeat: ClickHeat is an open source web analytics based on PHP and MySQL. Like CrazyEgg, it offers a heatmaps, allowing you to see the click hotspots on a page. I haven’t installed it yet, but it looks promising.



3. CamStudio: Not exactly intended solely for web analytics, CamStudio is an open source Screen recording software that’s perfect for in-house usability testing. For one of my clients, I’m planning on bringing in a dozen or so web users, and record them performing common tasks on the clients website.

Be sure to leave comment if you’ve used any of these solutions or any others.

Below I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be the most important metrics to monitor for eCommerce sites.

1. New Visitor Conversion Rate: Most etailers rarely differentiate between their new and return visitor conversion rates. By isolating the new visitor conversion rate, you’ll be able to see a clearer picture of what’s happening when first time visitors land on your site from search engines or other ad campaigns.
2. Return Visitor Conversion Rate: Unfortunately, not everyone buys on the first visit. The next best thing, however, is getting them back to your site. By analyzing your return visitor conversion rate, you’ll see how likely you are to convert your return traffic. Most likely, you’ll find that your return visitor conversion rate is the higher of the two.
3. Pageviews / Visit: Pageviews per visit can reflect how well your site engages your audience. An increasing number of pageviews per visit can indicate that your content is interesting, therefore visitors are spending more time browsing it. However, a high pageviews per visit metric can also indicate unecessarily complication processes such as checkout or product browsing.
4. Items / Order: If your site has a suggested product feature to encourage add-ons, you would benefit by tracking how many items you sell per order.
5. Average Order Value: While your target average order value will vary greatly based on your industry, it would be wise to monitor this metric over time. Ideally, you’d like to see a year over year increase.
6. Landing Page Bounce Rates: A bounce occurs when a visitor visits a page on your site, and immediately clicks away and goes no further. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors including excessive loading times, irrelevant content, unnactractive site design, etc. Be sure to monitor your bounce rates on all your important entry pages including your home page and any SEO or PPC landing pages.
7. Landing Page Load Times: As mentioned above, excessive page load time can wreak havoc on your bounce rates. Monitor your page load times on different connection speeds with this free tool from WebSiteOptimization.com
8. Traffic Sources: Google analytics breaks visit sources into 3 categories: Direct visits (from typing your URL directly), Search engines visits (both SEO and PPC), and refferring sites (any other sites linking to yours). Obviously, the percentage of visits from each of these sources will vary for every site. However, as your brand grows, you’d like to see more visits coming from direct URL entry. These tend to convert better.
9. Orders Per Customer Per Year: Come up with a calculation of how many times a customer order per given time period. This serves as a good tool for determining how much you can afford to spend on marketing or re-marketing.
10. Shopping Cart/Checkout Abandonment Rate: Measure what percentage of visitors abandon the shopping process at each step in your checkout. For example, how many abandon after adding an item to the cart? After entering shipping & billing info? After entering credit card info? Too high of an abandonment rate could signal a serious checkout problem.

About PWM

Palmer Web Marketing blog offers web usability advice and SEO Tips for e-Commerce sites.  Palmer Web Marketing also offers ethical SEO services and expert e-commerce consulting.

Recently, while reviewing a client’s Pay Per Click campaign, I was dismayed to find several high volume ad groups were resulting in a 1% conversion. Compared to the site’s overall conversion rate of 2%, this finding was disappointing. However, as I began to compare these results with the conversion rate of all first time visitors, I found they were comparable.

It’s crucial to monitor both of these metrics in order to obtain an accurate picture of what’s happening. With the same client mentioned above, we also found despite the fact the overall conversion rate remained flat over the past year, the returning visitor rate had improved dramatically. I believe phenomenon was due to an increased number of search engine visitors for keywords not perfectly relevant to the site. For more details on this, checkout my post on how SEO can decrease your conversion rate.