As consumers increasingly turn to the Web for news, advice, the weather, financial services, product/service purchases, and even a sense of community and belonging, advertisers and marketers are right behind them.
Companies and organizations spend billions driving traffic to their Web sites; increasingly, this is being done via online marketing and advertising. For example, according to the Advertising Age web site, “Measured spending on internet display advertising last year surged 33% for the 100 LNA (Leading National Advertisers) … Web display ads -- banner ads and the like -- accounted for 6.8% of LNA measured spending in 2007 ... (and more than double 2003's 3%)”.
Prospective customers are being bombarded with emails, ads, sponsored search results, and other demands on their attention online at ever increasing rates.
This will tend to place upward pressure on companies’ online Cost per Lead and Cost per Acquisition as interactive media budgets expand to try and overcome the resulting intensified competition for search engine keyword buys, softening email open and click-through rates, and the like.
Suppose you’ve won this battle and are successfully driving ever more visitors to your web properties. That’s great; are you fighting the right battle?
You need to ask “what do prospects do when they get to my Web site”. Because, if you are not asking this question continuously, the answer is: they are leaving.
Let me explain. We’ve all seen reports from our company's Marketing department stating that site traffic increased X% over the same period last year. Marketing is apparently effective at driving traffic to your site. But that’s not enough. Marketing does not typically disclose what I call the “dirty little secret of online marketing”: for 99% of all Web sites, after visitors arrive at the Web page to which they were driven, the majority leaves within a few seconds.
Why? There are a myriad of symptoms, but they all betray the existence of one very widespread but curable syndrome: bad online usability.
Optimizing web site usability is the missing link between increasing traffic and increasing business. Without it, your company is paying more to drive traffic to a Web site that dissuades most visitors from continuing or ever coming back.
What’s needed is an approach that significantly increases Web site visitor conversion (the percentage of visitors completing the action you want them to, whether it be buying online, registering on your site, or something else), not just traffic. An example should make this clear: which is the better outcome?
- Increase traffic by 20%; increase visitor conversion rate by 0%
- Increase traffic by 0%; increase visitor conversion rate by 50%
Unless your company has the resources to do both at once, tactics to improve conversion) should logically precede tactics to increase traffic (number of visitors). And yes, increasing a web site's conversion rate by 50% is achievable.
Beginning with next week’s article, I’ll get specific about how to improve your web site’s usability. Until then, hold off on those additional search engine keyword buys --- and please feel free to comment.