Ask any marketer or business owner what the number one goal for their website is and the answer will usually be “more sales!”. It’s a no-brainer right?
However, we also know that in order to get sales we’ll most likely need an increase in web traffic traffic – most importantly, we need the right traffic.
The right traffic on your site includes potential clients, warm leads and real potential sales. There’s no point in having a huge influx of random website traffic if it’s not going to result in the end goal of a greater number of conversions.
Only a small portion of your overall web traffic will actually convert to leads or sales (the global average for e-commerce is only 1-3%), but you can increase those chances with clever marketing and the right analysis of your site.
The big question is – how do we start bringing the right traffic to our website in the first place?
The answer is easy; with a touch of marketing flair (we’ve got that in spades!), and the use of these essential techniques we’ve highlighted for you below.
First of all you need to make sure you’re tracking your website analytics so that you know who’s already visiting, spending time on, and buying from you online. We recommend getting into Google Analytics if you haven’t already, as it’s free and relatively easy to use with a bit of basic knowledge. Here’s a great introduction on how to get your account set-up and running.
Google Analytics has a range of in-depth options, while being easy to read and understand. You can view data in whatever way best suits you (reports, pie charts, graphs and raw numbers), understand how people find your site (Acquisition), what they do once they get there (Behavior), and set-up and track conversion goals.
In this case we’re specifically talking about Audience analytics, which tells you about your website visitors, including their demographics, behaviors and interests – it truly is an invaluable tool.
Here’s a brief look at the vast range of data you’ll find in each section of the Audience profile:
Continue to track your audience throughout any marketing campaign using tools like Google Analytics; this will ensure you learn who’s visiting your site, what their interests are, and who spends time lingering (and buying) on your site.
Using custom Goals in Google Analytics (more about this below) you can go a step further, accurately measuring in-depth site performance and how your audience is using your site. Learn more about setting up goals here.
We’re sure you’ve heard of an audience persona; a fictional character that you create based on market research. They represent a section of your target audience and are used by many marketers and content creators to implement smarter marketing strategies – taking you a step above the competition.
You may have also heard these explained as buyer personas, customer avatars, target customers, or audience profiles.
Audience persona’s work because they create a visual representation of a brand’s core audience – allowing us to target content effectively by marketing directly to our ideal audience. When we imagine we’re talking (and selling) to a real person, we do a much better job of meeting that person’s needs.
Key benefits of knowing your ideal Audience Persona include:
Once you’ve taken the time to research and learn about your audience, and create an audience persona, you’ll be able to reach them with content that matters to them. You’ll be able to speak their language (discussing what they care about), and market to them in places where they spend their time.
You can then continue to personalize your content for your Audience Persona by customizing the content you give them during their Buyer’s Journey.
The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through as they first become aware of, then consider and evaluate, and finally decide to purchase your product or service. It’s the lifecycle your audience go through as they move from potential customers, to paying customers.
The journey consists of three steps:
Keen to know more? We recently explained in-depth how effective buyer persona’s can be, and give a great example on how to maximise the buyer journey for them. We’ve made it available for download here. (Buyer persona slides start at Slide 88)
Next up? They’ll land on your website, which continues to use that research to guide their User Experience (UX).
Now that you’ve reached your ideal audience, and analysed their behaviour on your website, it’s time to track who’s actually converting.
If you have an eCommerce business this means looking at actual sales, and if you’re a service-based business this means tracking the leads you generate.
One great way to do this is to go back to Google Analytics and set up Conversion Goals and Funnels.
A goal can be any action a visitor might complete during a website session – usually defined by your business objectives (like an order status, a destination page or a newsletter subscription box completed). Every time a visitor to your website completes one of these goals, it gets logged as a conversion.
A funnel is the particular path of URLs you expect your visitors to follow when completing those goals. You should track this funnel to see how effectively your website is working on converting, monitor when visitors enter the path, when they abandon it, or if they miss steps.
Find out how to set up Goals and Funnels with our Introduction to Google Analytics guide.
Another great conversion tracking tool, the Facebook Pixel can also be easily be added to your site. It looks specifically at how your Facebook Ads and Campaigns are converting.
We suggest starting by tracking Standard Events. These are predefined actions that relate to common, conversion-related visitor activity, like searching for, viewing or purchasing a product. Once you’re comfortable with standard conversion tracking, you should then move onto tracking Custom Events.
Again, the Facebook Pixel can be used to track conversion events – looking at certain URL pages your visitors land on. You can set these up with different parameters and view the results right in your Conversion dashboard or even within each campaign.
Your audience persona research will have one other great advantage; it will tell you what social platforms you should focus your marketing on.
For example, only 17% of people aged 18-24 use Facebook, while in comparison 31% of Instagram users fall in the same age category. If that’s your target age group, there’s no point buying ads on Facebook when the majority of your audience are hanging out on Instagram – so make sure that you start driving the right traffic to your website by marketing on social platforms where your ideal audience are already.
Those customers are already interacting with other brands on those platforms, and it gives you a chance to reach potential customers with specific targeting in mind. If you use social marketing to its best advantage, those potential customers can become dedicated brand advocates through sharing your content – eventually driving leads and sales to your website.
Researching your competition’s website doesn’t mean emulating their work – instead it gives you an insight into what they’re offering potential clients, and gaps in the market you could be meeting.
We have a really handy E-Book that breaks down some fantastic competitor research
techniques, and we’ve made it available to you for free download here.
You can also use software like BuzzSumo or Uber Suggest to collate the social performance of competitor sites and content. This will provide you with a view of what content is already resonating with potential clients within your industry, and what topics are driven by social media.
Once you know what people are already reading and interested in, you can add that popular content to your website, adjust to suit your expertise and your audience persona, and bring in more visitors through organic marketing.
We all love and need website traffic to run a profitable business, and an increase in audience size is great – as long as a strong proportion of the traffic is made up of warm leads.
Stay on-top of the competition by reviewing data weekly; if you want an aggressive marketing strategy this is a great way to review how campaigns are tracking and what needs to be done (and happens to be the tactic Zyber employ for our own marketing strategy).
By keeping up this analysis of your current website traffic analytics, building a strong audience persona, and tracking sales or lead conversions, you’ll be making sure that the traffic you bring to your website is the right traffic for your business and overall digital marketing strategy.
Let’s talk about how we can double your conversion rate.
We work with clients on a month-by-month basis to provide custom analysis & data-driven strategies, to optimise and increase online conversion rates for eCommerce & business websites.
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