E-Commerce for All

So you have your store up and running and hopefully you are watching those conversions closely. Today, we are going to hit some not so blatant discrepancies about online conversions that you should know. I have said this before, but it bares repeating, every store is different. Even store with the exact same flow and product line will convert differently. So lets did in to some conversion dirt.

First of all, and certainly unnecessarily, lets define a conversion…

In marketing a conversion occurs when a prospective customer takes the marketer’s intended action. If the prospect has visited a marketer’s web site, the conversion action might be making an online purchase, or submitting a form to request additional information. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the conversion action.

So you see a conversion or the act of converting a visitor to an action, not just about a sale. It is in fact a general term referring to getting them to do what you want such as sign up for a newsletter or click an Ad even. Now lets dig in…

I really hope you are using a great Analytics program like Urchin or Google Analytics which tracks conversions (completed sales and funnels) for you. Without these types of analytical tools you are pretty much popping caps off in the dark. We will assume you are using Google Analytics for our purpose.

On your main account stats page, the “dashboard”, you have several statistical summary boxes. We are going to concentrate on your “Ecommerce Overview”. In this summary box within your dashboard you get very basic conversion information. While I would never argue that your overall conversion rate is important, its just not enough information to grow your business. So click the “view report” link and lets dig deeper.

Before we go any further I want to debunk a very common misconception, something I hear far too often…

No, we always sell more beta widgets… That’s always been our top product. The alpha widgets just don’t sell, so lets concentrate on the beta widgets.

Personally, I really don’t care in the least “what you have always” sold more of historically. Have you considered the search rank, volume and potential sales of the other widgets? No, probably not. Here’s the thing, ALMOST 100% of the time when a customer tells me that, their lack of sales/conversions for the under performing widget is related to either their site or its lack of rank and therefore search phrase traffic. Only one time that I can remember was this actually related to a “bad” product. So throw everything you think about your products and whether you think they will sell out the window and rely on the data.

Ok, so we have or page one Ecommerce view up in Analytics. Some cool stuff here and some things I want you too look for…

1. In the top graph is about 30 days of conversions. The blue vertical line indicates the weekly separation, by default this is a Monday.