Design Your Website for Increased ROI

by Alden DeSoto

It's easy to over-focus on driving traffic to your site while overlooking another equally important key to website ROI - content optimization. Make the time, money, and effort you've spent developing your online marketing pay off. Design a website that gets visitors to take action.

1. Set your goals

Today, website ROI is measured by conversions -- how frequently visitors reach your goals. Goals are activities on your website that are important to the success of your business. Obviously, a sale is a goal if you sell online. A request for a sales call is another example of a goal. So is an email registration. Even if you have a purely brochure-ware site, you might consider viewing the Contact page or a Product Spec page to be a goal.

The point is that if you haven't built one or more key activities - goals - into your site, no amount of site re-working is going to help. Without goals, you haven't created any connection points with your prospects and customers and you'll have no way of knowing how well you meet your visitors' needs or of measuring your website ROI.

2. Get that first click

How successfully does your site entice visitors to make that first click towards conversion? Everything on an entry page must be designed and written to entice a visitor to click.

It is likely that your home page has several audiences. Potential customers, partners, investors, journalists all may have an interest in your company. Speak directly to each need and make the next step clear. Use active words such as "Learn", "Ask", "Browse", "Sign up". Use "you" and "your"; avoid "we" and "our". Keep copy short and to the point. Remember, you just want them to make that first click and start down the path.

Look at your Top Landing Pages report (in the Content section). This report will show you how many visitors you lose from each entrance page. Do everything you can to lower the number of "bounces", visitors who leave your site after viewing just a single page. Next, look at the Site Overlay for each entrance page. This will show not only where visitors are clicking, but how frequently visitors who click there convert to each of your goals (in terms of a conversion %).

3. Call your audience to action

Buy Now. Add to Shopping Cart. Calls to action, obviously, but not the only ones you should have on your site. Make sure your visitors always know what to do next, so that they aren't left standing in your store, overwhelmed by choices. Add calls to action on every page of your site: Learn More, Help Me Choose, Compare, Next Step. Gently lead visitors down the conversion path, and you'll earn more from the visitors you get.

4. Simplify conversion steps

The easier it is for a visitor to reach her objective, the more likely it is she'll convert. Obviously, you need to provide the information that the visitor needs before she'll buy or ask for a sales call, but consider carefully how much information you need to ask for. Do you really need to ask your visitors to select a city from a form when they already give you a zip code?

The Google Analytics Funnel Visualization report (in the Goals section) will help you identify where you are losing visitors on the path to conversion. The center column shows the conversion path that you expect visitors to take. The right hand column shows where the visitors who leave the funnel go. The left hand column shows where the visitors who enter the funnel come from.

Use this report to identify steps where visitors lose interest. Go back and tighten up these critical pages. Make sure the next steps are always clear and that you aren't asking for too much from your visitors.

Maximum ROI = Effective Marketing + Content Optimization

To summarize, you'll maximize return from the visitors you attract if you do the following things:

1. Create key activities (goals) on your site.
2. Get that first click towards conversion.
3. Call your audience to action on each page.
4. Simplify the conversion path.
5. Experiment and measure!