There were many people at the Dublin Web Summit in the Ballsbridge Bewleys last Friday, including speakers from Google and Facebook. Stephen Clark, the Head of Web for the European Parliament and Benoit Thieulin, a previous head of New Media to the French Prime Minister gave the event an interesting political slant.

Onto the good stuff: Web Analytics

I flew the flag for Web Analytics at the Dublin Web Summit,  by encouraging on-site analytics. I also pushed for Web Analytics to inform online marketing and traffic acquisition, in a talk structured around the excellent Web Analytics Business Process from Web Analytics Demystified.

A quick example

A site gets 1000 visits a week but only makes a sale in 10 of these visits, giving them a conversion rate of 1%.

Unfortunately this company cannot pay the wages on 10 sales per week. What they really need to make is 20 sales.

Without making any changes to the site, they would need to increase the number of visits to their site to 2000. Thats hard. Or expensive. Or both.

The solutions

On-site optimisation: an attempt to makes an extra 10 sales in the 1000 visits. In other words , they need to reduce the number of visits in which they didn’t make a sale from 990 to 980. How hard can that be?

Design informed by analytics

How I would increase conversions (or decrease the visits where there are no conversions):

Remove any unnecessary fields from your forms. One troublesome field can decimate your conversion rate.

Minimise the distractions on the checkout screens.  If someone is checking out, you shouldn’t distract them with ads for other products. In fact, I would even strip out much of the navigation from these screens.

Add relevant information to the checkout screens. Customer testimonials (saying how wonderful you are), prominent no fuss returns policy, and great big buttons all work to get people from start to finish.

Even if you are not in a position to make any functional changes to your site, you could say some nice things to your users, hold their hand a little bit and drive them towards conversion.

Optimise your conversions

This is called conversion funnel optimisation.  You can measure how successful you are at decreasing the abandonment rate from your funnels by doing just two things:

1. Set up the address of your receipt page as a goal in Google Analytics
2. Add the addresses of your conversion screens as funnel steps.

Then check out the ‘Funnel Visualisation’ report in the ‘Goals’ section of GA.

Check out my slides from the Dublin Web Summit (pdf).