Much of this blog is dedicated to driving traffic to your site. But there’s another really important part of the equation: Conversion Rate. Making money online is defined by this equation:

Traffic  x  Conversion Rate  x  Price  =  How Much Money You Make Online
(1000 visitors  x  2% Conversion Rate  x  $100 Product = $2000 Revenue)

If you increase conversion rates from 1% to 2% your sales will double and your traffic will be twice as valuable. Spending time on conversion rate is as important as spending time on driving traffic. Unfortunately, conversion rates are a bit harder to understand. Let’s take a look at some of the free tools out there to help us measure and better understand why people buy and why they leave.

Stop Reading and Install Google Analytics NOW
Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you lots of important information about your site including different sources of traffic, where they’re clicking, when they’re leaving, and conversion rates. It’s very easy to set up (all you have to do is cut and paste some JavaScript into your web pages).

One of the most important things Google Analytics measures is conversion rates. First you have to tell Google what kind of conversions you want to measure. For example, if you’re selling a product, put the URL for the completed transaction page into Analytics. If you’re looking to capture email addresses in exchange for free videos, use the thank you page.

Google Analytics will give you the raw data about how many people you’re converting to sales. This is a great place to start, but to really understand what these numbers mean, we’re going to have to look a little deeper.

Infrared Goggles: For Your Web Pages
A heat map is one of the most useful ways to understand how users are looking at your pages. Remember the way the Predator found Arnold Schwarzenegger in the jungle? It’s kind of like that for web pages. You can see exactly where your users are hovering with the mouse and where they’re clicking on your page. The more users that hover and click on a certain link, the hotter the map looks over that one spot.

This is extremely useful information because you can start to understand how your users think. If most of your users are hovering over the menu and then choosing a link at the very bottom of the menu, it may make sense to move that link to a more prominent place at the top. If your users aren’t scrolling down to your offer at the bottom of the page, consider how you can move it above the fold.

The best free tool to give you Heat Maps of your site is ClickTale.com. It produces high quality heat maps and can even give you videos of how your users are mousing over your site.

If it’s Hard to Use, I Just Don’t Use It as Much
One of the most useful things you can do is go out in the world and spend some time with users. They’re easier to find than you think. Bring a laptop to your rock gym and spend 5 minutes with climbers for your climber site. Spend some time at a health fair to test your health site. Spend some time at a independent coffee shop and you’re guaranteed to find some writers for your writer site.
Steve Krug wrote an incredible guide to Usability called “Don’t Make Me Think.” It’s a great place to start when you’re thinking about usability. You’ll be amazed what you find when you start watching people use your site. They’ll ask real time questions, they’ll click in all the wrong spots, they’ll get hopelessly lost. Pound for pound, it’s some of the most interesting feedback you’ll ever get about your site. And it only takes an hour.

Test Test Test and Then Test Some More
What can you do with all of this great feedback? Well, the most useful thing to do is start testing different ideas. Luckily, the brilliant engineers at Google came up with a free tool to test different pages on your site (aren’t you glad they’re spending so much money on us).

Google Website Optimizer is very easy to set up. Create a second home page, landing page, information page or whatever else you’d like to test and give Website Optimizer both URLs. It’ll handle the rest. Use the feedback you get to help drive additional sales and you’re well on your way to doubling profits.

Happy converting!

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Google Website Optimizer is one of the most accurate website optimizing tools out there. If your sites suffer from low conversion rates, then it’s time to use Google Website Optimizer to test your sites and increase conversion rates.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to websites who take desired actions. A sites’s desired action is based on your online marketing goals (sell more products, increase membership, etc.)

How Does Google Website Optimizer Work?
The program creates dynamic, high-converting pages. It also tests and optimizes design and content for websites, and uses Google Analytics for tracking.

It uses two types of testing: A/B and multivariate.

•    A/B Testing – Tests two or more entirely different versions of web pages

•    Multivariate Testing – Simultaneously tests multiple page variables /elements (headline, content, images, etc.)

Best Testing Practices
When setting up experiments in Google Website Optimizer, use these practices when you test your web pages. Remember to test, test, and test to achieve the BEST results!

•    Test pages with high traffic – High traffic pages usually optimize faster than low traffic pages

•    Test only a few variables at a time – The more elements you test, the longer it’ll take to run: for your initial test, start with 2 titles and 2 images

•    Pay attention to testing combinations – Make sure combinations are readable and are a good fit.

•    Choose high conversion goals – For example, if you’re an e-commerce site you’ll want to pick a common high conversion goal such as adding items to a shopping cart. Lower conversion goals take longer to find effective content that works.

•    You know what works best for your site – Google Website Optimizers gives you basic guidelines but you are the best judge when it comes to your site – test and re-test and find what works best.

How to Set up Experiments
•    Choose test page – This is the page that you’ll be optimizing by making changes with Google Website Optimizer. This page needs to offer an action to customers (landing pages, sign-up forms, etc.) The action can be found in the form or links to another page.

•    Choose conversion page – This page represents your business results (where users make a purchase, etc.)

•    Pick tests that work best for your site – A/B tests are simple to run and produce results quickly – test entirely different layouts or change look of pages. Multivariate tests are more complex and take longer to run, but are more flexible. Test out two different headlines, three different images and three different sale prices at the same time.

•    Select the type of content you want to test – This applies to multivariate testing (in A/B testing, you don’t need to pick specific content)

•    Create content variations – When you figure out the test page headline and image you want to use, you need to create a few variations: the original content or the new variation is shown to visitors. Variations are used to determine what content leads them to take action and reach conversion pages. You can also limit the amount of traffic who views new variations.

Report Results
Google Website Optimizer runs reports with helpful data lined up in columns– use this information to analyze your conversion rates.

•    Estimated conversion rate range – Shows how well variations/combinations are performing compared to your original content

•    Chance to Beat Original – Gives a percentage probability that combination/variation will be more successful than original content

•    Improvement – Displays percentage improvement over original combinations/variation

•    Conversions/Visitors – Total number of conversions per visitors that variations generated

•    Relevance Rating – Impact of page section on your experiment