As I’ve posted in the past, I get daily notifications of my “Daily Challenge” – little snippets, sayings, quotes, ideas that keep me grounded and remind me that it’s not all about me. Sometimes these little challenges strike a personal note, and sometimes they hit me professionally. Today’s challenge can apply both personally and professionally.
“Choose to re-frame disappointments as challenges to help you grow.”
We would not be who we are without disappointment and growth, so this is a great reminder or push to learn from our mistakes, both personally and professionally.
If I apply this professionally, it is to take a web site that does not perform well, or has experiences failures in the ways of online sales and/or traffic and turn that around. The disappointments in online performance are the things that push to dig deeper and find out what is not working and make it better.
I have one particular account that puzzles me – the site traffic grows month over month, the overall site bounce rate is low, the pricing on products is competitive and they are experiencing nice positioning in Google. They are following all the steps in our marketing plan, yet the site does not perform as well as I’d expect it to. It is rather disappointing. BUT, this is now a challenge – to test the waters and look for ways to make it work. We’ve just rolled out some changes that I hope will be effective, but again we continue to monitor using tools like Google Analytics to watch our changes take hold.
If not, I will continue to push to find the right solution as I attempt to do in all areas of my life. My passion for my client’s success is what keeps me motivated. At the end of the day, if their site is performing well and I am helping their business grow, then I’ve overcome just one more challenge.
As Joel Osteen once said “Every setback is a setup for a great comeback…”
I continue to view failures and disappointments as opportunities for growth in all areas of my life. It is those things that make us stronger both personally and professionally.
eCommerce sites tend to be a bit easier to monitor and rate success with online goals being sales. Sites that are not selling online still need to generate business – otherwise what’s the point of being online right? Hopefully you are using Google Analytics to set goals for your site and to monitor their success.
If you don’t have goals set up – take a look at your non-eCommerce site and look for areas for generate leads. A few examples of leads might be:
- Email Opt-In
- Online Conact Form Submission
- Online Quote Request Submitted
- Online Survey Completion
- Document Downloads
Each of these actions can be tracked separately in Google Analytics and can provide valuable insight into how your site is performing.
Assessing an existing goal and working to improve coversions
Having goals set up for a website doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be a successful goal with regular conversions. Through Google Analytics we can ascertain what is working and what isn’t. Here’s a real time example:
Company X is a USA manufacturer who does not sell direct online. They do however offer to quote out every product they sell and work directly with their online users. This is a means to be able to sell direct and not upset their distributor networks. After the site was live for several months we decided to add a quote request form to offer up this service and generate leads.
We added a quote request form to the site and featured it on the site’s home page. We then monitored the site’s goal conversion rate over a few months and found that while people were starting to submit quote requests – they were few and far between.
We took it a step further and created a call-out for this quote request and placed it on the top and bottom of every single product page. Below is a real-time screen capture of the change in goal conversions for these quote requests – showing two months before, and one month after this very simple change was made.
Note that in June and half way through July they were lucky to get 1-2 quote requests per week. Once we made that simple change of adding this quote request callout to every product page, the number of quote requests they are now receiving has greatly improved. One simple change can make a huge difference.
Be sure to monitor your site traffic regularly and look for areas to improve conversions. Work to develop ways to convert online traffic into real business and get creative. Adding a survey to your site is a nice way to generate leads if you are not currently quoting custom products. Email signups are another great way to generate leads. Start thinking outside the box – especially if you are not selling direct to your online website visitors.
As a side note – if you have more than 4 goals you want to track, and are using Google Analytics – you will need to create a duplicate profile. Each profile in Analytics only allows for 4 goals. (See post on creating duplicate profiles.)
