I’d like to talk about the conversion funnel.

Firstly, what is ‘the conversion funnel’? Well, the conversion funnel is the steps which a website visitor has to complete in order to fulfill your desired goal, whether the final outcome is a lead or a sale. Each step in this process is vital. After all, if a website visitor does not complete all of these, then the sale has not been made.

Most online marketers only look at the end result. However, it is important to consider the non-converting cases in order to discover at what stage the sale process was stopped. This information can then be used to improve the process and increase the conversion rate.

What happens if your website achieves a lot of downloads, but few sales? Could it be the checkout process? How secure does a user feel when they are completing their purchase? Are they been offered too many alternatives at this final step? These are all important questions to consider.

I believe in the KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid. The fewer steps a website visitor needs to take to complete your desired goal, the better. Just by improving the final steps within your conversion funnel, you can greatly improve your overall conversion rate.

Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can track the user’s progress through the different stages the checkout process. This allows you to monitor your conversion funnel metrics and learn valuable information which can be used to improve your website.

Without Website Analytics search marketers would only be obsessed with generating endless amounts of traffic.

There are many analytics tools on the internet that a webmaster or analyst could use to monitor where their traffic is coming from and how users navigate through their website.

Personally, I just make use of Google Analytics and also sometimes install CrazyEgg.

Most of you probably know what Google Analytics is all about, so I am going to focus on CrazyEgg.

One of the main features of CrazyEgg is the Heatmap, in fact this is the main reason why I sometimes include CrazyEgg on the websites I build.

In a nutshell the Heatmap allows you to see what’s hot and what’s not and it illustrates this is such an easy way to analyze.

I think CrazyEgg is a very important tool for webmasters that care about what their users do and in return aim at optimizing usability for their users.

I noticed the other day, CrazyEgg promoting a new feature called Confetti. According to their website, this allows you to dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser etc.

Although CrazyEgg is not a completely a free service, it does a allow you to track 5000 visitors per month.

With the combination of these two services (Google Analytics and CrazyEgg), I can get many useful bits of information from my website visitors.

This is just really a simple introduction, most analytics services offer a lot of more information including Bounce Rate, Top Entry and Exit pages and also allow you to setup goals. I will write more about this in another post, so watch this space.

So many times when I’m surfing the internet, perhaps via a Google search, I come across an ugly looking error page because the page used to exist that was indexed by the search engine. Immediately I push the back button and check out the other search results.

Surely it would have been better if they had created a prettier error page within their web-site

template to increase the chances of me staying at their website.

Websites evolve and get re-designed, URL’s change and search engines still keep the older websites URL’s indexed for a while. If a permanent redirect (301) has not been created for an older URL that is indexed in a search engine, you bound to get visitors landing upon an error page. So the choice is yours - Would it not be better create a customised 404 page which includes your branding as a safety net?

… Surely then you would not lose all your visitors trust as if you were sending them to the default ugly version that web servers generate.

I’m sure the web is full of resources on creating prettier customised 404 Error Pages.