Provide your visitors with sufficient scent
This post discusses the importance of scent and trigger words on a landing page.
In order to have a successful landing page, it’s important to provide your visitors with sufficient scent. This will lure them to complete the desired action.
Think about a mouse trap: the cheese provides scent, while the mouse performs the desired action. In this case, the mouse is trapped (not the best example). You don’t want to harm your potential customers, but you do want to provide them with strong scent to increase the possibility of completing an action – an action that you identify as a conversion.
What is scent?
Scent is made up of the parts of your website that attract visitors; the parts that stand out for them. These could be images, links or headings that “speak” to the visitor and quickly reassure them that they are browsing a relevant webpage.
It’s important to remember that all website visitors are different and have unique needs. Marketers create groups of visitors and define personas.
Wikipedia defines persona (marketing) as: (In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.)
When designing or optimising your landing page, think about the type of visitors (personas) visiting your landing page. What will your visitors be looking for? Does your landing page immediately address their needs? Are there sufficient links for the visitor to continue their session? Including sufficient links ensures that the visitor remains in a state of belief – belief that your website will provide them with an answer. Visitors need to believe that they will find this answer, even if they don’t find exactly what they’re looking for on the initial landing page.
A simple example:
You own a jewellery store that’s been operating for 75 years, specialising in the finest engagement rings.
You have a website, and the search phrase providing the majority of visitors is “diamond engagement rings”.
A gentleman may be doing research in order to find the perfect engagement ring. Alternatively, a lady may be trying to find her ultimate engagement ring, so that she can indicate to her boyfriend the ring she desires.
Ideally, the scent you want to include on your landing page should appeal to both personas.
By including the below content on your landing page, you will address the requirements of both personas.
This may appeal to men browsing your site:
“Give her the perfect engagement ring”
“Ensure she is thrilled with this worthy and precious engagement ring”
While this may appeal to women browsing your site:
“Show him your ultimate engagement ring”
The following may speak to both ladies and gents:
“How our diamonds are crafted”
“View our state-of-the-art Range”
“Over 75 years’ experience in jewellery”
“Our Store History”
This copy may also appeal to people who are meticulous or require a lot of reassurance – people who like to make decisions based on facts.
Checklist
Included below is a simple checklist you can use to evaluate your landing page content and/or relevancy.
*While going through this checklist to evaluate the effectiveness of your landing page content, it is extremely important to remember the top search phrases that are driving visitors to your landing page.
- Is the content (answer to search phrase) immediately available to your website visitors?
- How much related and persuasive content is provided to entice your visitor?
- Do your links contain trigger words that prompt visitors to obtain more information?
- Does the landing page address the following:
- Why the visitor should take further action;
- What the offer is;
- How to get started / what to do next.
Of course, there are also many design-related components that contribute to a successful landing page. Such components might include: navigation structure; headers and sub-headers call-to-action; search facility and more.
So next time you evaluate the effectiveness of your landing page, ask yourself – “Is there sufficient scent for the different types of persona that enter my landing page via my top keywords?”
Optimising the content of your landing page, and gearing it towards your visitors’ interests – based on the top search phrases – will have a positive impact.
Simple Analysis Starting Points Using Google Analytics
Site Search
If you have a search facility on your website, you should setup “Site Search”. Site search will allow you to view the search terms that visitors are entering into your search facility.
Some Site Search outcomes you may wish to check:
- Are there any relatively high-volume search phrases that bounce? I.e. Visitors use your search facility, enter a particular search phrase and thereafter immediately leave your website, perhaps due to irrelevant results?
(This metric is called % Exit) These high volume search terms will require better search results, to improve the user experience and retain the visitor.
- You may want to promote high volume search terms, especially in the case where these search terms result in revenue – which Google Analytics also measures.
- Do visits to your website that include the search functionality have a higher conversion rate? If so, this could mean that your search facility is working well and you may want to lead more visitors down this path.
- What Percentage of visitors utilise the search facility on your website? There is no clear “right” or “wrong” here, but if you are making changes to your navigation or website structure, this is certainly a metric you would like to check, especially in the case where visits that include site search, yield a better conversion rate.
Revenue & Transactions
- Which marketing channels do most of your high value transactions come from? Transactions with a high sales value might originate from a particular campaign. By promoting these campaigns further you will increase the likelihood of receiving more high value transactions. You will also be able to segment the products that provide the biggest net profit and thereafter, look to see which campaigns contributed to these product sales.
- Other obvious metrics include Revenue and Conversion Rate per Marketing Channel (Paid Search, Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic and Email Marketing)
Where do visitors exit your site?
- “% Exit” is the metric that you need to observe to find this information. “% Exit” will indicate the percentage of site exits that occurred from a particular page, or set of pages. If there is a high % exit on your Store Locator page, this is understandable, as the visitors may have “found” what they are looking for – your physical location. If there are pages that have an “odd” high % Exit, these pages may need to be optimised. Of course, visitors have to end their session sometime and eventually leave your website, so interpreting this metric in context is very important.
Top Landing Page Bounce Rate
- Your Top Landing pages (the first page a visitor sees) and Bounce Rate (Single page visits) are a great combination. Usually only a few pages make up the bulk (> 50%) of top landing pages. Monitoring their bounce rate is important. Also, these pages could be considered ‘low hanging fruit’, as improving their efficiency would have a positive effect on the bulk of visitors.
Segmenting your data
Segmenting your data is very important and helps you understand how different “types” of visitors interact with your website. Here are some Segments you may wish to create in Google Analytics:
International Visitors
This will show you how visits from international countries interact with your website. Perhaps there are some good organic keywords with high conversion rates and sales. You can then start a Paid Search campaign targeting these keywords and location to maximise revenue.
Social Media and Email Marketing
Segment all your Marketing Channels. In order to segment Social Media and Email marketing campaigns, you will need to ensure that these channels are properly tagged. This post will help you do this. With proper tagging of these marketing channels, you can view how visits from these channels perform. (Perhaps average page views is a lot less for these marketing channels, prompting you to create more specific landing pages for these channels) Also, with Email marketing correctly tagged, you will be able to see, with Multi-Channel Funnels how Email Marketing ‘fits’ into your Conversion paths.
Brand and Non-Brand Keywords
Segmenting your Non-Brand keywords is always a good idea, it will depict your conversion rate for the more competitive and generic search phrases. Also, you can understand what sort of keyword diversity constitutes to the Non-Brand keyword mix.
Other segments you may want to experiment with include:
Visits that started checkout process;
Store Locator Visits – What Percent of Traffic is looking for your offline stores?;
New vs. Returning Visitors – How do they interact differently; how do conversion rates differ?
With the “new” version of Google Analytics, your custom reports can include Filters, where you can segment your data. In other words, you can extract only the metrics you want, based on specific marketing channels or types of visitors!
The Benefits Of A KPI Dashboard
One of the components of web analytics is ensuring that your web analytics tool is properly setup. Measurement and analysis of accurate data enables you to make effective strategic decisions.
Once you have a web analytics tool setup, you will need an effective dashboard.
Included below are a few notes on dashboards.
Measuring and Reporting:
Defining the KPIs that point towards your business and website goals is extremely important and, by creating a dashboard that contains marketing channel and Site Optimisation KPIs, it will clearly show you how performance is trending. This is something you need to watch closely.
Your KPIs will be dependent on your business objectives and thus will be different from business to business. The key is to ensure that they point towards your business goals and enable you to take action to improve performance.
Some example KPIs might include:
Visitor Conversion Rate
Paid Search Conversion Rate
Checkout Completion Rate
Other KPIs may include “Percentage of High Recency visitors”, where recency is defined as visitors that visited your site within the last 5 days, in this case: the higher the percentage the better. In other cases, like “Home Page Bounce Rate” the key is to keep the percentage as low as possible.
Standardised Reporting – Once you have an effective Dashboard, you are able to view all your critical KPIs at a glance. Perhaps you require a weekly dashboard, a monthly dashboard, or both.
Make faster and smarter decisions – An effective Dashboard will enable you to make quicker decisions. You will clearly know whether the critical few KPIs are trending up or down. If there’s a large performance change for the reporting period, you should investigate why the metric is yielding the performance, and in turn it should give you great insight.
Communication and Accountability – With standardised reporting on one dashboard, internal teams and agencies will be more accountable on measured performance. This will have a direct impact on your bottom line. Setting realistic goals and milestones becomes easier too.
Greater Profits – Once you start entrenching a sound web analytics strategy, you will improve your decision making, which should ultimately have a positive effect on your bottom line. Ensuring you have an effective dashboard to measure the critical KPIs is just the beginning.
My e-commerce data is under reporting
In this post, I would like to highlight three fairly common implementation errors that may cause your e-commerce data to be inaccurate or incomplete.
1. Errors passing e-commerce values into your tracking script.
When passing product names and sales values into the e-commerce script, always ensure you closely follow the strict technical requirements. Some examples: You should never include any currency symbols in the data you pass into the script and always “escape” special characters that will break the JavaScript code. For example: If your product names contain an apostrophe, ensure that they are “escaped” so that the apostrophe within the product name does not “break” the script and avoid the transaction from being successfully captured.
2. You are using different versions of Google Analytics code.
Although this is not a common error, I have experienced this. Most webmasters have migrated to the asynchronous version of Google Analytics code which was released in December 2009. You will also need to update your e-commerce tracking to the asynchronous tracking. Herewith some more information on the e-commerce asynchronous tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingEcommerce.html
3. You are using a different domain name or sub-domain to record the transactions.
Although you may be successfully tracking sales, if you do not correctly implement cross domain tracking, you will lose the original traffic source that provided the sale. Ensuring end to end tracking is critical for measuring and optimising marketing campaigns. Herewith some more information on Google Analytics multiple domain tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html
There may also be other reasons for not successfully recording all transactions. It is always good to check what percent of transactions is being tracked in Google Analytics against your actual number of transactions.
If there is a significant difference between the recorded conversions in Google Analytics and your actual number of conversions, we highly recommend doing some end to end testing to ensure your Google Analytics implementation is correctly setup. For some simple debugging, we recommend the Google Chrome extension, debug.js which can be found here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jnkmfdileelhofjcijamephohjechhna
