I often see posts on forums asking “What’s the average clickthrough rate for banner ads?”, “What open rate should my emails get?” . This is human nature - wanting to judge yourself by how others perform. Or wanting to get a ‘benchmark guide’ to give yourself the belief that something is possible. It feels comfortable to reach for something ‘normal’…
If you’ve ever made regular, site-wide improvements to a website you’ve probably come across the problem of trying to please all of your visitors all of the time. You fix something because a couple of loyal buyers complain about it, then you notice your ‘new customers’ number is dropping. You simplify the cart to try and fix that, and suddenly your loyal buyers are complaining again. You look at your sales numbers & everything looks fine. Where did you go wrong? Are all of your ‘loyal’ customers unhappy, or is it just a few shouty complainers?
After a while this causes problems & slowdowns on new projects:
So what do you do?
Keep Reading this entry –»
Calculating the ROI (return on investment) of a campaign tells you whether it made sense to do it &, more importantly, whether it makes sense to continue. If you’re running several campaigns (or, for example, advertising on several sites) it can also tell you where to place your marketing budget.
ROI is best calculated by looking at the profit you’ve made from a marketing campaign (or channel) vs the total amount you spent on that campaign/channel. (you can get more complicated by factoring in the costs of having money tied up, etc, but for now we will keep things simple)…
The simplest short-term way to improve any ecommerce website is to figure out where the problems are & remove them one by one. The obvious paradox is: If you knew where the problems were, you’d have fixed them already. So how do you find those problems? Where are you letting customers down?
Here’s a very simple way to find problems & track your improvement over time…
Keep Reading this entry –»
If your website includes any kind of buying mechanism, you’ve probably thought a little bit about ‘abandonment’. ‘Abandonment’ (sometimes called ‘an abandoned cart’) is when a potential buyer leaves your site without completing a transaction: ie. they added something to their basket, but they didn’t check out.
One way of looking at a basic e-commerce sale is to break it down into four steps:
If a potential customer ‘abandons’ on your site, it means you’ve managed to get them past steps 1, 2 & 3: You’ve found a visitor who is happy with your product & comfortable enough on your site to think seriously about making a purchase.
When, between stages 3 & 4, your visitor decides not to buy, one of two things could have happened:
There will always be abandonments caused by the first group of visitors & that is nothing to worry about. But, if you can figure out what happened (or didn’t happen) to cause the second group of visitors to give up, you could gain extra sales & therefore make more money.
Here’s a simple four-step plan to tackle abandonment on your site:
Occasionally when you look back through your website stats, you wonder “what did we do on that date that made our sales figures jump so much?” You may then spend the next hour or so digging through old emails & logs to try and work out what change you made that increased your sales/visitor numbers/page views (or - much worse - what you did that reduced your sales!)
There’s a really simple way to solve this problem. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up & will pay off for as long as your website exists (possibly longer):
It’s as simple as it sounds - set up a log (maybe in excel, maybe in a textfile, perhaps just in a mail folder) where you record every change you make to your website that may affect your results. Here’s a very basic example:
Using that, in 6 months time when you’re looking at your web analytics tool & you see that your overall sales conversion jumped 2% on the 11th of March, you can refer to that log & see “ahh, we made the ‘buy now’ button larger”.
5 or 6 years ago you’d often read newspaper articles quoting how many ‘hits’ a website got. This was one of the first web metrics that crept into the public conscious & it still sits firmly in there. You can sit in a meeting with someone who’s been working on the web for 10 years & still hear them use the word ‘hits’. You can speak to someone who owns & runs a successful web business, and it still won’t surprise you to hear the word ‘hits’. Yet today, the word is totally meaningless.
Originally, hits were ‘hits’ to the server: every time a file was requested from a server this was described as a ‘hit’. If you ran a website back in those days, you’ll remember that webpages were just a single file: there were no associated images, external javascript files, cascading stylesheets, etc. Alongside that, one webpage was usually a solid piece of information. Every page had its own topic, like a wikipedia page today.
In those days, it made sense to count those ‘hits’ to the server. As a ‘hit’ was more-or-less equivalent to ‘one person reading one chunk of information’ on your website.
Today, every webpage you download will include extra files (images, flash content, videos, css includes, javascript includes, favicons, robots.txt). Technically, each time any of those files is downloaded, that’s 1 ‘hit’ to your server. On top of that, today, webpages are no longer substantial chunks of information: a blog frontpage might include 20 chunks of information; a search results page might contain several chunks of information, or none at all.
What that means is, today a ‘hit’ is no longer anything like ‘one person reading one chunk of information’ on your website. Depending on the specific page (or pages if your info is split over 2 or 3), that could be 50 hits or 100 hits, or 17 hits, or any other number. It means that today a ‘hit’ is just a meaningless term
Technically, yes. But, making that even worse, because ‘hits’ was one of the first web metrics to slip into the public conscious (before most had a firm grasp over how the web worked), many people will use the word & mean totally different things. When someone says the word ‘hits’ to you they may mean any of the following:
Unless you ask them to qualify the term, there’s no way to know what they really mean. It’s ambiguous, it means different things to different people, it risks misunderstanding - all of which are great reasons to say what you really mean & stop using the word ‘hits’.
One very common measure of website success is traffic: Greater traffic equals greater success. You can see just how common this idea is when you think of some of the more widely quoted web metrics:
Yet, unless you’ve already done so, putting some work into your website’s ‘conversion rate’ (its ability to turn a visitor into a customer) is usually more rewarding. Here’s a quick example that proves the point:
As you can see, with 500 visitors & a 3% conversion rate, a site can be much better off than one that gets 1000 visitors & only converts 1% of those into customers.
Conversion rate doesn’t have to be visitors:orders, here are a few other ideas:
What’s your current overall site conversion rate? Are you tracking it individually for key pages? Are you tracking it over time?
Whether you’re already using web analytics, or you’re just about to start delving into it, there’s one key thing you should know to hugely increase your chances of success.
You won’t find many successful companies or website owners who don’t keep an eye on their stats. Having worked with a few of these companies, and talked to a lot of website owners I think the difference between success & failure with Web Analytics boils down to one ridiculously simple, often overlooked question.
Okay that sounds overly simplistic, but it’s a question that’s often totally forgotten about: Somebody came up with the idea that you needed a website. Maybe that somebody was you &, either at the time you first put it together, or in between that time and now, the central purpose of the website has lost focus & you’ve drifted into a routine. Or, perhaps, you do know what the website is supposed to do, but that goal is a list of 50 different things swimming around in your head.
This ’success’ could be a single goal at a Macro level (eg: “Earn Enough To Pay Off The Mortgage”), or it could be a series of goals at Micro levels (eg: “Double Our Google Traffic”, “Make 30 Affiliate Sales Each Day”), or anything in between. But, unless you have these clear goals, you have nothing to shoot at and, thus, the numbers you’re looking at in your analytics tool won’t move you any closer.
Each of those is a fairly simple thing to aim for but, without deciding that that is what you’re aiming for, your web analytics is more or less useless: you just flounder about checking to see how many page views you had on monday, or how many visitors you had from Venezuela.
Once you have those goals in mind, you can stop wasting time looking at meaningless numbers & focus your web analytics work on the numbers that really are going to move you closer to actual success.
Email response rates vary wildly: Every email campaign & list is different. For one list, a 10% open rate be a great success, for another, a 50% clickthrough rate might be considered a failure. So it’s difficult to make generalisations about what kind of rates are ‘good’.
On top of that, it’s unlikely your competitors will want to share their email metric data with you. So how do you get a picture of where you stand?
MailChimp has just very kindly released a statistical analysis of 3-million emails sent out by their customers. Split across a couple of dozen verticals (from Advertising, through Legal Services, to Web Design), it shows Open, Click, Soft Bounce, Hard Bounce, Complaint & Unsubscribe rates for each vertical.
The average results across all verticals come out as:
How do your emails compare with that average? How do you compare against your vertical?
