How to decrease bounce rate

Posted by Rydal on February 23, 2012 — Comments

As a online business owner, one of the worst metrics that you will encounter is your bounce rate. Think of bouncers as window shoppers, they stop by, glance at your store and kept on going – all you get from that is a potential customer who looked at your store and took no action.

The reason for the bounce could be any number of reasons such as misinterpreted information, wrong website, typo, just didn’t click, etc. Anyway, your goal as an online business is to trap those people and navigate them to your goal, as simple as that may sound – its tough! I’ve put together some of the things that you can do to help reduce the bouncers and gain their attention.

Speed Matters

The response time of your website matters at the highest level, nobody wants to wait for your page to load and with the speeds at which our ISP’s can pull and push data, the expected response times have dropped drastically. Jakob Nielsen has written a detail article on website response times, you should read it – a snappy user experience beats a glamorous one. I strongly suggest performing some experimentation on your website and determine its current speed, we recently published an article on how you can track page load times with FoxMetrics. Once you’ve determine the average load times per page, sort them by speed and tackle each page that takes upwards of 6secs or longer to load. Speed it up! Here are some things you can do to speed up those pages.

1. Reduce the number of images
2. Compress images
3. Reduce the number of content on a single page, users hate to scroll too many times
4. Reduce the number of database calls, if you are making multiple calls consider aggregating the result into a single dataset
5. Reduce network chat
6. Place your assets such as javascript, images, css on a different domain

The Message

What are you selling? What do you have the offer? Your website has to be able to convince the user in a single pitch of what you are selling, why you are the best and why the user should consider signing up with you. If you can’t get that much conveyed to the user then he or she is probably going to bounce off or play around and leave later. Your product has to be an instant utility and proves to the user that its going to be useful as quickly as possible.

Credibility & Branding

If you are able to successfully complete the above, your next steps are to show your users that you are credible and you are not in the business to rip them off. There are several ways you can do this which includes but are not limited to contact forms, phone numbers, forums with active moderators, a blog, logos of partners and etc..

Clear Navigation

People are looking for stuff and they really do hate drilling through your non-organized pages to find what they want, so provide them with a clear path to what they are looking for and close the deal.

Relevant Content

Yes, provide relevant content and relevant only to your product, having content that has nothing to do with what you are selling is simply a way for your users to exit, you need to show them that you are the master of your domain.

Avoid External Links

Yes, we do want to share the link juice and provide a means to credit people for their work, however, there is a great chance that an outbound link to another site that has a lower bounce rate will capture your potential customer and they will not return. So, its imperative that you think before sending your users off to another website, work on reducing your outbound links especially on your landing pages or home page.

Offer subscriptions

Maybe the user is not ready to commit now, it could be that they are just reviewing all their choices, so if they don’t want to sign up now, you should work hard in collecting as much data about them (newsletters, rss feed) so that you can contact them later with say a promotional offer or a pitch.

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Successful E-Commerce Website’s Attributes

Posted by Rydal on January 19, 2012 — Comments

In spite of today’s failing economy, online sales have grown up, according to MasterCard reports. With the inevitable shopping season, these sales will continue increasing further. As the Internet persists to grow and expand, more and more companies are determining and taking advantage of the e-commerce possibilities to reach out to broader audiences globally. This seems to be promising and is ready to improve sales for leading businesses that make use of online e-commerce solutions. Anyway, it is important to remember that successful e-commerce websites possess certain common characteristics.

Here are certain characteristics that we’ve found at successful e-commerce sites around the world:

· Appropriately Set Goals

Each page of your e-commerce website has to have a purpose. Most people consider it an overwhelming condition as they assume their e-commerce website to have thousands pages.

While it is true that a website consists of hundreds to thousands of pages, if you properly implement e-commerce design trends, this is an easy step. Your site virtually has less than a hundred of most significant pages. These can be your product pages (preferably, those that sell best), review pages, about pages, contact pages, and category pages. With typical design and a general architecture, you will be able to offer your visitors to follow a unique path. In addition, it helps you visualize your site in the ‘hierarchal units’ terms or steps your visitors follow. You may adopt finest practices for one page and then apply them to all the pages.

· Effective Home Pages

It’s true that e-commerce sites, whose visitors land in from domestic pages, predominate those that are only dependent on website home page as its landing page. Nevertheless, the significance of the site’s homepage can’t be underestimated on any resource. In case you overwhelm or confuse your visitors with too many offers and specials and obscure navigation, your e-commerce site will definitely get low conversion rates.

· Web Analytics

Normally, both businesses and SEO practitioners mention web analytics at the end of the list. Although it’s significant to widen your website traffic funnel’s “mouth,” it’s same as significant to introduce corrections, based on your web analytics information, in order to stop your visitors falling out of it. When you look at visitors, like at people, instead of “visits” or “hits,” you will get more understanding of what’s going on. When you realize that the visit data displays the activity of a real-life person on your site, you try to provide more comfort. That’s what the majority of successful e-commerce sites do and you should do the same. You may consider using a tool such as http://foxmetrics.com.

· Maintainability at each point

It may be a simple single-page checkout blank or the variety of the product image display, but attention to details may assist you in selling more with success. There was one interesting case with a shoe company that has ordered an e-commerce website. The buyers of hiking shoes always used to outline the sole and its grip. The developers of the website made sure they asked the customer to add hiking shoe pictures, where their sole is seen plainly, which would help sport and adventure lovers to make a decision to the advantage of purchasing.

· Settle a connection

People love dealing with those, who has their trust. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you pull your slacks up and make friends with each of your site visitors. It’s just impossible. In place, ensure that you give your site visitors every chance to know about you and being able to get in touch with you. What inspired you to begin an e-commerce site, what is your location, are there any storefronts, people that work in your office, some cool pictures of how it’s done.

You will improve your visitors’ confidence levels by providing your e-commerce site a warm, personal touch.

In few words, detailed planning and perfect implementation are only possible, when you accurately stress out each phase of your e-commerce web development process. e-commerce site owners have to think about their website again and again to make alterations based on proper info through the web analytics tools they could employ.

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Taming the Web Analytics Cerberus

Posted by Rydal on January 17, 2012 — Comments

Taming the Web Analytics Cerberus Head by Head

Most people today consider web analytics as a sort of bipolar disorder, a continuous fight for finding the balance between two similar entities: IT and marketing.

However, if we take a deeper look, we’ll notice that there’s more to it, than just a bipolar disorder. FoxMetrics is going to help you out in taming this three-headed Cerberus in this article.

Head #1. Business: Keep Business in Your Mind

Doing analytics, if it is not going to bring practical insights is not too valuable. In this case, it would be something similar to doing a report. Analytics should always begin with an accurate comprehension of the business objectives and strategies that are thought of as demands, preferentially defined as Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) online goals. In a properly experienced organization, these requirements would come right from the business shareholders. However, most often the truth is you require a business analyst to communicate and connect business considerations to something an analyst could cope with.

Head #2. Technology: Comprehend the Method

For the majority of marketing people, this is just the “I” and “T” letters joined together, frequently referred to with a slightly deigning tone. You should have someone understanding the abilities and restrictions of the technologies involved in the process. Whether it’s CSS, HTML, JavaScript or comprehending how social media differ from one another, how to measure Facebook apps, comprehending the differences between Android, iPad, and iPhone mobile devices, and so on.

You require people, who have the website’s ins and outs, its technological properties, how it interacts with visitors and how the information placement and page naming systematic will affect data collection and SEO. You require people, who are skilled in equipping the website with the needed tools and measuring how the data is stored and could be benefited from. As you can see, this is an essential factor that can quickly become very complicated. In the end, the main goal is to supply the tools, the means, and the data to Cerberus’s third head.

Head #3. Analysis: Add a Little of That Detective Nature

This is where we confront statistics, where it’s time to turn on the analytical centers of your brain to determine trends, patterns, and comprehend interconnections. An investigative head, problem-solving strategies, and capabilities to summarize information to their most efficient communicative forms are critical. The result is clear and simple: to supply practical interpretation and recommendations to our Cerberus’s Business head.

It’s Time to Tame Our “Cerby”

No one can assert to be completely skilled in all three parts, so the significance of a multisided team is as clear as day. Every analyst is strong at one part, in best case – two, but the third is always the weakest spot. However, all three parts are important for successful provision of the highest benefit. Also, don’t forget about services, like FoxMetrics that will always come handy in handling your web analytics issues and turning that scary three-headed Cerberus into faithful, good boy Cerby.

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15% Growth in U.S E-Commerce spending during the holidays

Posted by Rydal on December 28, 2011 — Comments

I find it very fascinating that there is such an increase in E-commerce spending regardless of the economy – it shows that we as humans are built to adapt and we do so very quickly and naturally. comScore, a leader in measuring the online world reported that the first 20 days of November 2011 was 14% up from 2010 – Amazing!

As always, free shipping is the most important incentive, comScore shows 76% of online consumers made it clear that free shipping is very important, so much so that 47% of them stated that they will abandon if free shipping is not included once they got to checkout.

Read more of the press release here.

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Amazon SES: Is for everyone!

Posted by Rydal on January 26, 2011 — Comments

Amazon's Simple Email Service is not for small businesses.

I completely disagree with that statement that Amazon SES is not for small business. If you care more about all the fluffy stuff that goes with campaign emails then yes, otherwise, its perfect.

Our product FoxMetrics – a real time web analytics tool has a very vital feature, custom alerts! We send a lot of emails out when one or more of those alerts get triggered per website, We are currently using another vendor that charges 3x (still cheap) as much for the same amount of emails sent as Amazon would charge, I've already signed up for Amazon SES and I'll be implementing it this weekend in our test environment to see if it truly stands up to its name and I have no doubt that it will.

Since we are already using most of their products - its a no brainer. They’ve proven to be nothing but the best, most small businesses like us just want to send emails without the hassle, campaign monitor, constant contact, etc. come into play when you want more hand holding, templates,tracking, reports and more but if you are just sending emails - its perfect for small businesses and the cost is unbeatable.

Our email templates are design and host locally and are very simple, most of our emails are straight forward POT, plain old text. It's also a viable product for someone to build a viable business with – say a business to compete with constant contact or campaign monitor or whatever you may have – either way, it will be a blast because you simply just develop the UI and business rules and you are off on your way. Let someone else handle the email load. I won't be surprised if some of these existing companies start using Amazon SES to send emails.

All I’m trying to say is, Amazon has proven to launch products that are for the masses(small, medium or large) and scale to infinity. You can use Amazon Web Services regardless of your business size.

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