What do visitors do when they visit your website. Where do they go? Do they start an applicaton form or register for something right away? How much time do visitors spend on your website? Do they come back often?
These are all stories that an analytics system can tell you and these are important questions to answer if you want to determine what kinds of content should be on your site.
If people are not registering, or there are small numbers registering you need to ask yourself why that is. It’s one of two reasons.
1. They haven’t found your registration
2. The content isn’t compelling enough to encourage subscriptions
So how do you figure this out?
Well you look for the angle, the hook, the story your analytics system is telling you. Can you understand exactly why? Maybe, maybe not. But what you can do is dig deeper.
Hopefully your analytics system employs a fall out path reporting structure, if it does, this may become your best friend.
You can use thise type of report to determine exactly where in the process people are falling off. Once you have an idea – or several ideas, you can begin determining how to fix it. Is it a particular page – a particular set of questions? Maybe it’s whether something is mandatory (income field for example), or a way a question might be worded.
You can begin testing several different scenarios out and seeing what improves registration rates. In some cases you may see results right away, in other cases it make take time and several different tests before you begin to see an improvement, but again your analytics system will be able to help you compare the previous results to the new results and look not only for improvements, but other changes that might take place as a result of these changes.
That old cliche – Knowing is half the battle – works well here.
Photo Credit: Ulrick / Stock.xchng
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available