If only you had a foothold to get over the fence, that’s where your business could be…

You work hard to get the right visitors to your website, but most visitors leave within seconds. Others hang around a bit longer, have a look around, then leave.

Why do they leave? Why don’t they subscribe or buy something? Drives you crazy, doesn’t it?

You can find out what visitors are doing on your site…
There’s three ways to find out, but let’s start at the beginning.

[pull quote] “You can observe a lot by watching.” Yogi Berra

The first thing you need to put in place is visitor tracking. I use Google Analytics, it’s free, easy to setup and gives you some very useful information.

For example, lets say you have a few article pages describing a product or service. What would you do if you knew that the average customer that goes to article A spends $5.42, and the average customer that goes to article B spends $10.56?

Would you analize the two articles? Would you make article B more prominent so it gets read more? Would you write more articles (or maybe even create a product) on the topic in article B?

If you don’t know this kind of information, you’d likely just keep plodding along and missing the opportunity. And that’s just one of many examples.

But the why has to come from a different source…
For all the wonderful information analytics gives you, it can’t tell you why people do what they do and it can’t tell you what’s missing.

The only way to get this information is from real people, from your visitors. And you’ll probably find your visitors happy to help you…assuming you are helping them.

People have questions, that’s why most people are on the web. Give them an easy way to ask questions and you have a never ending source of information, topics and ideas.

Give them an easy way to leave feedback and you have an ongoing source of suggestions for improvement.

Do a simple survey and you’ll probably learn more about your customers than all of your competitors combined.

But sometimes it’s hard to get the real story…
Unfortunately, even the world’s best visitors — like you — can’t answer every question.

People make lots of decisions on the subconcsious level, so asking the conscious mind doesn’t always get the real answer.

Also, sometimes people don’t want to admit the real driver behind a decision to someone else, especially someone they don’t know well.

Worst of all, you can sometimes get input from a visitor who we agree with, but it turns out that visitor only represents a small fraction of the population interested in your product or service.

What you need is distill the input you get from your analytics and customers then play it back to them to get their unbiased response.

That’s where website testing comes in…

With testing, you create multiple versions of your web page and when a visitor arrives, they are randomly selected to see one of the versions you’ve created.

You track how many visitors take your desired action (subscribe, buy, etc.) after viewing each of the various pages you created.

Essentially, you’re “tricking” your users into taking a survey.

But, instead of voting with their opinion, they vote with their money (if they buy) or their actions (if they subscribe).

So you get a real answer, not the “I don’t want to hurt your feelings” kind of response.

Did you notice what we’ve got here?
We start out by observing visitor actions on the website, then we ask our visitors questions, then formulate a hypothisis (they might like this) we run a test.

We’re using the scientific method to improve your website:

1) Define the problem – Not enough visitors are taking our desired action
2) Gather information (observe) – Analytics & visitor input
3) Form a hypothesis – Visitors might respond to a different appeal
4) Perform an experiment – Test new appeal vs. current appeal
5) Analize results – Is new appeal better?
6) Repeat until satisfied

But don’t worry, there’s no bunsen burners, beakers full of acid or fogged up goggles like in science lab at school.

It’s a safe and easy process that anyone can use to turn more visitors into subscribers and customers.

If you’d like to learn more, just signup for my newsletter. I only send out messages when there is something useful to share.

Plus, you can unsubscribe if I start blabbing away too much, so really, you’ve got nothing to loose…and who knows, you might turn lots more of those visitors to turn into new customers.

P.S., You do realize you’re part of an experiment right now, don’t you?  You could also leave some feedback over there to the right, or email me if you have a question. So yea, I practice what I preach!