If you want to know how to make your website convert more, you need to dive into your data.
Step One – Determine What Each Visitor To Your Website is Worth
Its difficult to know if your website is producing the results you want, if you are not looking at the data.
(Would you rather watch Randy explain this on YouTube? Click here! )
Before you look at the data, you need to find out what each visitor to your website is worth to you. That way you are informed about whether investing in ads on Google, Facebook, or somewhere else is a good idea. And if it is a good idea to place ads, you can clearly see the value of each new visitor to your site and decide how much you are willing to pay to attract more visitors each month.
Knowing what each visitor is worth helps you get started and fine tune what you are doing online.
A good website should be designed for the single purpose of producing more for your company.
- More clients
- More sales online
- More contacts
- More people contacting the business
- More awareness about the business
You’d be surprised by how many businesses don’t know if their website is producing more of anything!
First and Foremost – Make Sure You Have Google Analytics Set Up On Your Site
Before you can determine what a visitor is worth, you need to know how many visitors you are getting. And you need Google Analytics set up so you can clearly see how many people are visiting your site each month.
It doesn’t do any good to start playing around with your site, unless you know what your numbers are.
You might be getting phone calls, but you don’t know what percentage of them are coming from your site. You might be getting 5 calls a month and what you don’t know is that you have 2000 people a month that are going to your site. And if you were converting at 1%, you’d would be getting 20 calls. Or 4 times as much as you were getting before. If you’re converting at 3% you would be getting 60 CALLS OR 12 TIMES THE CALLS! Think of the difference this would make in your business!
If you have a brand-new site or a site that has been around for a while and you want to get around to making it better and get it to produce at a much higher rate than you are now.
The very first thing you must do is have Google Analytics on your site, if you don’t have it already.
Google Analytics Can Tell You A Lot About Your Site Visitors
Google Analytics is a program that will tell you a lot of interesting things about your site visitors.
Within the analytics platform, you can find a lot of data about your site visitors.
- How many people are visiting your site each month
- What pages are they looking at on your site
- Where they are coming from. (search engines, links from other sites, etc.)
- What part of the world they are in when they visit your site.
You can see where your audience is coming from, and you can drill down into what country and then what state, and even what cities they are in when they visit.
To help you determine what each visitor is worth, you need to set up Goals within GA.
Goals Are The Gateway To Visitor Value
You want to set up goals in Google Analytics that help you see the value of each visitor interaction.
Here is an example from one of our sites that already has goals set up. Each goal has a different value based on their success in converting visitor interaction into a sale.
Visitor interaction that you can track on Google Analytics:
- When a visitor clicks on your phone number from their mobile device to call you.
- When a form is filled out on your site.
- When someone signs up for a free offer.
- When someone clicks on a coupon.
- How many products did you sell online
- And more…
There are many more types of visitor interaction that Google can track. These are just a few.
An Example Of How Goals Look Inside Google Analytics
In August of this year our client has 20 goal completions. Three of them were from visitors filling out a contact form. Twelve were from mobile phone clicks, and 5 were from visitors signing up for free consultations.
The total goal value for the month is $4900. Google Analytics calculates the goal conversion rate automatically and shows that it is .45%.
What Is The Value Of A New Customer?
To determine the value of a new customer, you’ll need to determine the revenue per customer minus any costs that are involved in servicing that customer, including costs of goods, and cost to service.
Each business is different so each business will have a different new customer value. You may sell custom golf carts and the average price of a golf cart is $7,000 and you net $2000 on each new cart you sell. A new customer is worth $2000 to your business.
This is a simplified example.
Great businesses can drill down their customer values and calculate the lifetime value of their customers. One business we worked with had a weekly class they taught for $15 each week, and the average student showed up 30 weeks a year and the class was still going after 5 years. She calculated the lifetime value of a new student to be about $2,250.
The new student/customer value was $15.
For the purpose of this article let’s say that your business’s New Customer Value is $1000, to keep it simple.
Once you know your new client value, you can get excited about setting up goal values in Google Analytics.
Calculating Goal Values in Google Analytics
So let’s look at how to set up goals and determine how much each visitor interaction with your website is worth.
Let’s say that you’ve tested it with your team and that from 10 new calls you get one new client.
That is 1 of 10 new callers becomes a new client. So that is a 10% sales conversion rate. And you know this because you’ve tracked it over the past few months.
It is easy to see that each new caller from a mobile phone click is worth $100.
You’ve already determined the value of a new customer to be $1000 and the percentage of new callers that turn into customers is 10%, or 1 out of 10.
So the goal value for a phone click is $100.
Here is how it looks on a spreadsheet:
You can apply this to any visitor interaction on your site.
If you have coupons on your site, you can see how many people clicked on the coupon from your site and how many coupons were redeemed at your place of business.
If you are selling something online, you can see how many people went to see the product and how many people bought the product.
What you want to get down to eventually is determining how much each visitor to your website is worth.
Determining How Much Each Visitor Is Worth
Let’s say you have 1000 people visiting your site each month. You know this is true because you can see it on Google Analytics. You also know that 5 people called your business from interacting on your website. That is 5 calls in one month.
Since you’ve already calculated that each new caller is worth $100, and set up the goal value for each new caller at $100, the goal value for phone clicks for the month of August is $500.
One More Step
There is one more step you need to take in order to determine how much each visitor to your site is worth.
We know that you have 1000 visitors a month so your website should be making $500 a month from those 5 phone clicks (visitor interactions).
Then, each site visitor is worth 50 cents.
$500 /1000 visitors = $.50 per visitor. This is a .005% conversion rate. If you can get the conversion rate up to 3%, the value of each visitor is $3.00. At this rate you can easily spend $1.50 to get visitors to your site and make a nice profit.
Expanding How Visitors Interact With Your Site
If you are doing it right, you will have visitors filling out contact forms, asking for free quotes, signing up for specials, and downloading coupons. And let’s not forget about the visitors that buy things from you online.
There will be many ways visitors interact, and many paths to help them convert from visitors to paying customers. You can use this same formula for each customer path.
Two Ways To Help Your Website Convert Higher For Your Business
So how do you make your website to convert higher?
- Increase the amount of traffic to your site.
If you increase the number of visitors to your site, you will increase the amount of sales if all else stays the same. So if your monthly traffic increase from 1000 visitors to 2000 visitors, you’ll go from making $500 a month to $1000 a month.
We will share some tips on increasing website traffic in another post.
- Increase your conversion rate.
If you increase the conversion rate to 2% from 0.5%. You’ll get 20 Calls a month instead of 5. We already determined that each new caller was worth $100. You’ll go from $500 to $2000 a month from phone calls. And each new visitor is worth $2.
We will share more about increasing conversion rates in future posts. For now, know you
This is a quick lesson on how to determine what each visitor to your website is worth and how to determine the value of your goals so you can set up Google Analytics, so you have accurate data each month which is the foundation for increasing the effectiveness of your website.
This is step number one. Do this before anything! Good Luck!
Now It’s Your Turn!
- Check your analytics on Google Analytics.
- Visit our Conversion Calculator to plug in the numbers from your website.
- Watch Randy explain this article in this YouTube Video.
