Drilling down to buried treasure
There’s potentially lots of buried treasure underground, you just need to know where to dig, right? Well the same can be said for your website. There are most likely lots of revenue that you are leaving untapped every month; you just need to know where to find it. And that’s where data comes in.
What I learned
- More traffic doesn’t always mean more revenue
- You need to know where your site is underperforming
- The secret’s in the data
- Are you taking advantage of mobile?
Transcript
Hey. Welcome back Rankers. I wanted to tell you a little bit more about how we`re going in and discovering revenue for clients. A lot of clients, typically they just think they need more traffic and more traffic will get them the results, based on how the site`s already performing.
Are you looking in the right places?
However, what a lot of clients don`t know is that the sites are under-performing and specifically in little areas and we`re gonna bring in a guide about this on how to look and one of the first things you have to do is get data integrity so you know that you`re actually looking in the right data.
We`ve been talking to one client recently, they only ever see the data inside of their CMS; their incoming CMS. They don`t know necessarily what they`re missing out on because they don`t have their data, and the CMS stats don`t provide it, whereas Google Analytics does.
You`re going to look at things inside Google Analytics, just like the cost for Google Ads and Analytics doesn`t include GST or tax for the most part. Yet it does in the transactional information for revenue. You`ve gotta add all those things up and work out what`s what.
One of the areas often overlooked a lot is still mobile and usually we find that mobile doesn`t convert as well as desktop and there are exceptions to that rule though and this is one. But we`ve just found another area where we can maybe even increase revenue, theoretically, that`s what the numbers tell us, by another 50%. What? I know. Wait!
This site transaction, it`s directed at men. Lots of products, very blokey things and we find sites that are geared toward that demographic tend to have a larger mobile slice of the pie and that`s because, quite often these sites are geared to tools and those sorts of things, where people are out in the shed or they`re mobile, they`re out on the road, whatever else it is and they`re using a mobile device. Now, that doesn`t necessarily translate to meaning that, as I showed you last week, where the majority of the traffic was mobile, but it was way under-performing that of the desktop.
Don’t leave money on the table
This one, the mobile actually transacts a bit better, so what we`re looking at here is … I`ve actually hidden what the channel is, but basically these bottom numbers here, these are mobile numbers and you can see the whole site is transactioning at 0.46, but mobile is transactioning at 0.91. Now that`s still bad, right. Those numbers there are still bad, at that eCommerce conversion rate because you know, under one percent for a retailer, there`s something wrong there. You`re leaving a lot of money on the table and we`ve got a couple of retailers in that, basically book, where they`re under one percent and we need to get them higher and there`s a whole variety of reasons, usually it`s performance, usually it`s user experience.
In this case, it`s not that different because one minute you go down here and you look at this other channel and you can see the relative numbers here of revenue. This is mobile and this is mobile, so we can see in this particular channel, mobile is converting at 5.41%. If I can move just a small portion of these guys into this channel down here, all of a sudden, bang! That is a channel that is getting used or it`s generating traffic because it`s a better experience for the user than the generic site or desktop.
We’re talking about a specific type of user on mobile, where we think we can add at least, maybe more, hoping, maybe, and we`ve got to be able to drive traffic into this area, that`s going to be the tricky bit for us and that`s how we`re going to work out different techniques to do that. You can read a lot of books about conversion rate optimisation and all these other things, but you`ve got to remember, it`s something that evolves. We`re not born using screens. The Web has only been around since the early 90`s and during that time, websites have changed significantly to what I used to use. Now it`s all about with retailers, especially get in, get out, bang! Gone, I`ve transacted. That is pretty much the way we`re using the Web and retailers now and we`re in a fast moving environment. We just want the thing to work and we want the thing to get in and we want it to get out. It never used to be like that.
The trust issues of the 90`s and everything have gone, but now we just need to make sure, you want this product? Here it is! Quick, see ya, bye. That`s it.
Hopefully, that`s helpful and we`ll see you next week. Thanks very much everyone. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
