Improving Website Conversion 3 – How to Identify Why Your Website is Losing Customers

This is part 3 of an 8 part series on how to improve the conversion rate of your website using a new testing approach to web design, rather than the old way of guesswork and assumptions

In my previous post, I showed you how to use Google Analytics to identify which pages are losing you customers so you know which to focus on first to improve your website’s conversion rate.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing your traffic; however, it doesn’t show you why pages are leaking visitors like a sieve. And when it comes to website design, it’s easy to assume you know what your customers want – but if you don’t ask them how can you really know?

So the next step is to investigate what experience visitors have on your website. This will help you to identify which elements of your website are working, which are broken and which send visitors heading for the door.

Thankfully, through using these tools, it’s a straightforward process to find out:

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg provides you with a ‘heat map’ of your website, showing you where people are clicking, which parts of the pages capture their interest and which don’t. The heat maps also enable you to identify usability problems which might be preventing them from taking further action or progressing through your website.

With Crazy Egg’s ‘Confetti’ tool you can also segment visitors based on referral websites, search terms and other factors, so you can focus your website changes on your most profitable visitors. You can get started with a free trial, so why not get ‘cracking’ (sorry!).

ClickTale

This records every mouse movement, click and keystroke, with videos you can replay to see exactly what your visitors are doing.

Along with heat maps, ClickTale (yes, it’s an affiliate link) provides visual reports that help you to spot any problems or frustrations visitors are encountering. In particular, you can see how people interact with your forms and which questions cause the highest rate of form abandonment.

ClickTale is used by Groupon, Barnes & Noble and Cnet to improve their website conversion rates, and you can request a free personal demo to see its benefits in action for yourself.

Survey Gizmo

Heat maps and usability reports are useful tools, but it also helps to get feedback straight from the horse’s mouth. With Survey Gizmo you can ask your existing customers, fans and followers questions about your website and how it can be improved.

Survey Gizmo’s design wizard makes survey creation a five minute job. You can customize surveys with your own branding and integrate them with Salesforce, Mailchimp and Freshbooks, while real time reporting makes sense of all the data so you can gain valuable nuggets on how you can improve your website’s conversion rate.

You can test drive Survey Gizmo for yourself with a 14 day free trial, and with customers such as Vodafone, Skype and ING you can be assured that Survey Gizmo has pedigree.

4Q

As in the real world, the best time to ask people why they are abandoning your website is just before they leave. This is where 4Q comes in. With 4Q you can ask visitors questions directly on your website.

Key questions you could ask on how you could improve your website’s conversion rate include:

1)      How would you rate your website experience?

2)      Which of the following best describes the purpose of your visit?

3)      Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit?

4)      I) If not, why were you not able to?

Ii) If so, what do you value most about the website?

The customer always knows best

Through using  these website tracking and survey tools, you can create a list of the website issues that are costing you customers. You can then create a list of objections and usability problems to be fixed so you can reduce the numbers leaving and improve your website’s conversion rate.

In the next post I’ll be discussing how to analyse the competition and to listen to what people are saying in social media so you can build a stronger sales appeal on your website.