December 22, 2006

OK, we've got a winner!

Truth be told we only had one entry for our Google Analytics Success Stories Holiday contest, but it's really great and very deserving of the $400 gift certificate for a beautiful handcrafted Jewelry Chest.

Dustin Sparks was the lucky one, and did get his gift certificate in time for the holidays. This is being posted after the fact due to a pretty annoying server issue, that is now past us (finally!).

Anyway, here it is, enjoy:

As the CEO of DDA Digital LLC, the Parent company of www.SecretDivorce.com I set out to accomplish the goal of increasing sales/conversion on our site. We have a very solid product and great Search Engine presence; we just weren't getting the sales we believed that they were capable of. In order to increase anything I had to find quickly & accurately identify what was working as well as what was "broken" in order to tune what worked & eliminate what was not accomplishing any of the sites goals.

To do this I had to establish a baseline of data for things like traffic source, homepage abandonment rate, top content, top paths etc. Google Analytics was not only KEY to establishing this baseline it was as easy to install as falling off of a chair.

It only took 2 weeks of data to realize that far too few visitors were reaching a shopping cart/checkout page and the homepage abandonment rate was an embarrassing 73%! Additionally Google Analytics made it easy to identify what pages where getting little to no traffic and eliminate them, what pages to combine & what pages where being viewed the most. The best morsel of data was the finding that the shopping cart was sending less than 1% of visitors through to the invoice page.

From this data, we set 3 immediate goals:

Reduce Homepage Exit Rate
Get the "Buy it Now" option in front of more visitors
Get more visitors to the shopping cart & checkout page
Get better conversions on the shopping cart

Homepage - A

Homepage - B

Using Google's A/B Testing to test 2 new versions of a homepage.

One with a discount coupon well above the fold
And another version that had thumbnails of product shots linked to a "More Info" page

It was clear almost immediately that the coupon got more people past the homepage & into the site. Homepage exit % went from 73% to 23%! Goal #1 accomplished.

Buy it Now in Sidebar

Adding a "Buy it Now" button to the sidebar of all of the top 10 most requested pages got 32% more visitors on the Shopping cart checkout pages.

We noticed that the checkout process was losing more people with each step of the process, so by simply combining a few steps we got more conversions & completed more sales conversions rose from less than 1% to 4% in less than a month. Not to shabby by my standards.

Currently we have setup Google Analytics to track purchases & setup funnels starting on 3 different pages & ending on the invoice page, data is still coming in but we have a clear leader on which funnel performs the best and will use this data to tune out PPC & SEO campaigns.

Worth noting:

2 items we are tracking through Google Analytics

The demographics of our visitors to give us better visibility & control over whee to spend our advertising dollars - this could be huge
Sales from our recently implemented affiliate program

Data for these is too early to report on at this time, but I will say without Google this client would still be making decisions based on emotions NOT data...

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