If you get 1000 site visitors a day and have a conversion rate of 2.00% you are going to get 20 orders each day. Understanding this simple Total Order equation will get you on the road to planning your ecommerce strategy.
Pushing (and monitoring) either of those key numbers is a great place to put your attention and will help you toward meeting your website revenue goals.
Analytics Data is Your Friend
If you don’t know the details of the traffic flowing into your site you are pretty much hunting in the dark. There are quite a few analytics packages out there. Google Analytics is free, easy to install, and quite accurate.
To take the Total Order equation a step further, if you can track and analyze the sources of your site visitors you can get more specific in your approach than just wistfully thinking you would love to have another 250 visitors next week.
Here is the Top Traffic Sources table from Google Analytics for a sample ecommerce site:
Now that you see the breakdown of the sources of traffic you can formulate some intelligent questions and dig deeper into your data.
1. The example site above is getting a high percentage from organic traffic. On your own site, are the search terms driving organic traffic the ones that will result in orders or are you seeing a lot of “soft” traffic from irrelevant searches?
2. Are you already putting a bunch of effort into search optimization or another source like Google Product Feed? If so, are you seeing any measurable changes in the traffic level from that source? Ecommerce sites should really be able to capitalize on Google Product Feed and other comparison shopping engines at this point in time.
3. Do you have a high flow from a particular referral source? In the graphic above, traffic is coming from ecomall.com. Have you checked out the listing on the referring site and made sure that it stands out on the page and goes to the best location on your site? Perhaps, since the one referral source is working for you there are other similar opportunities, either free or paid, that will really help boost your traffic.
4. Is Google organic traffic your first or second source? If not, this could mean you are radically underperforming with your search optimization. If you have a new site, you might need to be a patient, but if your site is more than six months old, you likely want to assess your search optimization efforts and incoming links.
5. Direct traffic is comprised of visitors who directly type your url in the browser, have created a bookmark, or come from some other source that Google can’t recognize the referrer. If you have a high percentage of direct traffic, it is worth considering whether this is coming from offline advertising. If so, we recommend adjusting your ad urls so you can track that traffic more closely. If the offline advertising is generating sales, that is a great piece of information to know as you will want to consider budgeting money for effective advertising venues.
The more specific you can get about looking at your analytics data the more effectively you can decide where to put your efforts and resources for driving more high-quality traffic.
We love to talk analytics. Let us know if you have any insights to offer.
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