I have an easy job for you. I’m in the market for a new 55″ LED TV and I need your help to find the best one that is local to me. Sears and Best Buy are right down the street, but I have ordered a TV from B&H Photo Video before – mind checking that one too? I need:
- Price
- Soonest Availability
- Best Ratings
Did you find one for me yet? No! What do you mean you didn’t look? You just kept reading? Okay – fine, I’ll tell you who this exercise is really for: your staff or your HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person with the biggest Opinion). You’re on DealerRefresh so you already know this stuff.
When you were searching for my TV did you go to BestBuy.com and ogle at the homepage? Ooooo that’s a pretty button. Wooooow look at that slideshow of specials. Maybe they had something up there that caught your attention, but chances are your mission had nothing to do with that homepage. Your mission started in the navigation at the top – you were looking for my 55″ LED TV and nothing else was going to deter you from finding it FIRST.
Logically, when building a website, it makes a lot of sense to start with the homepage and work your way into it from there. I get that, but…. Why not start with the navigation? The header? Extra buttons and conversion points on the internal pages? What do phone numbers look like and where are they? Should the homepage be the last thing you put together?
If you want to start living life by the numbers here are some measurements you can use to see which parts of your website are the most valuable:
Rank your pages by form submissions
Simply go into your website’s analytics and find the report on form submissions (a.k.a. Internet Leads) and sort your pages based on the number of leads submitted. Got a page that isn’t performing as well as you’d like? How many views did it get? Which brings me to the next one….
Per Page Conversion Rate
On that same form conversion report there should also be a “Visits” or “Views” column. You simply divide the number of forms submitted by the visits or views.
Forms Submissions (Leads) ÷ Views = Conversion Rate
What is a good conversion rate? As with all Internet metrics it is all subjective to the analytics tool used and too many other factors, so calculate your own average and start by paying attention to the pages that are below average. Be sure to look at the pages that are above average to see what’s going on there.
Time spent on Homepage
Look at the time spent on only your Index page in analytics. Factor out the bounce rate if your phone numbers are on it or if you have a SEO guru on the payroll. You want to factor out the bounce rate because your homepage phone numbers might be all that customer is looking for (and you’re tracking those differently) and if you have a SEO guru pointing 5 million links at you you’re going to get a lot more unwanted traffic that bounces. Read this about True Time on Page.
Take your bounce rate and subtract it from 100% to get the percentage of visits that didn’t bounce. Multiply that percentage with your Average Time on Page to get your “True” Time on Page without bounces (hopefully I put that into usable English).
What is a good metric? This depends on whether your home page is severely action-packed, opens links in new windows, is sitting on dealership computers all day everyday, you hired a SEO consultant, or is just insanely confusing. You’ll have to be the judge of that.
P.S. If you export your analytics to Excel you’ll want to use this at the end of your cell that have times in them: /60/24/60 and then format the cell to show time as hh:mm:ss to get your times in English. Or you can borrow my Excel calculation =(((1/(E2-1)*-1))*D2/60/24/60) that should work when you export specifically from Google Analytics.
