Golfballs.com’s revenue from customers that come to its web site via Google AdWords has doubled in the past year without any increase in spending. E-commerce director Brandon Hartness attributes the improved performance to rigorous analysis of what happens when an AdWords-referred visitor arrives at the golf equipment retailer’s site.
One of the key metrics Hartness looks at is “bounce rate,” the percentage of visitors who arrive at a landing page from Google AdWords and then leave the site without going to another page. “If a page has a high bounce rate we see if the ad copy needs to be revised, if the landing page is right, that is if the data we’re providing on the page is relevant to what people are searching for, and, third, if we’re having a problem with the pricing of the item.”
Hartness says the Lafayette, LA-based retailer, No. 467 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, also improved conversion rate by using web analytics to test different designs for buttons on its checkout page.
In the original design, all three buttons—checkout, continue shopping, and empty cart—were the same size and color. Testing showed that the conversion rate went up 18% when the checkout button was made larger and colored orange instead of white. “We needed to make our preferred path stand out,” Hartness says.
Hartness says he uses the analytics system, which is from Omniture Inc., constantly to monitor the performance of key web site pages and of advertising campaign. Among the tests on his to-do list is an A/B analysis of whether net revenue would go up or down if shipping rates were raised or lowered.
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