But we need to keep our data clean.

Unless you’re careful, you can corrupt your Google Analytics data. Your clean tasty data will become dirty not-so-tasty data. Which means you won’t be able to learn anything about your customers.

Here are 5 rules you want to follow to keep your data tasty and delicious:

1. Always test your filters before applying them to your main profile
2. Use virtual pageviews only when you have to
3. Never use campaign URLs for internal marketing
4. Keep yourself from being hacked
5. Only use the goals that you need

You’re about to learn how to follow each of them.

Testing Filters

Filters are powerful. They’re so powerful that they can completely nuke your data if you’re not careful.

Let’s step back and review how Google Analytics collects data:

1. All day long, the Google Analytics servers collect raw data from your site.
2. Once a day, Google Analytics compiles the data.
3. Then it runs your data through your Google Analytics settings. This includes your different profiles, goals, and filters. Using your settings, Google Analytics permanently changes the data to match your instructions.
4. The altered data is what you see in your reports.

Once Google Analytics runs the raw data through your settings, there’s no going back. The raw data is gone forever.

So if you have a filter that tells Google Analytics to take a hike and delete everything, your data goes poof. Adiós data!

Here’s the deal: the difference between a benign filter and a nuke filter is very small.

For example, most sites have a filter that removes company traffic from the reports. This is a great filter to have. After all, your employees behave very differently than your customers. To keep your data as accurate as possible (so you can get the best actionable insights), removing them from your Google Analytics reports makes a lot of sense. Usually, this filter is set up to exclude the range of IP addresses that your company uses.

Instead of telling the filter to exclude traffic, what it you tell it to include traffic from your IP address by accident? Now your Google Analytics reports will kill everything EXCEPT your company traffic. All it takes is one little mis-click and your data is hosed. Since these options are in the same dropdown menu, this mistake is easy to make.

Seriously, there are about 10 pixels between you and certain death. Take a look:

So how do you avoid the filter nuke? Set up Safety Net Profiles. In addition to the main profile that you use for analysis, you need two more Google Analytics profiles:

1. Test Profile: Set up your filters here first. If you nuke your data, it’s no big deal. Make sure it works, then apply the same filter to your main profile.
2. Raw Data Profile: Don’t apply any goals, filters, or anything else. Just let this profile collect data in case of a critical failure with your other profiles.

These safety net profiles are so important that they’re one of the 8 Google Analytics features that every site MUST have enabled.

Overuse of Virtual Pageviews

Using a snippet of JavaScript, we can force Google Analytics to record a pageview whenever we want. This is ideal for tracking PDF downloads. Since the Google Analytics Tracking Code isn’t embedded in a PDF, there’s no way to tell if someone downloaded it.

Instead, we can tell Google Analytics to record a pageview when someone clicks the link to the PDF. We call it a virtual pageview because the page doesn’t actually exist.

But Google Analytics can’t tell the difference between a real pageview and a virtual one. Data from virtual pageviews gets merged into the rest of your metrics. If you track a few PDF downloads, this isn’t a big deal. The extra pageviews aren’t enough to throw anything off.

Let’s say we want to track the amount of time someone watches a product demo video. We’ve set up everything so that every 5 seconds, a virtual pageview gets recorded. We’ve named all the virtual pageviews differently so we can see how far people get into the video before they abandon it.

If the video gets a sizable amount of traffic, you could receive thousands upon thousands of extra pageviews. This will skew a huge portion of your data.

So be careful with virtual pageviews and make sure you don’t use them excessively.

I recommend using them in two instances:

1. To track downloads or any other action that represents a “pageview” that Google Analytics can’t track.
2. You can set up events as goals. But you can’t use them with goal funnels. So if you have an event you’d like to use in a funnel, use a virtual pageview instead. Check out our guide on the 4 Critical Goal Types That Are Critical To Your Business for all the details.

Using Internal Campaign URLs

So you have a banner or call to action on your site. But you don’t sell advertising space, you’re trying to market your own products to your visitors. Many people assume that they can use a campaign URL with UTM parameters to track their internal marketing.

This is a very bad idea.

Every time someone clicks a campaign URL, Google Analytics starts them off on a new visit.

Normally, if I come to your site from an organic Google search, everything I do on your site is tracked under the same visit. But as soon as I click on your internal campaign, my visit gets split into two different ones.

Traffic data will then become completely corrupted. Your visits, pages/visit, time on site, bounce rates, exit rates, and just about everything else gets thrown out of whack. You won’t be able to trust your data at all.

Conversion rates for traffic course also get corrupted. Google Analytics attributes conversions to the most recent traffic source. The only exception is direct visits, those conversions get passed to the traffic source before the last visit (if there is one).

But when you use internal campaigns, Google Analytics will give them the credit for the conversion. It will be much more difficult for you to figure out where your profitable traffic is coming from.

Instead, choose one of these options to track your internal campaigns.

Event Tracking

With events, you can track just about any action that you want. But you’ll need to pass some data to Google Analytics with a snippet of JavaScript.

This data gets passed into your event reports where you see the conversion rates for all your events.

So if you have a bunch of different calls to action throughout your site, give them events, then see which ones encourage your visits to convert.

For in-depth instructions on how to set all this up, go to the Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide.

Virtual Pageviews

As we’ve already covered, we can force a pageview into Google Analytics whenever we want. But be careful with these. If you start tracking too many virtual pageviews, the data can get out of control and you’ll have a terrible time figuring out what’s going on with your site.

If your internal marketing points to another page on your site that’s already being tracked by Google Analytics, you should use events instead of virtual pageviews.

But feel free to use them if you’re going to set up a goal funnel. To set up a funnel report that includes your internal marketing, you’ll need to use a virtual pageview. Events can’t be added to funnels.

Site Search

With a little ingenuity, we can hijack the Google Analytics site search and force it to track our internal campaigns.

It involves 3 basic steps:

1. Create 1 or 2 custom utm parameters (this isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds)
2. Add the custom utm parameters to your internal links
3. Tell site search to track these utm parameters instead of the site search parameters (it’ll never know the difference)

All of your data will then pop up in your site search reports. It’s that easy.

Since this will completely monopolize the site search, you’ll want to set this up on a separate profile.

Here’s what the Site Search Overview report looks like:

After you hijack it, mentally replace every instance of “Site Search” with “Internal Campaign.” You’ll have all sort of delicious data to play with.

Justin Cutroni has a complete guide on how this works. If you want to go this route, definitely give it a read.

Custom Variables

Custom variables are not for the meek and tidy. This is big dog territory. I would only go this route if you’ve already played around with custom variables and have a firm grasp for how they work. Events, virtual pageviews, and hijacking the site search are all much easier to implement.

If you want to dive down this rabbit hole, start with Google’s custom variables guide.

Getting Hacked

Yes, your Google Analytics account can be hacked. You see, you have complete control over where your site data goes. As long as you know the Property ID of an account, you can send your data to any Google Analytics account out there.

And it’s very easy to find the Property ID of any site. All you have to do is view the page source of the website. Once you have someone’s Property ID, you can send all of your site data to their Google Analytics reports. This will corrupt everything.

It can also happen to your reports. If someone does it to you, you won’t be able to tell what’s going on with your site. Every drop of value from your analytics will go whooshing out the door.

Does this actually happen? It sure does. I know this is shocking but there are evil people on the internet.

But there’s good news.

You can set up a filter to protect yourself from being hacked. It will completely protect you. To get step-by-step instructions for how to set it up, check out our blog post on How to Protect Your Google Analytics From Being Hacked.

Excessive Use of Goals

I’ve left this one for last because it’s not nearly as nefarious as the others.

Throughout your reports, you will see aggregate conversion rates that include ALL of your goals. If you’re diligent, you can segment your reports and make sure you see the conversion rate for critical goals like purchases, account signups, and form submissions

But this adds another step. When it comes to analytics, you want to make it as easy as possible for yourself to pull out valuable insights that help you take action. The further you bury your numbers, the harder it will be to do this. If you keep your goals clean and only focus on tracking items that directly help your bottom line, you’ll instantly see what’s working and what’s not.

There are two goals in particular that the vast majority of sites should avoid activating:

• Visit Duration
• Pages/Visit

These goals won’t tell you anything useful, they’ll just inflate your conversion metrics. You’ll either waste your time trying to get to the real numbers or you’ll come to the wrong conclusions about how your site performs. Neither option is good.

You should definitely read this post on why it’s important to avoid setting up visit duration and pages/visit goals.

Bottom Line

Now that you know the pitfalls that will corrupt your data, take care when dealing with them. You must be vigilant!

Specifically, make sure you:

1. Avoid applying filters without testing them first
2. Don’t use too many virtual pageviews
3. Avoid using campaign URLs to track internal campaigns
4. Protect yourself so you can’t get hacked
5. Be careful with goals that you don’t need

If you follow these steps, your Google Analytics data will be rock solid. You’ll be able to dive into your reports with reckless abandon, gaining valuable insights at every turn. And that’s what it’s all about.

Keep your data clean and it’ll be much easier to figure out how to grow your business.

How do you keep your Google Analytics data clean? Tell us in the comments!

About the Author: Lars Lofgren is the KISSmetrics Marketing Analyst and has his Google Analytics Individual Qualification (he’s certified). Learn how to grow your business at his marketing blog or follow him on Twitter @larslofgren.

Gamification is the concept of using game design elements in non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. And it’s growing – M2 research predicts that the gamification market will reach 2.8 billion in direct spending by 2016.

And look at the Google Trends graph:

This thing is hot.

Why? Well, people like games. As much as 77 per cent of U.S. households own videogames, with the average age of gamers at 37.

If you take what people love about games and apply it to other things, they become more enjoyable and fun.

How Gamification Works

Gamification works by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors, by showing a path to mastery, and by taking advantage of our human psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.

Smart marketers use it to increase consumer engagement and influence consumer behavior. In order to achieve this, consumers should be rewarded with virtual items (like points) for specific behavior (e.g. buying something, signing up, using the product, filling out their profile), and those virtual items should offer access to exclusive privileges and rewards, such as levels or prizes.

The Secret Sauce: Game-Like Mechanics

Game mechanics are constructs of rules intended to produce an enjoyable gameplay. Think of it as basic building blocks that can be combined in interesting ways to drive a (often complex) sequence of actions in order to achieve desired results.

These typically include items such as points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and the possibility to level up. These come from game-like dynamics such as rewards, urgency, pride, competition, and status-building.

I’d like to point out that gamification is not games. Games are often much more complex than the simplifications that are abound. Critics make a point that games ≠ points and what is often called gamification should be called pointsification instead.

If fun were about just “rewards”, this would be the best game ever:

Gamification is also not about game-like wording. It’s not enough to call filling your email newsletter subscription form an “unlocking the treasure” and following you in Twitter “a challenge”. For something to be a fun, interesting challenge, it has to be, you know, interesting, fun and a challenge.

While gamification in marketing has become a popular buzzword in the last two years, the practice of using game-like mechanics in marketing programs has been around for a long time. An airline loyalty program or a happy hour in your local bar are just some of the examples.

Gamification Principles

Before you can start thinking about using gamification to grow your business, you need to understand its principles.

At SCVNGR we like to joke that with seven game dynamics you can pretty much get anyone to do anything.

- Seth Priebatsch

The goal of game dynamics is to drive a user-desired behavior predictably. In order to do so we have to understand how humans behave. After all, as per “Gamification by Design” co-author Gabe Zichermann states: “Gamification is 75% Psychology and 25% Technology.”

The technology part keeps getting easier. Application designers can build on gamification platforms from startups like Badgeville, Big Door, and Bunchball without hardcore backend coding.

Fogg Behavior Model

Prof. B.J. Fogg, an experimental psychologist of Stanford University, developed a behavior change model. It says that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability, and trigger. The most important aspect is that all three factors must converge at the same time.

So in a nutshell gamified systems must:

1. Give users motivation to do something (emotional investment, promise of reward, etc.).
2. The ability to complete the action.
3. And finally, a trigger or cue to complete the action.

The structure is all about timing – if all components don’t fire simultaneously then the player will lose interest or become frustrated. Here are some gamification principles you can build into your website and apps.

• Rewards. A reward is something you receive and feel positive about. The feeling positive part is the key ingredient. Consumers should be rewarded with virtual goods (e.g., points) for specific behavior (e.g., purchase, filling out a form), and those virtual items should offer access to exclusive privileges and rewards, such as levels or prizes.
• Loss Aversion. Most people strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. One way to get going with this is to give people something right away that they can lose (unless they keep playing). When you join Zynga’s Farmville, you get a starter farm. If you don’t visit the farm and care for your crops, they wither and die.
• Status, competition and reputation. Most people inherently want a higher status and not only to keep up, but to out-do the Joneses. This is why leaderboards are a good idea. Also, making achievements social encourages people to continually one-up, and stay motivated to reach clear goals. To learn more about designing reputation systems, check out this presentation.
• Feedback. Feedback tells users that their intended action was registered, and shows the outcomes of that action. Seeing points accumulate as actions are taken establishes a clear and instant reward system. It’s also an immediate indication that the user is getting closer to their goal. Continually accomplishing small goals in order to reach a larger goal is often what makes games addictive.

You can see a list of 47 game mechanics used by SCVNGR here.

So How Does Gamification Increase Engagement?

To sum up the psychology behind it, game dynamics use positive feedbacks (points, badges, status, progression, etc.) to build up the users’ motivation.

Next, they increase the perceived ability of users by making difficult tasks / challenges simpler either through practice or by lowering the activation threshold of the target behavior.

Game dynamics place triggers in the path of motivated users when they feel the greatest excess in their ability. That is, triggers that prompt the user for action are designed to bring about the convergence of motivation, ability, and trigger all at the same moment.

All of this together forms an effective driver of user behavior.

Gamification Can Boost Conversions Up To 7x

Extraco Bank in Texas was able to use gamification to teach their customers about certain benefits the bank has to offer. Ironically, they employed their gamification technique to help ease the pain of the news that free checking was going to go away for certain customers.

Their game had around 4,250 visitors and was able to convert 14% of visitors into a bonus banking account from their free checking account. The usual rate of conversion is less than 2%.

Increase Work Speed And Results By Making Work A Game

55% of Americans said they were interested in working for a company that uses gamification to increase productivity. Here are a few examples of gamification improving the workplace:

OpenText

OpenText made it possible to earn points and badges by sharing information, contributing to discussions, completing assignments, passing tests, or closing deals for their OpenText Pulse product. The results were more than promising: “the IT level of active participation was well above 60% which is significantly higher than the current average in the rest of the company.”

Steward Agency

Stewart Agency wanted to get sales people to collect email addresses when talking to leads. They incentivized this with a competition. They launched contest which awarded salespeople based on how many emails they could collect over the course of a couple months. In less than 2 months they almost doubled the number of emails they had collected over 3 years.

Target

Target launched an initiative to gamify the checkout process in their retail stores.

They started to use a gamified system at checkout stations – scoring the transaction’s speed and accuracy of customer checkouts. The system calculates the cashier’s success rate over multiple transactions. A system of beeps and green lights were built into this system as a way to create positive reinforcement, a similar feeling to that of beating a level or achieving a high score in a game.

This gamification design increased cashier efficiency, lowered checkout times, and increased employee morale.

Engagement Leads To Sign Up

Codacademy doesn’t let people to sign-up for their service, but instead invites them to participate right away. As you complete little assignments, you earn badges, get a pat on your back and enjoy making progress. Users are only later asked to create an account, if they want to save their progress and not lose the work they’ve done so far (using loss aversion).

They reached 1 million users in just 5 months.

Get Employees To Exercise

Gamification is about behavior change. NextJump wanted their employees to work out more, and thus be healthier and save company money.

They installed gyms in its offices, and offered to reward to performers with a cash prize. Still, only 12% of the company’s staff started to workout. Then they retooled the fitness “game” to become a team sport. Leveraging the game themes of tribalism and competition had an astonishing effect on behavior. Today, 70% of NextJump employees exercise regularly.

Higher Quality Survey Answers

Engage Research and GMI found that gamified surveys would produce both higher quantity and quality feedback.

They began by making questions more fun and game-like in nature. The results were instructive: 2-3x as much feedback to the more engaging questions and participants consistently took more time providing their answers.

We explored how rules that we all know from playing games could be adapted to turn questions into puzzles. A question such as “Describe yourself” yielded on average 2.4 descriptive words, with effectively 85% of respondents answering. When that question was changed to present the challenge “Describe yourself in exactly seven words” the descriptors increased to an average of 4.5 and the response rate rose to 98%.

They also included game mechanics like rewards and feedback. Their research showed that almost everyone will respond to game mechanics, and these game-inspired techniques really deliver.

More Pageviews, Higher Ad Revenues

TV show Psych launched an online platform Club Psych and implemented gamified incentives to raise page views by over 130% and return visits by 40%.

The resulting rise in engagement has generated substantial revenue for the company, bringing registered user counts from 400,000 to nearly 3 million since the launch of the gamified version.

Conclusion

Gamification is a powerful tool to boost your business results – either by incorporating it in your marketing and/or product, or by using it to motivate your staff. Quality of execution determines the success.

“Most attempts at gamification currently miss the mark, but successful and sustainable gamification can convert customers into fans, turn work into fun, or make learning a joy. The potential is enormous.”

- Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner

A gamified application must offer a worthwhile experience; otherwise people are not going to use it. At the same time, its success has to be measured.

Sources

Image source for mega point image.

About the Author: Peep Laja runs a conversion marketing agency Markitekt. He shares conversion advice on his blog ConversionXL.

I’m going to show you exactly how to hack Google Analytics. Then I’m going to tell you how to protect yourself.

And as a super secret bonus, I’ll show you how to get the attention of a fellow marketer if you’re applying for a job, trying to close a deal, or just want to show off your Google Analytics chops.

First, let’s dive into how someone can corrupt your data.

How To Corrupt Google Analytics Data

First, we need a quick overview on how the Google Analytics Tracking Code works. Here’s the tracking code:

This code is on every page of your site (at least it’s supposed to be). Each time a page loads, it executes this JavaScript and records a pageview along with other relevant data. Unless you customize the code yourself, it looks exactly the same on every site.

Google Analytics needs a way to keep track of which data comes from which site. To do this, it uses a Property ID (also called a Tracking ID). It’s completely unique to each Google Analytics account. It also gives you complete control of where your data goes.

The red box above shows you where to find this delicious little nugget.

For example, if you want data from multiple sites to go to the same account, use the same Property ID on each. Google Analytics will then track everything as if it’s a single site. Be careful though, I don’t recommend doing this unless you really know what you’re doing. In order to tell what is happening on a specific site, you’ll need to separate your data back out with filters or tell the Google Analytics Tracking Code to send data to multiple accounts. Both options are fairly advanced and not for the faint of heart.

As long as we have the Google Analytics Property ID, we can send data to ANY Google Analytics account we want.

So if someone gets a hold of your Property ID and wants to corrupt your data with their data, it’s very easy to do so.

Corrupting Data: Step-by-Step

Let’s say you REALLY hate me because I ate all your gummy bears. You’re SO angry about not getting your gummy bears that you want to ruin all of my Google Analytics data. I have a site at LarsLofgren.com that’ll be perfect for exacting your vengeance.

First, you’ll go to my site, right click, and choose “view page source.”

This gives you the code for my home page.

Now, you want to find my Google Analytics Tracking Code (where you’ll find my Property ID). To find it, hit control+F or command+F and search for “ga.js”. This is the Google Analytics file that does all the analytics grunt work and will bring you right to my Property ID.

This is what you’ll find:

And BAM, you now have my Property ID which is UA-23929748-1. If you plug this Property ID into any other site, my data will become a mess and I won’t be able to use any of it.

Go to your Google Analytics Tracking Code, trade your Property ID for mine, and the Google Analytics servers will take care of the rest. Your revenge will be complete and I’ll feel appropriately sorry for eating your gummy bears.

Is There a Way to Fix the Data Once it’s Corrupted?

Nope. Google Analytics collects raw data all day. At the end of the day, they run your raw data through filters, goals, and profiles to get the final report. That’s what you see when you log into Google Analytics. Once the data is compiled, there’s no going back. So if two sites are sending data to the same account, there’s no way to separate the data once it’s in your reports.

Your only option is to protect yourself and keep all of your future data clean.

How to Protect Yourself

All you need is a simple filter. It will only include traffic on your domain, protecting yourself from any data corruption when people hijack your Google Analytics Property ID.

To find your filters:

1. Go to your Google Analytics standard reports
2. Click on the “Admin” button in the top right
3. Click on “Filters”
4. Click “+ New Filter”

Then use these settings for your filter:

• Select “Create New filter for Profile”
• Name your filter with something snazzy like “Hacking Defense”
• Select “Custom Filter”
• Select “Include”
• For the Filter Field, select “Hostname”
• If your site is LarsLofgren.com, you would define the filter pattern as “larslofgren\.com” and make sure to include a “\” before any “.”
• Pick “No” for case-sensitive

You’ll get a filter that looks like this:

Hit the save button and you’re all set. Your Google Analytics profile will now be hacker proof.

WARNING: Make sure you test this filter on your Test Profile (One of the 8 Google Analytics Features Every Site MUST Have Enabled). If you don’t set everything up correctly, you could delete all of your data while the filter is active. So apply it to your Test Profile first, make sure everything works, then add it to your main profile.

Including Multiple Domains on Purpose

Some of you will be collecting data from multiple domains intentionally. A common example is merging data from different country domains. Let’s say that I include traffic from LarsLofgren.com and LarsLofgren.co.uk in the same Google Analytics profile. If I use the filter above, I’ll only see traffic on LarsLofgren.com.

With a little regular expression magic, I can include both. Instead of defining the filter pattern as “larslofgren\.com”, I’ll use “larslofgren.com\.com|larslofgren\.co\.uk”. Since the “|” acts as an “and” symbol, this tells Google Analytics to include traffic from both these domains.

All the other settings are exactly the same. My new filter would look like this:

The filter pattern is set to “larslofgren\.com|larslofgren\.co\.uk” even though you can’t quite see it in the screenshot.

Why Would Someone Want to Hack You?

I’ve seen hacking occur for two reasons:

Evildoers Want to Corrupt Your Data: If you pissed the wrong person off, they may want to make your life as miserable as possible. And with a large enough site, they could inject all their traffic data into yours. This will make it impossible for you to learn anything about your customers and traffic.

Spammers Driving Traffic: You’re more likely to see situations where spammers inject data into your reports. Their goal is to perk your curiosity and get you to come to their site, resulting in more traffic for them. I think this is a terribly inefficient for building traffic (even for spammers) but people do it.

How to Hack a Campaign Report and Get Noticed By Other Marketers

This hacking method isn’t nearly as nefarious as the first. While we’re going to inject our own data into someone’s report, we’ll only mess with the campaign data. The rest of their data will remain untouched.

If you’re classy about it, you can get a custom message into someone else’s campaign reports. Say you’re trying to close a client, land a job, or make a connection. This method is perfect for getting the attention of another internet marketer.

Let’s back up for a moment. Google Analytics allows us to track our marketing campaigns by adding UTM parameters to our links. Basically, you define a few variables (the name of your campaign, where the link is located, etc.) and you can see which links drove traffic and conversions to your site. So if you have an email campaign, banner ads, and Facebook ads for a marketing campaign, you can see which ones are actually working.

But there’s nothing stopping me from creating campaign URLs for someone else. All I have to do is create the link, send traffic through it, and I can insert any message I want into someone else’s campaign reports.

Here’s how it works:

1. Confirm that the site is using Google Analytics. Just like the last hacking method, go to their site, view page source, and search for ga.js. All you need to do is confirm that they’re using Google Analytics, you don’t need to grab anything like the Property ID. If the site doesn’t use Google Analytics, this won’t work.

2. Build Your URL. Go to the Google Analytics URL Builder and setup your link. Enter in the homepage of the URL that you’ll be sending traffic to, and then insert a message in the Campaign Name field. The Campaign Name is displayed first in the campaign reports and also comes up in the traffic source reports. By putting your message here, you’ll have the best chance to get noticed. For Campaign Source, put your name so they can easily connect the dots. You’ll also need to fill in the Campaign Medium field since it’s required. Avoid all punctuation and symbols in all fields. Once you’re ready to go, click “Generate URL.”

3. Send Traffic. Place your URL in a location where it will get plenty of clicks. If you have a large email list, blog, or Twitter following, spread the link to your audience. Success depends entirely on the size of the site that you’re sending traffic to. The larger the site, the more traffic you’ll have to pass through the link for it to get noticed.

Once the link is live and your minions have clicked on it, Google Analytics will now report visits from the campaign that you’ve set up. Queue maniacal laughter.

Rapid Fire Recap

Anyone can populate your Google Analytics reports with their own data. Since you can’t separate the data back out, it’ll prevent you from learning anything about your visitors.

To protect yourself, set up a quick filter that only includes data from the domains you want to track. Make sure to apply this filter to your Test Profile first to make sure you set it up correctly.

If you want to get someone’s attention, insert a message into their campaign reports using the Google Analytics URL Builder. Link to a page on their site, add a message to the end of the URL via the UTM parameters, and drive traffic through the link. The more people that use the link, the better the chance you have of someone noticing it.

So set up your filters and protect yourself from Google Analytics evildoers!

Seriously, go set up your filter right now. This is probably the most important filter you’ll set up on your site.

About the Author: Lars Lofgren is the KISSmetrics Marketing Analyst and has his Google Analytics Individual Qualification (he’s certified). Learn how to grow your business at his marketing blog or follow him on Twitter @larslofgren.

In this post I’ll address some of these questions and give some advice for making sure you have an effective Twitter account. But before we begin, and just in case you don’t read anything beyond this point, please always remember this:

It should not be looked at as a place to advertise your products. It should be looked at as a place to have meaningful conversations with people important to your business.

Ok. Are you ready to dive in? Let’s start by selecting a username!

Selecting Your Username

It’s crucial to use your real business name as your Twitter username. If your exact business name is taken, you can try to get something similar. A username that signals your location may be helpful. For example, if your business name is Widgets Inc and the widgetsinc username on Twitter is taken, you can try widgetsinc__ (home state initials).

Hyphens and underscores are always something to avoid, not just in Twitter usernames but also in domain names – it just looks unprofessional.

For example, some companies have multiple Twitter accounts. Zappos is a company that uses multiple Twitter accounts effectively. One is from the CEO, Tony Hsieh. The other is Zappos customer service Twitter account. They both serve different purposes. Hsieh occasionally tweets about the company or anything else he finds interesting. The Twitter Zappos customer service account handles all mentions on Twitter and uses Twitter as a platform to interact with current and prospective customers.

The Dell Outlet Twitter Account is run by Dell and sells refurbished computers. It is a great example of how multiple Twitter accounts can have a profound impact on a business.

Your Bio

In the “bio” section of your Twitter account, you are limited to 160 characters. It’s important to not skim this part, as users with bios and a link have been shown to have more followers than those without. If you cannot explain what your business does in a couple of sentences, you may have to rethink what it is that you’re doing.

So explain what you do in your bio and the benefit of using your service or product. Here are a few I like:

KISSmetrics states that it’s the official account, what they do and what benefit is derived from their software.

Skweal tells the benefits of their service:

Megafood tells of their experience and their exclusive process for their organic vitamins.

Your Twitter bio will likely be the first thing people read about your business (if they haven’t been to your website first). It should not be your slogan. It should state what you do and the benefit of your product or service. Just because you are allowed 160 characters doesn’t mean you have to use all of it. Sometimes the short bios get read the most.

It may be helpful to start with what you do in the first sentence. The second sentence can state the benefit or competitive advantage your business has. For example it could be:

“We sell widgets that make your life better. Low price guarantee, free shipping, money back guarantee & 24/7 customer support.”

Some bigger companies like to tell who tweets for the company. Here are a couple examples:

Ford tells us that there are two people who tweet and leave their initials. In tweets they leave their initials so you know the exact person that you’re talking to:

Starbucks lists the names of employees:

Southwest cleverly tells who their tweets come from:

Take some time on this one and focus on the benefits of your product in the bio. You can always go back and change the bio at any time by going into the settings page in Twitter.

To edit your bio: Start by moving your cursor up towards the top menu of your Twitter account -> Click on the “headshot” icon -> Click on “Settings” -> Then Click on “Profile”. In this area you can edit your bio in the “Bio” text area.

Your Picture

Your profile picture should be your logo. It’s common among almost all brands on Twitter. Twitter does provide you with a default photo, but do not use it. Change it so people can identify your profile picture with your brand.

To edit your picture: Start by moving your cursor up towards the top menu of your Twitter account -> Click on the “headshot” icon -> Click on “Settings” -> Then Click on “Profile”. In this area you can upload or replace your picture.

Since Twitter’s last major update, older photos may have been expanded a bit because of new sizing standards. Our recommendation is to use a larger image (maybe a few hundred pixels wide) and be sure to crop it into square dimensions.

Adding a Background

Like your profile picture, make a background that is unique to your brand. It’s not bad to use the default Twitter background, but it doesn’t help your page stand out.

Here’s the default background:

Dell shows pictures of their employees who run their Twitter page:

Starbucks has coffee:

FedEx gives their customer service number on their Twitter page, signaling that calling them is still the best way to get service:

Cachefly explains their services, gives their street address and their number (though it’s cut off):

Zynga gives their other social media addresses:

Branding: Your Twitter background is really important for your company branding. The best rule of thumb is to keep your Twitter background branded and styled similarly to your website, promotional materials and other online properties. When it comes to branding, consistency is king!

To edit your background: Start by moving your cursor up towards the top menu of your Twitter account -> Click on the “headshot” icon -> Click on “Settings” -> Then Click on “Design”. In this area you can upload or replace your background.

Twitter backgrounds are fixed to the upper right hand corner of your screen. So when you look at a Twitter profile on a large screen, the upper left hand contents of the background will “stick” to the upper left hand area of the screen. It usually takes a bit of tweaking to get your background looking just right. Be sure to view it on multiple screens, and phones so that you are satisfied with your results. Employ the help of your in-house designer or design firm to make it look even better!

Hubspot has a nice guide on how to add your own custom background on Twitter.

Starting on Twitter

You’ve got your username, a great bio, picture & background all set up, so now what? As mentioned, the key to social media is engagement. Be there to engage with people and provide value.

A good place to start is on Twitter search.

The number one rule in social media when you are first starting out is to listen.

Most businesses start off by not listening and go straight into “talking”, promoting and pushing content. And most of those companies get very little use out of social media.

To start off on a good foot, search for keywords in your industry and see what conversations are happening. Listen to what people are saying about your brand; listen to what they’re saying about your industry. If you see a conversation that you can join, then do so. Don’t try to sell a product when you join a conversation, but rather provide value. You can do this by:

• Offering helpful answers (be as unbiased as possible).
• Trying to solve problems that your customers may have.
• Point people in the right direction (say if someone is looking for your returns policy).
• Try to turn upset customers into happy customers.

How do I talk to my customers on Twitter?

Let’s say you do a Twitter search and you see a customer with a complaint. Click on the reply link to begin to help the customer out:

This type of communication is called “mentioning” because chances are both you and the customer are not “following” each other. This conversation will be available for the public to see.

Now, if both you and the customer are following each other, you can have a private conversation by “direct messaging” each other. To do this, go to the customer’s twitter profile page, click on the grey head-shot icon and select “Direct Message”.

Then proceed to help the customer out…

Twitter makes it very easy to help upset customers or those who are having trouble with something. By using Twitter to help out customers, you will have the element of surprise on your side, which can turn unhappy customers (or on the fence customers) into evangelists.

Here are some great stats that you probably want to look at that go over the importance of customer service.

Being a Thought Leader

Aside from using Twitter for customer service, you should also use it to become a thought leader. Thought leaders are where people go to when they want advice on something in your industry. They also go to thought leaders when they’re looking for a product in your industry and often will favor you. It can be difficult to achieve thought leader status and usually takes years, but Twitter is a good place to start.

As you continue to listen to conversations and add your voice, start following people who are in your customer demographic or target audience. Go to your competitor’s Twitter page and see the people that they follow. They’re likely following people similar to them and ones that can be customers, so follow those people. Also check out the people who follow them and see if it’s the type of people in your target audience. You can see who follows a profile by clicking on their “followers” button:

Follow them and often they will follow you back.

In everything you do on Twitter, aim to be a resource. Provide value and talk with users and customers. Be the expert in your industry.

What to Tweet

Tweets are simply status updates, and they are the bread and butter of Twitter. Conversations happen by people tweeting to one another.

As a business, you want to tweet things that are valuable. By tweeting valuable links, quotes or facts, you’re more likely to get retweets, which will help spread your account awareness. The people who will be following you are people who are interested in your company and industry, so make sure the tweets are relevant.

Many companies will post links or quotes. Both of these types of tweets are commonly retweeted. These links will help start conversations as people will give their opinions on the story you posted. Like we mentioned above, reply to these conversations to become relevant to the conversation(s).

How to Keep Your Links Short

Since you can only tweet 140 characters at a time, sometimes it’s beneficial to shorten your links. You can shorten URL’s (links) to track what kind of click through rates you get on your tweets. Two popular services are bitly and Google’s URL shortener. You can also make your own.

We recommend to only shorten links when you have to. For SEO reasons, it’s best to tweet out the original link. This is because, as content is disseminated via your Twitter account, the original links may get picked up elsewhere and get the full benefit of being a backlink.

Use Caution When Promoting

On occasion, you can send a promotional tweet. Be cautious with this though. If it’s done too frequently, people will tune you out. Most people aren’t on Twitter to always hear a salesman, so don’t flood your followers with promotions. Around 20% of your tweets can be offers, coupons or other promotional items. When you do occasionally self-promote, followers are more apt to listen to you because it has the value of being a scarce promotion.

Tweeting Quotes

Don’t underestimate the power of quotes. A good quote that is related to your industry can go a long ways in getting retweets and replies. It doesn’t always have to be about things in your industry, because a good quote can provide value to the reader. Honest Tea is a company that frequently posts quotes that are not related to tea, organic food or the environment. You can always have a mix of both industry related quotes and random quotes.

If you’re having trouble finding industry related quotes, find who the influencers are in your industry. For example, many people in the tech field will post quotes from Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg and others.

Asking for Retweets

It may also be helpful to simply ask for retweets. Saying “Please ReTweet” in your tweets have been shown to get more retweets than “Please RT” or not asking for retweets. Only do this in moderation, as asking for retweets on every tweet will annoy followers.

Finally, keep in mind that most people will look at your most recent tweets if they are unsure to follow you or not. This is why it’s so important to offer relevant content and to not tweet too often.

What Not To Tweet

Avoid tweeting about your mood. This is for both business accounts and personal accounts. Most people do not care if you’re hungry, tired or have a headache. In fact, you’ll often hear from people who don’t join Twitter because “I don’t want to know what people are doing every minute of the day.” When in fact, almost nobody on Twitter does this. If they do, they likely have minimal followers and get little engagement from followers.

Do not tweet your locations. As a marketer on Twitter, it is not your job to tell people where you are or where you’re physically going. Save that for your personal account.

Frequency of Tweets

You may be thinking to yourself: “If one of the goals on twitter is to get retweets, why not just tweet a couple hundred times a day?” Good thinking, but tweeting every 15 minutes may get you less followers. If your tweets are crowding someone’s Twitter stream, they’re likely to unfollow you unless they really like you.

It appears tweeting 10-50 times per day is optimal, with the sweet spot being about 22 tweets a day. Be sure to look at our Science of Social Timing Infographic – it goes over the aspects of social media frequency in detail:

Getting Retweeted

It’s helpful to tweet things that followers are familiar with. It may also be helpful to share the key takeaway from the article in the tweet. Something that gives a fact that will lead into the article. Here’s an example:

This tweet tells a little fact about Klout, which leads into the article. It gets the attention by sharing a little fact.

Here’s another one similar one that doesn’t give the title of the article, but a fact contained in the article:

You should also retweet other people in your industry. This shows that you are listening to other conversations and are actively engaged in the industry.

Tweeting links have been shown to get more retweets. Find interesting stories or articles and tweet them out to your followers. This will require you (or someone on your staff) to read a lot. Don’t skim the article, hope that it’s good and tweet it out.

Other Things to Keep in Mind When Tweeting

Links on Twitter have a “shelf life” of about 3 hours.

In general, the best time of day to tweet is around 5PM. The best days to tweet are days at the end of a work week. You can use a tool like Tweriod to help you optimize your tweet times and understand when it’s most effective for you.

130 character tweets appear to get the best CTR (click-through-rate). In general, the longer the tweet (up to 130 characters), the higher the CTR.

Always be monitoring what people are saying about your company on Twitter. Use the Twitter search function and search for your company to see what people say.

Don’t try to please everybody. With your Twitter account you will likely get spam followers. Tweet things out about your industry and helpful articles. The majority of people who will be following you are ones who are in the same industry, so don’t serve the minority of random followers while also serving the majority. Stick to your target audience and ignore the spam followers. You can always report spam to Twitter.

Add the Tweet button to Your Site

Adding the tweet button to your site can make it easy for visitors of your site to tweet your web page. Here’s an example from KISSmetrics:

Option to tweet at the bottom of the page:

Once that button is clicked, if the user is signed into Twitter, this window will show:

The user can then simply tweet out the KISSmetrics homepage to all of their followers.

The tweet button is not just reserved for your homepage. It can also be added to your company blog.

Adding the tweet button to pages on your site will get you more traffic from Twitter and help spread your blog content. If you have a strong blog following, this is a great way to increase readership and attract valuable SEO backlinks!

Twitter has an easy to use guide to adding the tweet button to your site. Most blogging platforms have plugins that make it easy to add Twitter and other social media buttons to your blog pages.

Reaching Influencers

Try to reach the influencers in your industry. Since you’re in the industry, you undoubtedly know who those people are. Many companies will send these people gifts in hopes that they’ll give a public thank you to the company in the form of a tweet. Some will also send the influencer a message saying that they mentioned them in a blog post. The influencer then may tweet the blog post out to their followers. It doesn’t always work and depends on the type of person the influencer is, so be thoughtful and personable. Don’t send them a clichéd gift. Be creative.

To help you understand how much an influencer one is, you can use Twitter Grader or Klout to see your score and other Klout scores.

Here’s an example of Eli Roth’s Klout score:

Eli’s score is 66, which is pretty good.

You can also use a directory like Listorious to search for some of the top influencers in a select category.

Tools You Can Use

There are a lot of tools available for Twitter. You can automate your tweets to go out at certain times of day, you can manage multiple accounts from one page and more. Check out Neil Patel’s favorite Twitter tools to help you find the best ones.

Here’s a list of articles we have created that go over different Twitter tools for different purposes:

• 6 Tools to Learn More About Your Twitter Engagement
• 10 Great Twitter Tools To Transform Your Tweeting Experience
• 10 Twitter Tools Used by Social Media Experts

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide will get you well on your way to being a Twitter power user. When you’re ready to learn more about Twitter, check out these other articles that are full of hidden gems:

• What Can You Learn from These 6 Companies That Thrive On Twitter?
• 20 Days to a High-Quality, Highly-Engaged Twitter Following (in just 20 minutes a day)
• The Hidden Guide to Using Twitter Effectively
• 5 Tips To Make Your Startup’s Twitter Account Stand Out
• The Marketer’s Guide to Twitter
• 7 Sneaky Ways to Use Twitter to Spy on Your Competition

Twitter will require an investment of time. However, when done correctly, it can have an extraordinarily positive effect on your business. What has worked for you on Twitter? Any tips you can share? Let us know in the comments!

About the Authors:

Zach Bulygo is a guest blogger for KISSmetrics, you can find him on Twitter here.

Sean Work is the Director of Marketing at KISSmetrics. Follow him on Twitter @seanvwork.

Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong.

Not all data is helpful. Some of it is worse than worthless because it tricks us into believing we have answers when we don’t. But when you focus on data that helps you make decisions, everything else in your business gets easier.

How to Tell if Your Data Matters

It all comes down to one thing: does the metric help you make decisions? When you see the metric, do you know what you need to do?

If you don’t, you’re probably looking at a vanity metric.

Vanity metrics are all those data points that make us feel good if they go up but don’t help us make decisions. Let’s say your visits look like the graph below. What should you do to help grow your business?

There’s no way to know. Traffic spikes twice towards the end of the graph but what does that mean? Absolutely nothing. Maybe some blogger mentioned the site. Or maybe a blog post went viral. The marketing campaigns could be driving the traffic. We have no idea. We don’t even know where to start. Not only do we have to figure out why visits went up, then we have to figure out if those visits actually helped our business.

Let’s look at an actionable metric. What does this conversion rate tell us?

It says “HOLY SNACK ATTACK BATMAN! WE HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM!” Conversion rates plummeted for some unknown reason. We know immediately that we need to take action and figure out if the report is broken or if people can’t convert.

So we check our merchant account and see if payments are still coming in. If not, we send out the bat signal, get our developer on the phone, and find out what’s wrong with our checkout funnel. Then we fix it.

Notice how there’s no confusion and no ambiguity. Only action. The data quickly told us what to pay attention to so we know immediately how to focus our efforts to improve the situation.

“But Lars! Things like this don’t usually happen you silly goose!” Sure they do. And even when they don’t, actionable metrics still tell us how we’re doing.

Have you revamped your site design or checkout funnel in the last 12 months? Did you compare your conversion rates before and after? If you did, they would have told you whether or not the project was a success. If your conversion rates remained constant, you know that you wasted your time. You’ve learned that you need to go in a different direction to improve conversion rates and get customers faster. When you have actionable metrics, you can make decisions constantly. And each decision will help your business get to the next level.

Actionable Metrics

Whenever you start tracking a metric ask yourself if it helps you take action and make decisions. If not, ditch it.

At their core, actionable metrics are geared to answer these questions:

• How do you gain or lose revenue?
• How do you gain or lose customers?
• What are the key functions and benefits that people are coming to you for?

Revenue

Above all else, you need to track where your revenue is coming from. Each and every time someone pays you, it needs to get tracked. This includes all these juicy metrics:

• Lifetime Value
• Total Revenue (Month, Quarter, Annual)
• Net Profit
• Average Order Value
• Number of Transactions
• Average Length of Subscription (for subscription business models)

Leads and Customers

Where do your leads and customers come from? Social Media? Google? Paid traffic? You need to find out.

This is not the same as finding out where your visitors come from, that’s a vanity metric. Since your customers represent a small portion of your visitors, they’ll get lost in the data.

So stop focusing on your visitors as a whole, you need to discover where your customers come from. This tells you where to spend your energy and marketing dollars.

But be careful, most analytics providers attribute conversions to the most recent traffic source. So if someone finds you with an AdWords ad and then googles your business name before they convert, the branded keyword gets the credit. Most analytics tools are starting to track assisted conversions. These show you which traffic sources bring high quality prospects to you and which traffic sources bring them through the finish line.

Conversion Rates

Site-wide conversion rate is a start but there’s so much more to conversion rates. Track the conversion rates of your traffic sources, primary keywords, and marketing campaigns.

And don’t compare yourself to the industry or your competitors. Your goal is to establish an internal benchmark. Then try to beat it. When you move the needle up, you’re on the right track. Otherwise, you’re either going backwards or your efforts aren’t making any impact.

There’s going to be some overlap with conversion rates and your leads/customers. One of your top priorities is to track the conversion rate of prospects to leads, and leads to customers. When someone comes to your site, they’re a prospect. When they give you their email, fill out a contact form, create a trial account, or add a product to their cart, then they become a lead. When they give you their credit card, they become a customer. Track the conversion rates at each step.

A/B (Split) Test Results

You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again: TEST, TEST, TEST. But you can’t just test randomly.

Everyone says you should “throw paint at the wall to see what sticks.” That’s a terrible idea. Because you haven’t built a system that will tell you which paint did the sticking. So separate everything into different colors (split tests and analytics), THEN start throwing.

Funnels

Sections of your site and marketing might be highly defined. Like an ecommerce checkout process, your visitors are forced to follow a series of steps before they convert. Other examples include email signup processes and webinars.

When you have a funnel that people follow before converting, you need to track each step. This tells you where your funnel breaks down. Do your customers abandon the checkout process right before submitting payment? Or do they never get past the cart page? Knowing where people bail tells you exactly what you need to work on.

Cohorts

Different groups of customers behave completely differently. Do you know what separates your most profitable customers (they come back month after month) from the customers that buy once and never return? To understand how these groups behave, you need to use cohorts.

Cohorts separate your customer into groups so you can find trends in the data.

Marketing Campaign Performance

Do your marketing campaigns bring you profit? If not, you need to cancel them right now. Or test new ideas until you force them to work (if they’re not profitable, they’re not working). Either way, you need to know how much profit each campaign brings you.

Take the total revenue of each campaign then subtract the cost of marketing and the cost of goods sold. If you end up with a negative number, you have a problem.

Is Google Analytics Guilty of Vanity Metric Focus?

Yes.

Look, I use Google Analytics heavily. Every day in fact. I also know how NOT to use it. I rarely look at the main traffic reports and spend all of my time focusing on conversions, trying to piece together the behavior of my customers.

When we log into Google Analytics, we get a data puke of vanity metrics. On the Visitors Overview report, there isn’t ONE number that you should actually care about.

Your goal should be to click into a better report before Visitors Overview even has a chance to load.

Not only do you need to ignore the vast majority of data in Google Analytics, you also need to know how to customize it so it tracks your business outcomes. Most people will never do this.

You need to enable ecommerce tracking, define goals, and calculate goal values so you have actionable metrics to work with. Using the default setup of Google Analytics will only give you vanity metrics.

But we can’t really fault Google for this. After all, they’re giving us what we want: data that makes us feel good. When visitors go up, we’re happy. And it’s not hard to get visitors to go up. The real trick is convincing visitors to become customers. Many times, we neglect the responsibility of growing our business in favor of metrics that are much easier to improve but don’t matter. Pageviews, visitors, fans, and followers will only distract you from the real task at hand.

How Most People Pick Their Metrics

When some people pick the key metrics they want to track (also known as key performance indicators or KPIs), the first thing they do is log into Google Analytics and figure out what’s easily accessible. Then you get a decision process like this:

1. Log into Google Analytics
2. See all the fancy graphs and numbers
3. Pick a few that sound nice (pages/visit, visitors, and time on site usually make the list)
4. Report these numbers to the boss and use them to evaluate your own marketing performance

Now you’re stuck with numbers that don’t mean anything. And your salary is now based on them.

Pro-Tip for Terrible Business: For those of you that are judged on how many pageviews your site gets each month, here’s a quick tip on how to impress your boss. Make your navigation super complicated. Your visitors won’t be able to find what they’re looking for and they’ll click all over your site. You’ll crush your quarterly pageview goals and impress everyone in the office. But is this good business? Absolutely not. So stop tracking pageviews.

How You NEED to Pick Your Metrics

Start from the opposite direction. Don’t even look at Google Analytics or any other tool. Start with your business.

1. Pick 1-5 metrics that tell you how healthy your business is. This will include things like revenue, number of leads, account signups, and lifetime value.
2. Figure out how to force your analytics tools to get you as close as possible to these metrics. If you have to import and merge data into Excel, do it.

Once you’ve built a process for tracking the health of your business (not the health of your website), then you can focus on other metrics like:

• A/B test results
• Newsletter subscribers
• Conversion rates
• Cohort reports
• Funnels

Is There a Tool that Helps Us Track All This?

We built KISSmetrics from the ground up to focus on the key metrics that show you how to grow your business. Everything in KISSmetrics is actionable. And since it’s so simple to use, you’ll be finding juicy insights within your first week. We’d love to show you what KISSmetrics can do.

Bottom Line

We only have so much time in the day. Every minute counts so don’t waste any looking at metrics that don’t help you. Focus on metrics that matter and ditch the vanity metrics.

Don’t track these metrics (these are the vainest of all metrics):

• Pageviews
• Visitors
• Time on site
• Pages/visit

Instead, track these metrics:

• Revenue
• Customers
• Conversion Rates
• A/B Tests
• Funnels
• Cohorts
• Marketing Campaigns

And if you really want to get good data, go talk to a customer. Find out why they bought from you and how they found out about you. Ask them to show you how they use your product or service. WARNING! This entails actually talking to a human being. I know, it’s scary. But business is fundamentally about building relationships so reach out to your customers. You’ll get better data in 5 minutes than you will from 5 months of only looking at reports.

With actionable metrics, you’ll know exactly what questions you should be asking. Why were they hesitant to buy after adding the product to their shopping cart? Why did they cancel their account after only a week?

All of this gives you a deep understanding of customer behavior, which is what it’s all about. When we truly understand our customer, we can delight them at every step and build our business faster than we could have imagined.

What actionable metrics are essential to your business?

About the Author:

Lars Lofgren is the KISSmetrics Marketing Analyst and has his Google Analytics Individual Qualification (he’s certified). Learn how to grow your business at his marketing blog or follow him on Twitter @larslofgren.

Given this, you’d think more companies would test and run experiments. Yet 61% of companies do less than 5 tests per month.

My gut tells me the reason for this is MOST companies are too caught up in the “business as usual syndrome”, and they rarely take a second to stop and think about really focusing on conversion optimization.

In this post we’re going to go over what the highest converting websites do differently. But before we get into the details, we want to highlight a few points to get you thinking first:

• You have 0-8 seconds to make a compelling headline and landing page. After 8 seconds, the majority of visitors leave.
• Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.
• The more landing pages you have, the more leads you are likely to get.
• Product videos can increase purchases of the product by 144%.
• A 1 second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
• A/B testing is becoming the preferred method that has brought a lot of the companies the most success.

Got that? Ok, let’s get into what the best do differently….

1. They Make Their Unique Value Proposition(s) Clear

Visitors should clearly see on your homepage or landing page why they should do business with you and the benefit of it.

A great example of this is MailChimp:

There are plenty of email service providers out there, so for a company like MailChimp it’s quite difficult to differentiate yourself from the pack. MailChimp made themselves different by focusing on making email campaigns easy.

If you think about it, whose usually tasked with sending out the email newsletter? It’s usually someone who’s specialty is not marketing, who’s not technical, and has a never ending “to-do” list. Making it easy is really important!

And by looking at their home page, they make this very clear:

Not to mention, if you have ever used their service – everything from campaign creation to sending out your emails is really simple and clear.

Another example is Helzberg Diamonds. They are a little more subtle about their USP, but they definitely address “Why you should buy from them”.

For example they state free shipping on orders over $149:

Scroll down the page a little bit, and you’ll see some reassurances:

Certainly having 12,266 fans on Facebook doesn’t hurt their conversion rate, either.

What are the reasons customers should buy from you? Is it a money back guarantee? Free shipping? Find what yours are and make it clear.

2. They Test Their Calls-to-Actions

Hubspot featured a company on their blog that increased their conversions 105.9% by having a clear call-to-action that leads to a whitepaper. In this whitepaper, the company informs the visitor about the company & what they offer.

The company also made a more effective headline and used meaningful graphics to help guide the user.  Just these three changes led to more than doubling their conversion rate.

Mozilla increased downloads of their popular Firefox browser by having a stronger call-to-action. “Download Now – Free” performed better than “Try Firefox 3”. They made it clear that Firefox was free and called the viewer to download the program.

Proflowers is a site known for high conversion rates, with some estimates being around 40%. They make it really easy for customers who are in a hurry to buy flowers – they can start by simply picking a day they need the flowers by:

ProFlowers is eliminates any initial questions that the prospect may have. The prospect knows right away the answer to the question “can you get this to me by __?”  They’re helping to overcome any obstacles to a purchase. See if you can do something like Proflowers has done—answer one of your most popular questions in a clear, above the fold headline. If some obstacles to prospects purchasing from you are:

“I don’t feel comfortable purchasing from a small company like yours” – then some ideas to help overcome this fear could be:

• Include a behind the scenes video of your company and how your operations work.
• Include a banner at the top with customer testimonials, each one showing for a few seconds.
• Give your unique value proposition right at the top. Tell how long you’ve been in business, how many orders you’ve shipped, customer satisfaction rate, etc.

How do you find out what questions your customers have?

You should always be asking your customers questions to get their feedback. Understanding your customer’s pain points, confusion and what they are really looking for can help you design a site that converts higher. KISSinsights is a tool that allows you to do just that:

3. They Test Their Headlines

The headline can make or break your website, and possibly a sale. As mentioned in the intro, the first impression is formed quickly, and the headline is a big part of that impression. It’s important to test and see what resonates most with your visitors. There is no magic formula, but there are some good guidelines that you can follow.

37signals improved conversions of their Highrise product by 30% by having the headline “30-day Free Trial on All Accounts”. Their worst headline was “Start a HighRise Account”.

The key lesson from this is that it’s important to have a clear headline with a unique value proposition. “Start a HighRise Account” doesn’t tell of any benefit. They don’t give a reason why they should sign up now. Consider having adding free trial in your headline or try “Save __% and start [enter the benefit of your product here]”. The important thing is to test to see what works.

CityCliq improved their conversions by making a clear headline that tells the user what they’ll get. First, the tested headlines:

• Businesses grow faster online!
• Online advertising that works!
• Get found faster!
• Create a webpage for your business

The winner:

This is the best headline because it’s clear and avoids any language that you may find in your spam folder. Be creative with your headlines and inform the visitor of what you do or the benefits of your product.

One more tip: having a headline that addresses a pain point has in one case, increased conversions by 32%.

4. They Tend To Have Short Forms

Conversion expert Tim Ash recommends keeping forms to only the essentials. How many times have you been ready to sign up for something, continue and see 25+ fields that you have to fill in? I have many times and I’ll often just leave the site. It’s important to respect the users time. If you’ve gotten the user as far as wanting to sign up, it’s pivotal that you don’t let them drop off because your form is too long.

Take a look at Dropbox’s signup form:

Dropbox is only asking for what they need. No username, no security questions, no birth date, no verification code, no re-enter password field, nothing unneeded.

For Proflowers, they don’t force you to signup before you order. If you’re a first time buyer, they’re not interrupting your buying process at all. You don’t have to create a new account; you have the option to do that after you make your purchase. Proflowers is removing any obstacles to ordering.

Building more concise forms is important.

Test the number of form fields!

Most conversion experts will agree that simplifying forms and making them clearer should be the direction you want to aim for when you ready to start iterating.

Sometimes, having more fields can improve your form conversion rate. However, in general, fewer fields tend to produce better conversions (it depends on what your form is for). The point is: Don’t look for rules of thumb, test and find out for yourself!

Other Techniques To Try

• Implementing a “Chat Now” button increased free signup form fills by 31%.
• Cars.com recently boosted their conversion rate 2.7% by having a security seal on their site.
• Including discount information in the title (e.g. 15% off Product A vs Product A) increased add to cart conversions by 148.3%.
• Benefits, social proof and credibility indicators led to a 144.1% improvement on landing pages.
• Putting people on your homepage can have a huge impact on conversions.
• Including a pain point in a headline increased conversions by 31%.
• Changing your call-to-action button from green to red has been shown to increase conversions by as much as 34%.
• Try moving around your Buy Now button. Appsumo did this (among other things) and doubled their conversion rate.
• Changing a button from “See Plans and Pricing” to “Get Started Today” increased conversions by 252%.
• Turning CAPTCHA off led to no conversions lost and very little spam mail in this case study.
• Showing testimonials can drive validation.
• Using natural language on forms has been shown to increase conversions by 25-40%.
• Having a nice mobile site can double conversions.
• Segmenting your users can increase conversion rates be giving more relevant content to the user.
• Putting your call-to-action button can really improve conversions.

The important thing is to test and experiment. What has worked for you? Let us know in the comments!

About the Authors:

Zach Bulygo is a guest blogger for KISSmetrics, you can find him on Twitter here.

Sean Work is the Director of Marketing at KISSmetrics. Follow him on Twitter @seanvwork.

Want to display this infographic on your site?

Sources

• TechCrunch – Instagram Captures 100,000 Mobile Photo Addicts In Less Than A Week
• The New York Times – Instagram Quickly Passes 1 Million Users
• DigitalBuzz – Infographic: Instagram Facts & Stats
• Ecorner – From Stanford to Startup
• Business Insider – Instagram: 5 Million Users, 95 Million Photos, 4 Employees
• Fast Company – What Instagram Plans To Do With 150 Million Photos And Faster Growth Than Flickr
• Scribbal – Instagram Hits 10 Million Users Less Than One Year After Launch
• Social Fresh – Instagram Becomes The Largest Mobile Social Network
• Gigaom – Instagram: 150 million photos shared
• CNET – Instagram for Android grabs 1 million downloads on first day
• Media Culpa – Instagram now growing faster than Flickr
• Pingdom – Instagram sharing on Twitter is blowing up

Why Should You Try To Increase Your AOV?

For most ecommerce operators, the reasons for increasing AOV are pretty obvious. However, arguments can be made for focusing on increasing your traffic instead of increasing your AOV. These arguments really depend on how far along you are on your business building timeline and probably should be discussed in another post.

On to the reasons why you want to increase your AOV:

• It can be a quicker way to increase your cash flow. And as we all know a healthy cash flow is a sign of a healthy business.
• Considering the increased frequency of search engine algorithm updates these days, betting on the chance that you will be able to increase traffic might prove to be more difficult.
• Acquiring traffic usually has a cost attached to it, where increasing your AOV could be as simple as installing a simple plugin for your shopping cart.
• If any of your traffic sources disappear for any reason, you’ll be in a much better position if you have improved your AOV beforehand.

This post will cover 7 simple tactics that you can implement on your site and also some tips on how to take to these concepts further.

1. Bundles & Saving Packs

Bundles are about providing the user with a bargain for multiple complementary products and to increase the amount spent in one order. Let’s imagine you own a pet store and sell baby kittens (that cost $100) for a living.

You also sell kitten food, litter trays, and food bowls. Imagine all those products add up to $50. Instead of the user going to supermarkets to buy all those peripherals you could just bundle them together for $40 and call it a Kitten Starter Pack.

By bundling our products we push AOV from $100 to $140 and provide a cost saving to the customer of $10, a 20% discount.

Take the concept further: Allow a user to personalise their bundles. For example have a mix and match option providing the user with the ability to choose and select exactly what they want.

2. Free Delivery Thresholds

For most retailers, free delivery can be quite a difficult challenge financially. Setting free delivery over a certain threshold can solve this problem.

For example, if you notice that people on your site spend around $30 and if delivery costs you $3.00, then try setting free delivery at $40. For this to work effectively you need to display the required amount needed to get free delivery.

Going back to our pet store example: if a user adds dog food to their basket worth $33.50 then show a message such as: “spend another $6.50 to get free delivery”. Then combine this with relevant upsells and cross sells that help take the users basket to the free delivery amount and you will see an increase in your AVO.

Active Ride Shop gives a little nudge by telling the customer what they need to spend to get free shipping.

Take the concept further: By packaging free delivery as a product (for example get “free delivery for 1 year only $14.95”). ASOS does this really well. This acts as a bolt on for most purchases. It also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases throughout the year and moves retail sales from a single purchase to an incentivised income stream, as users want to make the most of their free delivery.

3. Donations

Another technique is to donate a percentage of profits to a charity. Show a cost breakdown at the basket page showing how much is donated to charity vs. how much you actually pay. For example, if a percentage of the order went to Cancer Research or Oxfam, people are likely to spend more as they are enticed by the fact that a proportion of it goes to charity.

Toms Shoes takes this donation technique to another level, where donations have been integrated into their business model since day 1.

Take the concept further: Sponsor a charity that is seasonal, for example Comic Relief or Red Nose Day (if those are the trending events). By targeting a charity that is currently trending, we increase the effectiveness of this tactic – i.e. the likelihood to increase extra spend and gain some good PR.

4. Bolt-Ons

According to PredictiveIntent’s case study, upselling on ecommerce sites perform 20 times better relative to cross selling. However this does not mean cross selling is dead. Cross selling is still a great way to increase AOV and revenue. For example you could offer a user the chance to add a product for another person. Interflora does this really well and also allows users to add extras to their order en route to and from the basket page.

Targeting the relevant cross sells and upsells is imperative when making it a success. For example, beauty retailers such as The Perfume Shop add gift wraps and bags to increase their AOV. By staying relevant they save the user time when looking for a gift bag. Although these are simple techniques, they can be quite effective, especially during Christmas seasons.

5. Cashback Techniques

Cash back in the form of gift cards or vouchers such as “Free $10 voucher on your next purchase when you spend $40” can really boost AOV and repeat purchases. You can also build partnerships with other companies which allow gift cards or vouchers to be redeemed at several companies such as “$50 off at CrazyEgg & KISSinsights”.

(One of the gifts on my birthday wishlist…) * Note: the above gift card is only an example and does not exist.

Refer a friend programs are really good at increasing site conversion. If a user refers a friend they get cash back usually in the form of a voucher and the company gets a new sale.

6. Displaying Cost Savings

Revealing the cost savings on a product when a user buys more than 1 item can boost average order value as there is an incentive to save when purchasing in bulk.

For example:

If you buy one then it costs you $16.45 as opposed to buying 3 which reduces price to $15.80 providing a cost saving when more than 1 item is bought.

7. Gamification

Gamification techniques can be used to increase average order value and a recent example of this is the McDonalds Monopoly Campaign UK.

How it works: a user peels off a prize from their meal to get a monopoly piece/ instant prize and can then collect property sets to win big prizes. McDonalds includes more stickers on their larger meals to entice people to spend extra on larger meals. This increases AOV but also increases the likelihood of a returning visit. This campaign combines a lot of persuasive techniques which unfortunately worked on me.

Take the concept further: By framing the different stickers to the different meals you can increase value of the rewards and move the purchasing decision away from “should I buy?” to “which one should I buy?”

For example: Ignoring user income levels, the “large meal” seems to offer more value for money. This idea can be applied to almost any product. By combining gamification and price framing techniques we can make additional spending more lucrative and also demonstrate the value to the user.

Conclusion

Implementing these tactics on your site obviously depends on your ecommerce solution. Many shopping cart systems have plugins and add-ons to include these features during the shopping process. However, if you’re cart was built from scratch, you’ll need to reach out to your developers to create the appropriate solutions.

These tactics are also not limited to ecommerce websites. Subscription based businesses can incorporate some of the same ideas to increase their cash flow as well.

Do you have any awesome ideas on how to increase average order value? Please share them in the comments below:

About the Authors:

Fabian Alvares is CRO Analyst at SEOgadget, and works with companies in Retail, Finance and Data Services. You can follow him on Twitter @panduuf

Sean Work is the Director of Marketing at KISSmetrics. Follow him on Twitter @seanvwork.

Technically, Google Analytics pages/visit and visit duration goals do allow you to measure the engagement of your site. The problem is that we don’t know what KIND of engagement.

Let’s say someone visits 10 pages on your site. That’s a good thing right? Maybe. What if they were clicking all over your site trying to find something, couldn’t, and got so fed up with you that they left in a terrible mood? That’s bad engagement.

When we track these metrics with Google Analytics goals, we don’t know if we’re making things worse or better. In most cases, they provide zero value.

You might argue that while these goals don’t have much value, they’re not hurting anyone. But they are. These goals get rolled into every aggregate goal conversion rate in your reports and make it harder for you to figure out what’s working. At best, they’ll waste your time. At worst, they’ll lead you to the wrong conclusions.

The Cost of a Useless Goal

Having more goals is not necessarily a good thing. The more goals we have, the harder it is to focus on the goals that actually matter (revenue, leads, account creations, etc.).

When you have goals that don’t track critical outcomes of your business, some metrics and reports in Google Analytics become worthless.

For example, take the Goal Overview report. Since Google Analytics compiles all of your goals into a single conversion rate, you’ll have to drill deeper into the reports just to get a sense of what’s working. In other words, the at-a-glance metrics that are supposed to help you no longer do so.

This is the Goals Overview Report with pages/visit and visit duration goals activated:

The pages/visit and visit duration goals account for 95.6% of the total goal completions in this report. If goals go up, we might be doing a better job with engagement and delighting our customers. Or we might be frustrating them to no end. There’s no way to tell.

Since pages/visit and visit duration goals don’t tell us anything about our business, the majority of this data set isn’t useful. That means we have absolutely no idea how our business is doing without looking at other goals individually.

With the other goals being such a small percentage of the total goals (less than 5%), we can’t even begin to see how they impact our business.

These items from the Goals Overview Report are now worthless:

• The Graph
• Total Goal Completions
• Conversion Rate
• Abandonment Rate

We could drill down into each individual goal. But we can no longer get a quick overview of our critical goals. At least not easily. If you’re super motivated, you could apply advanced segments or build a custom report. But it’s faster and easier to not apply pages/visit and visit duration goals in the first place.

If you keep your goal data clean by only including essential goals for your business, you can get an accurate overview of how your business is doing whenever you want.

Now, there are two exceptions to this: support and advertising sites.

Exception #1: Support Sites

What’s the primary purpose of any support site? To help visitors find the information they’re looking for as fast as possible. People rarely go to support sites for fun. They arrive because they have a problem. And the faster you provide the answer, the happier the visitor becomes.

You want the visitor to spend as little time on your support site as possible.

So one of your goals is to reduce the number of pages people need to view before they leave. You also want to reduce the amount of time they spend on your site. Pages/visit and visit duration goals sound perfect for this.

Here’s how you set them up.

How to Define Goals for Support Sites

Most pages/visit and visit duration goals set a minimum threshold for how many pages or minutes trigger the goal. When people view more pages per visit, conversions go up. We’ll do the opposite and set a maximum threshold. Now when people view FEWER pages, conversions go up. Our priority is to increase the number of people that reach the goal.

So if we set a pages/visit goal to less than 5 pages, the goal will trigger every time a visitor leaves before loading a 5th page.

Visit Duration Goal

To start setting up your visit duration goal:

1. 1. Go to your Google Analytics standard reports
2. 2. Click on the “Admin” button in the top right
3. 3. Click on “Goals”
4. 4. From one of the Goal sets, click “+ Goal” (goal sets are just a way for you to easily group goals) to set up a new goal.
5. 5. Name your goal and select “Visit Duration”

For the name, I recommend included the amount of time for your goal in the goal name so it’s very easy for you to remember what the threshold is.

Pick a length of time that 25-50% of your audience will hit. It’s not important to have the perfect amount of time; you simply want to establish a benchmark. So if 50% of your visitors spend more than 5 minutes on your site, that’s your starting point. A benchmark of 40% spending more than 6 minutes works just as well. Don’t get caught up in absolute numbers, just figure out where you are so you can start moving the needle in the right direction.

Make sure you select “less than” for the Condition, then enter in the time you want. If you don’t know what where to start, plug in 5 minutes.

In general, you won’t define a goal value for visit duration goals. For the lowdown on Google Analytics goal values, check out this KISSmetrics post.

When you’re all set, you’ll have a Google Analytics goal that looks like this:

When tracking this goal (or any time on site metric), be careful about focusing on the actual amount of time people spend on your site. Visit duration will never be a good way to measure engagement accurately because of how time on site is calculated. Google Analytics only calculates time when a page loads. So if a visitor goes to two pages, it can figure out how much time was spent on the first page. But Google Analytics doesn’t know how much time the visitor spent on the second page unless that visitor goes to a third.

Essentially, Google Analytics has no idea how much time your visitors spend on the last page of their visit and assumes they didn’t spend any time at all there. So time on site metrics and visit duration goals are artificially low. Don’t focus on the actual number, focus on how that number changes over time.

Pages/Visit Goal

Instead of picking “visit duration” when setting up a new goal, choose “Pages/Visit.”

Just like your visit duration goal, don’t worry about the exact number. Simply set a maximum threshold that will be triggered by a good chunk of your visitors. It doesn’t matter what the exact number is, you just need a place to start from.

Choose “Less than” for the condition and define the pages you want (5 pages is a good starting point). Unless you have a REALLY good reason to set a goal value, leave it blank.

You’ll have a pages/visit goal that looks like this:

WARNING: Be careful with this goal on any site that uses virtual pageviews heavily. Remember, virtual pageviews allow you to force a pageview into Google Analytics whenever you want. And if you use them frequently, the vast majority of your visitors will start to hit your pages/visit goal. Either use restraint with virtual page views or set your pages/visit goal MUCH higher.

3 Strategies for Lowering Pages/Visit and Time on Site

Simplify Navigation: Look for ways to eliminate and condense items in your navigation. If you don’t know where to start, use heatmaps (CrazyEgg is a great choice) to figure out which elements in your navigation aren’t used at all. Then merge those elements into other areas of your site or get rid of them altogether. Also consider replacing them with other content that your visitors find more valuable.

Clear and Concise Copy: Every word on your site should be super clear. Avoid cute copy which tends to confuse people. When your visitors know exactly what to expect from each page on your site, they’ll find what they’re looking for much faster.

Better Internal Search Engine: Most internal search engines are terrible. Test yours out and see how well it pulls results. If it can’t give great results for common search terms that directly relate to your content, start shopping around for a new internal search engine.

Exception #2: Advertising Sites

If you sell ad space on your site, you live and die on one of two metrics. Click-throughs or pageviews.

If you sell by the pageview, your entire business model is based on increasing your visitors and increasing pages/visit. In this case, a pages/visit goal makes a lot of sense. The more pages you serve, the more impressions you have, and the more money you make.

So let’s get to it.

How to Define Goals for Advertising Sites

Go ahead and log into Google Analytics, head to your goals in the admin area, and pick the pages/visit goal.

Since you sell ad space by impressions or clicks, time on site goals won’t give you any value. Focus on pages/visit goals.

Just like the support site, you’re going to set up a pages/visit goal that a portion of your audience already reaches. Once you’ve established a benchmark, try to increase it.

Set the condition as “Greater than” and pick the number of pages you want as a threshold. Most sites use 5.

Then you’ll get a fancy schmancy goal that looks like this:

What if you sell ads based on clicks? You’ll have to take a different route altogether if you want better data.

Abandon pages/visit goals and track your ad clicks with events. Then set up event goals and use event values or goal values to track your revenue. This will track individual clicks on your ads.

Tracking individual clicks will definitely give you better data since you can set specific goal values for each ad. You’ll have reliable revenue data in your Google Analytics reports. But it’s also much more difficult to set up because you’ll need to add onclick event tracking using JavaScript.

Check out Google’s Event Tracking Guide along with KISSmetrics’ posts on Goal Values and Goal Types for a complete overview of all this.

Avoiding Goals Altogether

Even if you have a support site or you sell ad space, you have the option of not configuring goals in the first place. Instead, you can grab the site-wide time on site or pages/visit metrics each month and put them into an Excel spreadsheet. Over time, you’ll be able to judge whether or not you’ve been going in the right direction.

If you’re tracking other goals like newsletter sign ups or ecommerce transactions, this is probably your best bet. It’ll keep your goal data clean and allow you to track user engagement over time.

Bottom Line

Unless you have an advertising-based business model or a support site. You should never ever have visit duration or pages/visit goals in Google Analytics. They’ll get in your way and prevent you from focusing on data that matters.

Instead, focus on goals that help you track any of these items:

• Transactions
• Leads
• Account Creation
• Downloads (software or PDFs)
• Upgrades
• Newsletter Sign Ups

Think I’m wrong? Give it to me straight and we’ll duke it out in the comments! The winner gets crowned Analytics Champion of the Intrawebs.

About the Author: Lars Lofgren is the KISSmetrics Marketing Analyst and has his Google Analytics Individual Qualification (he’s certified). Learn how to grow your business at his marketing blog or follow him on Twitter @larslofgren.

In this post we look at eleven often overlooked page elements that can be the secret heroes of your conversion success story. Forget these eleven, and you can forget about a website that really drives revenue.

Element #1 – Clear, Differentiated Pricing Information

Have you ever checked out a product online and been unsure what the difference between the Silver and Gold plans were? Did Pro seem a little too much like Basic? Without pricing tables or pages that create a clear difference in value between product options you’re not going to sell much of either.

So how does one go about differentiating their product SKUs and service tiers? The most effective methods can be boiled down to a simple philosophy – focus on the benefits, instead of features, and highlight the differences. The best pricing tables allow you to quickly ascertain the value you’ll personally get out of each option, and discern the differences between each, rather than get bogged down squinting at row upon row of checkmarks.

A great example of clear pricing information can be seen at Launchlist – each tier of the service has its own personality, and it’s easy to see the differences between the feature set of each package.

Element #2 – Customer Confidence

Despite the fact that so many transactions are carried out online, the lack of personal interaction in this medium means that even the smallest thing that’s out of place on your ecommerce pages can rapidly erode customers’ trust in your product and business.

There are many ways to build this trust though, and almost all are fairly easy to implement. For instance, if you use an SSL certificate to secure your transactions (and you really, really should be if you’re processing credit card info), show it! Many consumers know to check for secure web pages when proceeding with a purchase, so they’ll be looking for that all-important padlock icon.

Clearly articulate your refund policy upfront, so your customers can buy knowing that they have recourse if things don’t go according to plan. List an actual phone number and address. Or even offer live chat on your site, to help address pre-sales questions one-on-one.

Finally, set expectations as to when and how customers will hear back from you. It’s a simple thing to communicate, but goes a long way towards preventing people from feeling like they’ve been left hanging, not knowing whether their questions have been received.

Element #3 – Unconventional Social Proof

It’s no secret that social proof helps drive conversions and sales, but it often takes the form of TechCrunch logos and endorsements from celebs or, *gasp*, web-celebs.

Take the road less-travelled with your social proof: use real people in your testimonials and images, skip the logo pond and share one key case study or client anecdote.

Incorporating social proof into your product pages is a way to complement and reinforce the positive influences on your visitors for a given product. It can take many forms, ranging from customer testimonials, to star ratings, to simply exposing the number of units of that particular product left in your inventory.

Netflix is famous for their movie ratings algorithm, which crowdsources members’ ratings as a whole, and uses it to predict a personalized rating for each subscriber. There’s something undeniably compelling about knowing that a particular movie is likely to be one you really enjoy, based not only on previous movies you’ve personally watched, but also because other members with tastes similar to your own loved it too.

Element #4 – Tell Me And Show Me

Too many product pages provide too little insight into what the customer is actually buying. This is particularly true of software product pages – if you’re selling a piece of software, show it in action via a demo. The most exemplary cases of this are often seen “eating their own dog food,” i.e. use the function of the product to sell itself.

Take a look at the wonderful product tour for Joyride – a plugin meant for building product tours. Immediately, they’ve communicated the core benefit of their product by using the product’s function itself to demonstrate just how well it helps to guide users through a tour.

Element #5 – Get Ready For Your Close-Up

Sure, most product pages have a nice big image of the item in question. But what if you want to see the back of it? The underside? What if the detailed stitching pattern is what’s important to me as a customer? Ask yourself, “How can I get close up and personal with the product to really experience it before I buy?”

Offering a good selection of images for tangible products allows your visitors to get as close to touching and getting familiar with a product as digitally possible. Best-in-class online retailers like Park & Bond, and Fab.com take this philosophy a step further, allowing visitors to zoom in super-close on each of a variety of artfully-shot high-res images for each product.

Element #6 – Choices, Choices, Choices!

Similar to the point about showing multiple product images, an element that’s often neglected is showcasing variations of a product. For example, is there a version of the product with a special attachment? Do some models come with a telescoping arm, or are there different materials and finishes available to choose from?

Remember that the image(s) you put on your product page are all the customer has to go on when making their decision, so if they can’t view the exact item they’re looking to get, they may have some trepidation in going through with the transaction.

Zappos understands this point well, so they make sure not only to show lots of images of the products (from almost every conceivable angle), but they also show every available color combination for each pair of shoes. They even allow you to sign up for a notification email if you don’t see a particular color combination that you’re looking for – that way, even if they don’t get the sale now, they can at least contact you if they do eventually stock those fabulous neon pink Chucks that you have your heart set on.

Element #7 – Invest In The Writing

One staple of the typical product page is the features and details section. Often, most stores will simply list off points in a clutch of bullet points and call it a day. Yawn.

Rote listings put the burden on the visitor to determine what the actual benefits are of the product in question. You end up making them do the heavy intellectual lifting as the responsibility falls to them to compare and contrast the feature sets of your product with your competitors’.

Honing in on the true benefits of your product is more helpful, as it addresses the most important question in the visitors’ mind: why should I buy this? This is accomplished with good copywriting on the product page. A well-written blurb of copy can help make a product stand out, as well as even entertain your visitors.

Don’t believe that the copy is worth investing in? Groupon, with its brain-meltingly huge IPO last year, distinguishes its offers by hiring teams of aspiring comedians to write the copy. Thinkgeek also takes care to infuse each and every product listing with spirited copy that entertains its discerning target audience.

Element #8 – Page Loading Speed

Funny enough, one element that frequently gets overlooked in the design of product pages isn’t even on the page – at least, not visibly. The speed with which a page loads can be a critical determining factor as to whether your visitor lays down their credit card, or decides to bail completely. This means it pays to keep load speed in mind when designing your product pages, especially if you’re planning to have a lot of large images, rich interactivity or other media.

According to a recent study, users make up their minds about a website in less than 3 seconds, which means that the longer you make them wait for the page to load, the less of a chance they’ll likely give you to capture their attention. Don’t keep them waiting too long!

The big daddy of online retailers, Amazon, has product pages that load incredibly fast – an absolute must, when a delay of even a couple of seconds means thousands of lost potential customers.

Element #9 – A Clear Next Step

This should be the biggest no-brainer in the history of the Internet, but too many product pages clutter up their pages with excessive calls to action. View customer photos, view pricing, view our knowledgebase, get customer support, talk to a representative, read reviews. Without good design, these calls to action all blend into a confusing mess, and make your user feel like they’ve just been blindfolded and spun around. Now, which way to that pinata?

While it may be tempting to utilize your product page with many actionable next steps as possible, remember that focus and clarity is the key to truly guiding your user to your main conversion goal. Typical methods for designing a good call to action include using high-contrast buttons, treatments or callouts that are unique to the overall design of the page, as well as giving the actionable elements plenty of breathing room to make them stand out.

Element #10 – The Soft Sell

Is your product all or nothing? If you’re selling software or a service without a soft sell opportunity you’re missing out on conversions. Can you give away a free trial? A free month of service? Can visitors set up a free account, download the software for free and activate later, or play with a demo version (also sometimes known as a sandbox)?

Often times, users might not be willing to make the commitment in buying your product right away. Therefore, you need to get them hooked with a smaller sell that takes little commitment on their part. By creating steps that extend the relationship and get the user to commit to a smaller action (even if it’s not the ultimate commitment), you’re building the bridge to the ultimate sale.

Element #11 – Wayfinding

Quick, how many steps lie between your product page, and your transaction confirmation page? If you don’t know, then it’s probably too many. A convoluted and laborious funnel is a sure-fire way to kill conversion.

If the customer is on the checkout page, then get them to their final purchase as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don’t make their purchasing effort seem like an arduous journey that can leave them second guessing their purchasing decision along the way.

The Dollar Shave Club has an easy purchase funnel that, once you hit the “select” button to purchase their product, immediately signs you into your account and jumps you to their one page checkout screen. No annoying registration confirmations, no five-step checkouts, just a simple log in and checkout process.

On another note, resist the temptation to distract your users with anything that’ll take them away from your purchasing funnel. Don’t shuttle them off to an obscure part of your site just because they happened to click on one of your recommended similar items. Don’t interrupt them with a link to your latest blog post. You’ve worked hard to get your visitors to this stage, so let them finish the transaction before you take them anywhere else.

Conclusion

Product pages can be a delicate dance, where one misstep can cost you the trust of your dance partners, a.k.a. your visitors. Take the time to nail all of these elements though and it’s highly likely you’ll be reaping significantly higher conversion rates as well as enjoying a better bottom line.

What have we missed? Are there any other product page elements you feel don’t get enough attention on most ecommerce sites? Let us know in the comments!

About the Author: Jason Amunwa is the Director of Products at digital-telepathy, a user-experience design studio that created SlideDeck, the WordPress slider plugin that lets you create awesome content sliders in minutes with no code, as well as Hello Bar and Impress.