Some initial points I notice:

• The site URL is biblebible.com yet the name of the page is Audio Bibles. This will probably cause a loss in direct traffic, and a loss in returning visitors.
• For a browser with 1024 x 768 resolution there is nothing pulling the methodical buying types down the page.
• On the 60 Day Money back Guarantee you have the word Opinions when you want the word Options. I know it is in development
• The in stock is clearly displayed
• The call to action, add to cart, is located above and below the fold in a clear location.

What I would test without any data

• On the category page, moving the product name below the image, Amazon has the product name below the image so it is definitely a point to test.
• Test the site with and without Hacker Safe. Reassuring customers is a great idea, but it can make them think about hacking when they would not have thought about it before.
• On the category page, test the size of the retail price, the font is small and with the strike through it makes it even more difficult to read.
• On the product page, test adding a review system
• Test the design of the add to cart button

There is enough testing ideas to keep you busy for a couple months. Once you have more analytics data then you will see where you are losing most of your users and then start testing from there. Remember to keep your goals in mind, for example if you want to make profits then optimize for what makes you the most profits. If you want to get as many audio bibles out as possible optimize for that.

Good Luck.

When optimizing your website do not forget your overall goals. This post will tell you why…

Common mistake:

It is a common mistake these days to get cought up in improving your conversion rates. Now there is nothing wrong with this, it is excellent and guarenteed to bring you more of what you want.

What do you want?

What is is that you want, more profits? Maybe you want more leads? The important point is that you need to keep this in mind when prioritizing your optimization.

Good prioritazation.

In my comment to Millissa Burdon’s post I mentioned always considering your highest traffic pages and other metrics. Again, this is excellent advice but I realised that there is even better advice.

Optimize based on your Goals.

Example, you optimize a product page that has a 50% prophet margin because it has a high hit rate. And get 200 more conversons a day. Celebrate you followed my advice and you did good work. You might even get a bigger christmas bonus.

Better Example, you optimize a page that has a prophet margin of 800% and get 5 more conversions a day. Shame on your for not listening to my advice, but you actually cause your company to make more money, because your ROI is higher.

Moral of the story.

If you forget your goals you will optimize for optimization not for your goals.

Conclusion.

With your goals in mind, you should consider what optimization will make you meet your goals. When choosing the optimization you need to consider all types of metrics not just one or two.

Analytics data is a websites life blood, if you are giving the wrong blood to your college website you are going to kill it! Do you know if your analytics code is set up correctly, just because you are receiving data does not mean you are receiving the correct data. Let’s take a step back from trying to advance our websites and make sure the information we are using to advance our site is correct. We can also look at a couple tools we can use to help us.

The Bad News

One of the major problems with college website is they normally span a number of subdomains, it is even worse if they also span domains. I am going to be completely honest, if you do not have the dream team of web developers for your college website you are never going to be able to handle multiple domains. My suggestion, is create new profiles for each domain, and do the best you can from there. You can still use optimization software which is important.

The Good News

Managing many sub domains is straightforward, you will have more of a problem getting code on all of the pages, but hopefully you have worked that out at by now. Also, you can track sub domains in separate profiles, but you need to recognize if you are measuring goals that span subdomains you need to have them in the same profile.

Here is what you need to change on your Google Analytics code for multiple subdomains:

Add the following line (in bold) to the tracking code on all pages of your subdomain and your main domain:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>


<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._setDomainName(”example.com”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Note the above information was taken from the Google Analytics help page.

How to know if your code is installed correctly

Take a look at Site Scan by EpikOne. Site scan scans your website and checks to make sure the code is installed correctly. It is an excellent resource and worth using, especially if your department is organized enough to take advantage of it.

Note:

• If you are using Google Website Optimizer it will throw errors on the pages that have both Google Website Optimizer code and Google Analytics code.

How many of you are at a point where your Analytics data is accurate and providing you with information to improve your website?

This first article by Alex Papadimoulis, explains that all of your good employees will leave after a couple years because they have hit the apex of the benefits the company can give them. i.e. after a few years the employee gains less from the company, in areas as experience and improved skills. So the ambitious employees, the best employees, leave after a couple years to peruse other options to improve their skills. Now good companies can extend the duration good employees stay in the company but it is inevitable that they will leave eventually.

This second article on The Cost of Employee Turnover, explains the cost of the entire process of turning over an employee. Now, I do not suggest reading this entire article unless you have a reason to. The point is that the employer incurs a lot of costs that most employers do not even notice.

Note: Based on the data from the Cost of Employee Turnover article, for a $50,000 employee turnover can cost over $75,000.

The standard turnover process:

1. Employee states he is leaving the company
2. If the company is good then they place an ad for a new hire before the current one leaves.
3. The employer goes through the hiring process
4. New employee enters the company
5. New employee is trained
6. A lot of work, experience and knowledge that was completed by the original employee is lost in translation.
7. After two months or so the new employee starts producing valuable work.

Now that the standard process is laid out it is easy to see all the problems. First there is usually a significant time between when an employee leaves and a new employee is hired. Also, all the mistakes made by the first employee will only be repeated by the new one.

Solution:

The ideal solution that Alex stated in his article, is one where the leaving employee trains the new employee. True, there are a number of problems that can occur with this, but they are less significant then the benefits.

Benefits:

• No time between leaving and new hire
• No time sacrificed from coworkers to train - Note: many employers do not want to have the leaving employee train because they will be paying for two people to do the same job. When what ends up happening is the employer pays for 2 people to do no job at all, if they go with the traditional method.
• Drastically reduce the loss in experience and knowledge incurred by a leaving employee.
• Digital Permissions - the leaving employee will be able to contact all the people responsible for setting up permissions, on databases and so on.
• Training Management - in a position such as mine, when I leave I will spend upwards of 20 hrs creating documentation and training coworkers and managers how my job is done, then they go and train the new employee. It is fairly clear, how this will virtually be eliminated when the training is done by the leaving employee.

If my idea is so great why does it not normally happen

The reason is because it is easier to do it the way it has been done forever. And there is minimal risk involved, not to mention few have ever analyzed the actual cost incurred from employee turnover.

Final piece of advice

Think out of the box, I know you hear this a lot and you probably believe you do, but you don’t. if you are not upsetting people with your different ideas then you are not thinking out of the box.

What do you think? Does the company that you work for have the leaving employee train, or do they follow the traditional model?

I was reading this post by Bryan Eisenberg, on how to convince people in your company how important optimization is. It is a great read and has a lot of information, the only problem is that it is more complicated when it comes to colleges.

You can convince your boss and coworkers that optimization is important.

First off, as Bryan says in his post you need to make sure you get your math correct. And here is where it gets complicated, because it is not easy to measure the value of optimizing for someone who requests information about your college. It is equally difficult to measure the value of someone who requests a tour, and a little less complicated is to measure the value of someone who applies.

All of these measurements someone should know on campus, but as we have all experience not everyone does what they should so that leaves you to get the answers, or fake them.

The metrics and what they mean

We are going to do this in reverse, so the easy measurements first then we will build from there.

Values:

1. Enrolled student - The average value of an enrolled student should be easily available to you. Basically, you take the total amount of money that comes from all the student, then divide by the number of student and that will give you the average. There are also other values you can use, for example the quality of students, say the average SAT/ACT scores.
2. Accepted Student - A certain percentage of students that are accepted become enrolled. It is best to take the average rate over a few years if possible. Lets call this the enroll rate. If you are an open enrollment school then this metric is the same as completed applications.
3. Completed Application - A percentage of students who complete their applications become accepted students. We will call this acceptance rate.
4. Incomplete Application - A percentage of students with incomplete application will complete them. Lets call this completion rate.
5. Tour Request - A percentage of students who take a tour will start an application. We will call this apply rate.
6. Information Request - A percentage of students who request information will take a tour or just skip the tour and start an application. We will ignore this for now but it is worth noting when you get more advanced.
7. Visitor to your web site - Finally a percentage of students who visit your site will either request a tour, request information, or start an application. I include this because it is the important starting point to show your bosses the benefits of optimization. This is known as your conversion rate, basically.

Few, I am glad that is over, it is complex and not much fun. Lets do an example:

1. Enrolled student - average worth is $5,000
2. Accepted Student - rate accepted students enroll is: %87
3. Completed Application - rate completed application become accepted: %77
4. Incomplete Application - rate incomplete application are completed: %91
5. Tour Request - Lets say you do not track this well enough to get a measurement
6. Information Request - we will also ignore this saying it is not a reliable metric in this example. Your situation might be different. But you should be able to understand how to translate this into a usable figure.
7. Visitor to your web site - 100,000 in a month and 2% start an application. the 2% is your conversion rate for starting an application. This can change if you count information requests and tour requests as conversions.

Ugh so many numbers!!!! Finally we are to the math.

(100,000 x %2 ) x %91x %77 X %87 X $5,000 = $6,096,090

With a modest conversion rate increase from 2% to 3%

(100,000 x %3 ) x %91x %77 X %87 X $5,000 = $9,144,135

Conclusion

Now all these numbers are made up, but the point is to show how important conversion optimization is. Not to mention I currently am running an experiment where I expect a conversion rate improvement of %10, think about the benefits of that. Now for the percentages that you do not know, you can admit to not knowing them and make a good guess. Often times your boss will just recognize how important optimization is, in other cases he will see an interesting concept and help you to find the rates you are missing.

There are a number of ways to track a marketing campaign including using different phone numbers and websites. In this post I will touch on the importance of tracking and how to do it with the web. All this information will help you make the most out of your advertising budget.

In the beginning God created marketing

Marketing is essential in today’s business word, we all know that. But the huge gap between marketing departments and technology needs to close. This does not mean marketing needs to use technology as a medium to market; that is being done already. What it does mean is marketing needs to consult with IT to understand the numbers behind their advertisements.

Then God created things that can be measured

• E-mail’s
• Postcards
• Brochures
• Billboards
• Any ad with a call to action

Then god designed a way to measure each of these

All electronic ads like e-mail and pay per click ads can be measured by adding code to the links placed in the adds. If you use Google analytics and Google ad words than you do not need to add any code but you do for e-mails.

How to track e-mails

You want to tag links that are in your e-mails. Google has a good bit of information on how to tag links in their help files. Google also has a URL builder for quick easy URL creation.

How to track non electronic ads

This is all dependent on your call to action, but lets start with the basic idea that you send out postcards with phone numbers on it. Use a unique phone number for that post card so that the number of calls can be tracked.

Tracking using unique URLs

Basically you buy a URL for each piece of advertisement ( billboard, brochure …) and you have the URL redirect to the content you want the user to see.

Example: you want an ad campaign based around your new integrated studies degree. It is obviously terrible to design a billboard with the url, www.yourcollege.edu/integratedstudies. So you purchase is.yourcollege.com which is not the best URL but stick with me. In your hosting you have the URL redirect to

http://www.yourcollege.edu/integratedstudies?utm_source=integrated%2Bstudies&utm_medium=Billboard&utm_campaign=IS%2Bcampaign

I got that URL from the URL builder, the URL will tell Google Analytics that the visitor came from seeing your billboard.

And on the seventh day god rested while the ads were optimized.

Now that you can track all your ads, what can you do to improve them? Well start off with brochures, postcards and e-mail. Create 3 versions of each and send them out to a small portion of your mailing list, each with a unique tracking feature. I.e. for brochures and postcard each version needs its own URL, where the e-mail can use the same link just different campaign information. After a couple weeks see which brochure resulted in the most visitors to your site. Than send that one out to all the rest of your list. No more guessing what is the best way to design a postcard, you can now have measurable results to base your decisions on.

If you have ever said the following, ” My website is < insert some claim to complexity>, so there is no way I can test it.” you are wrong. Your website is not too complex to test, you can do it and you should have started months ago. There is a good article by John Quarto-Vontivadar titled The Price of Perfection, which touches on the importance of not lying to yourself and start testing.

What is website optimization?

First, if you are asking this question you are a step ahead of the game. Around 3/4 of e-comerce websites do not optimize their websites, so you are one step closer to increasing your job security. Now, take a look at the resources on the Google’s Website Optimizer website. In summery, you conduct tests to see what causes more users to convert.

Where do I start?

The starting point for college websites is unique in that most college websites lack concrete goals. Read my post on Excellent College Website Goals to learn how to establish goals for your site. For this post I will refer to Future Students section of the website for it is a site with high traffic and common goals for most colleges.

What should I test first?

There are lots of blog posts about what you should test first, here are two resources to help you get started: Prioritize Optimization, Introduction to Website Optimizer Webinar. For your first few tests, go to your future students page and find some major text or photos, then swap them with a couple other versions. Do not do too many versions at first, get a little experience under your belt before you do any complex testing.

What to test for a college website:

• Future Students landing page
• Apply Online buttons
• Request a tour button
• Test, offering incentives for tour request or information request forms
• Test the application process - this is a big one, if your application process is complex you will lose completed applications.

There is no limit to what you can test, so look at your pages and try new ideas. And remember if anyone has an idea during a meeting, do not allow that idea to be wasted. Just say you will test it to see if it increases your conversion rates.

So you don’t just want to keep your job, you want a promotion!

Now this is where optimization gets interesting, you want to increase user satisfaction so how can you do it, well a survey is the only real way to see if your users are enjoying the experience. How are you supposed to test if people are enjoying one version of the site or another?

This is more complex and less objective then normal optimization tests but in no way should this be ignored for college websites. Because every college website should have a goal of user satisfaction, often times it is difficult to find a goal page for a certain site, like the advisement office site.

How to execute it: simply create an a/b test with 2 versions of the page, and use any page as the goal page. Then include different surveys with the same exact questions, i.e. the same survey but the results go to different locations. This test will take a while to execute because you need enough data to have reliable information. Run the test until you feel there is significant data, best is 2 weeks to 6 weeks. Keep the surveys short no more than 6 questions, and one should be “What is your overall opinion of the site?” You can also use 4Q, which is a decent survey for such a test.

Optimize now and forever

Your site should constantly be tested and optimized. Your users change year after year and what might increase your conversions one year can decrease them the next. It can even be seasonal, don’t keep snowflakes on your page from a test in November when it is July.

Website goals are the most important base structure of any website, be it a college website or e-commerce site. Without goals the site can easily become a mess of pages with no unifying purpose. Which is the case with most college websites; the lack of unifying structure causes users to suffer through their navigation. Your design, marketing campaign, and optimization are all based off of good goals, so if you do not have goals already laid out this post is required reading.

Examples of the good the bad and the OMG-WTF !!!

Some OMG-WTF goals:

1. To provide information to the world
2. To sell our products
3. To get people to sign up
4. To provide information about the college

Some bad goals:

1. To provide information about cars to everyone
2. To sell our sinks
3. To get people to subscribe to our blog
4. To increase interest in the college

Some decent goals:

1. To provide information about cars to males between the ages of 16 and 45
2. To sell our sinks to new home owners
3. To get people to subscribe to our blog about <insert unique blog topic here>
4. To get prospective students to apply and to make it easy for current student to pursue their education.

At a first glance you would think that the decent goals are too confining and do not reach the goals of your company or school. This is not the case, because your goals can change as your school/business changes. For example, the current age of your visitors is between the age of 22 and 40, so a goal of providing information to an age range of 16-45 is an excellent goal. In the case of a college website, if your current goals are to get high school seniors to apply, then opening up the goal to all prospective students is quite the goal( If you have such a goal keep an eye out for the upcoming post on persons).

How to: make goals (soccer pun repressed )

Sit down and write them down on a piece of paper. If there are a number of people who work on the site make sure they sit down individually and come up with goals, then meet to decide which goals best represent the website. Well, it is not that simple, because the main point is to not cheat yourselves into creating weak goals. Make sure the goal is specific and related to your website’s current market.

What not to do:

Do not get in the habit of thinking that sub pages have a more specific goal than the main page. They don’t, they have the same goal with a more specific form of achieving that goal. This can be tricky and results in a lot of debated semantics, but in the end the goal of the website is the same as the goal of each page of the website.

Design with goals in mind

So you have goals, now how to design the layout, look, and structure with goals in mind. Take a piece of paper and have the landing pages at the top and goals at the bottom. Now think, how can I get a person from here to there. Normally, this involves complex persons and funnel processes, but those can not be decided until you have concrete goals.

Lets start off with a view of the most common misstates. Infomration request forms are known as Lead Generation in the internet marketing world. What does ths mean for you, well your information request form is a lead generation form. Therefor it falls into the same best practices category, i.e, “On a lead generation site, optimize form questions, try to shorten the time needed to fill out the form, and introduce ways for the visitor to take more control of when and how they’re contacted.” - Bryan Eisenberg

Common Mistakes,

Asking too many questions. This is a big one, lets take a look at some of the worst offenders to this rule.

1. Lewis-Clark State College - The form is almost 4 pages long !!!!!
2. Berkeley College - The form is long and it is also very confusing, the prospective student is supposed to create an account and then have a web page to request information… I don’t even know what is going on.
3. Dixie State College - Take a look for yourself, the form is almost as long as Lewis-Clark but does not look nearly as nice

So your school is not on the list of worst offenders, great! What can you do to improve your lead generation.

Take a look at a couple minor offenders:

1. Brooklyn College - So their form is shorter, not nearly as short as it can be. But the worst part is they ask the student to leave the site to get the college board code for their high school. Having someone leave the site is a guaranteed way to lose leads.
2. Gettysburg College - Not terrible, but they ask for clearly useless information, i.e. Nickname, and other information that might be useful but most likely not worth asking, i.e. Race, Gender, Sex.

Now, I was not able to find many great examples of information request in my quick searching but here is one example that is nearly ideal.

1. Southern Utah University - The form is as short as possible assuming they utilize every piece of information asked for. It is also clean and quick to fill out, no confirm e-mail or any repeated information. They should probably conduct an optimization test to see the effect of adding ‘preferred form of contact’ radio buttons.

Remember, the more applications you receive the better your school looks. Even if they are from students who do not meet your entrance requirements. Low acceptance rate ( applications relative to acceptance) is a major influence in college reviews such as the College Board or The Princeton Review.

Final point: Each additional field in a form reduces the number of people who will fill it out. So, if your boss says he wants such and such information, be absolutely positivity the information is used. And weight the loss in leads to the benefit of targeted mailings.

First things first, What is CrazyEgg?

CrazyEgg is an analytics tool that utilizes click mapping to gain a unique understanding of your users.

The Main Benifits:

1. You not only see what link they clicked on you see where on the link they clicked.
2. You can see if your users are clicking on parts of the page that are not links ( paid only)
3. You can view by time to click, i.e. how long it takes for a user to click on your call to action.
4. The confetti view (pic to the right) can separate out all the clicks based on Referees, Time to Click, Browser, and more.

So now that I sound like a typing CrazyEgg advertisement, let me get down to some honest truths. First things first, the heat map feature ( as seen in the pic at the top) is basically useless. It looks really cool, but does nothing for you, if you have a link that is more popular than other links you would expect it to have more clicks hence that is what the heat map shows you. It might be something you would want to show your higher-ups to get the funding. The plans are a little pricey when you can get other analytics software for free, but don’t ignore paying for a plan, the ‘paid only’ features are the most useful ones.

Best way to use CrazyEgg on a college website

If you are an important figure relative to the website then send an e-mail out to everyone telling them about CrazyEgg. And I would appreciate it if you linked them to this blog. If you are a webmaster or are in some way in charge of the website purchase a plan that works for your site. Then only use that plan for important pages that have recently been changed and are in need of analyzing. Have smaller departments sign up for the free account, so they can regularly keep track of their pages. And as before, if they ever need the features of the paid version then you set them up on a test with the paid account.

Also note: CrazyEgg is a test period based analytics software, which means you set up a test, let it run, then wait for results. Though you can see results before the test is complete.

Final Addition: In hopes of preempting e-mails asking what plan to buy here is my suggestion on how to save money: Find your average weekly visits for your most visited web page. Then purchase the plan that will fit the number of visits. This way you will test your highly visited site only when it changes, and the left over visits can be used for other sites.