Virtual Entrepreneur

Boost Your Online Sales With New Software

January 23rd, 2007 | Author: MrMoney

New software lets you see exactly who’s doing what on your Web site.

BusinessWeek:
To announce a summer sale of its fire-polished beads, Shipwreck Beads e-mailed 76,000 customers and put ads on the Web sites of BeadStyle magazine and Bead & Button magazine, as well as on search engines.

The first day of the sale, Shipwreck, an 87-employee, $18 million company in Lacey, Wash., brought in $63,000. To keep the sales momentum going, it turned to Google Analytics, a free software tool.

‘I can look at who is coming in from an e-mail campaign or a Web site or who is coming in from keywords and different sponsors,’ says Pat Simmons, Shipwreck’s info tech manager and creative director. He reworked the copy on some ads and scattered the phrase ‘fire-polished beads’ through the site to improve its ranking on search results pages. By the end of the July sale, Shipwreck’s online ads were generating four times as many hits as they had in June, before the sale started. Sales for the first week – including the first day, which Simmons expected to make up the lion’s share of purchases – totaled $164,845.

If you’re not sure who is visiting your site and what they’re doing when they get there, it’s time to check out Web analytics services. There are dozens of packages available, and the Web analytics market is expected to grow to $652.5 million from $318 million by the end of 2010, according to IDC, the Framingham (Mass.) consulting firm. But only a few of the analytics packages out there are designed for small businesses, including software made by ClickTracks, Genius.com, Google, VisiStat, and WebTrends.

All the services let you track visitor movement through your site, so you can spot problems that need to be addressed. Most allow you to track how much traffic the keywords coded into your site are bringing from search engines and to compare the results of multiple pay-per-click ad campaigns. ClickTracks, Google, and WebTrends help you figure out whether visitors are buying products or completing registration forms, by calculating a metric known as conversion. And you can see which of your online marketing programs generates the biggest return on investment. Another plus: ClickTracks even aids in uncovering click fraud.

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New way to sell software transforms the industry

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