May 19, 2009
Your Visitors Are "Unique" in More Ways Than One!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) What's New at the Shared Self Publishing Experience
Keep up with traffic figures. See how large an audience a big, do-it-yourself site can draw.
2) FEATURE ARTICLE:
Use Google Analytics to Tailor Your Site to Online Book Buyers
You can now use the same traffic analysis tool the big boys use...and you can use it for free!
3) Zero Traffic to Analyze? Hmm...
You can only learn so much about your visitors' click patterns if you don't have any visitors!
4) New Pages on the Site
When you signed up for the newsletter, you were promised an update on new pages to the site. Here they are!
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Functionality Alerts!
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This email was designed to be read in an email reader that reads html. If you don't have one or yours is turned off, this letter might not look great but I'm guessing you're still smart enough to make sense of what I'm saying!
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1) What's New at The Shared Self Publishing Experience
Well, you may have noticed this: I skipped last month's newsletter! And I'm afraid I may have started a trend. I'm giving myself permission to scale back newsletter frequency a little. Too much other stuff to do!
Much of what I'm working on is occurring at my children's books site, so let me share some much more detailed traffic numbers with you than usual. (The REAL news this month is how I got these figures!)
The site is getting about 37,000 visits per month and upwards of 70,000 page views. But remember, I sell my own self-published ebooks on this site. In that same month I received:
- 1955 page views on pages where all the books are sold
- 765 page views on pages where the books are sold individually.
But here's something interesting. Visitors are spending an average of 2 minutes 49 seconds on the page where I sell my Picky Eater book, and only 26 seconds on my Pouty Child page.
That's a huge difference! I better take a look at my sales figures. If the Picky Eater book is selling better, I need to figure out why my visitors are spending more time reading the page and less buying the book. If the Pouty Child book is the bigger seller, I need to figure out what it is I'm doing to persuade people so quickly!
And speaking of that Picky Eater page: the search engines found my Lying Child page 75 times, while they only found the Picky Eater twice. Maybe I need to find a better keyword. And looky here...
Read on for how you can get such helpful statistics...for free!
2) Use Google Analytics to Tailor Your Site to Online Book Buyers
It's amazing how much Google gives us for free!
Have you discovered Google Analytics yet? Have you installed it on your website? If not, let me tell you what you're missing.
If your website were a bricks and mortar store, Google Analytics would be like you being there every hour of every day. But that's just the beginning. With Analytics, you don't just know what your customers buy, you know what they look at. You even know how they found your store!
There's too much to Google Analytics for me to spell it all out for you. Heck, there's much too much for me to even provide a vague overview! I can give you a taste though...
You'll know how people find you site. You'll know which page they arrived at and what search term brought them there. You'll know where on your site they went after they found that first page. There's even a "site overlay" feature that let's you see what percentage of visitors clicked on each link!
This is valuable data. I'll give you an example. On my children's books site, I learned that my home page is only my 7th most popular page. It only gets about 3% of my site's traffic! The fact that it's been getting about 50% of my attention tells me I could be making better use of my time.
Here's a phrase that should be part of your vocabulary: bounce rate. A page's bounce rate is the percentage of time that visitors enter your site via that page and then proceed to leave without looking at any other pages. Analytics also tells you how much time to the second the average visitor spends on a page. (This can be further broken down by what keyword brought them or which page they surfed from.) So imagine...
You're selling a thriller novel about a plot against the president's life. One chapter takes place in Afghanistan, and that's what you've chosen to excerpt on your site. That excerpt contains a paragraph about poppy production, and it turns out that 90% of your traffic is coming from the google search top heroin producing countries.
Your visitors are finding this page and bouncing back out at a 99% rate after visiting for all of 2 seconds. Not exactly good news...but good to know! Maybe you want to change your excerpt. Or maybe you want to sell heroin!
Just kidding. But look what you've learned. The overwhelming majority of your visitors are looking for something other than what you're trying to sell. They have no predisposition toward buying your book. (As opposed, say, to a visitor who arrives after Googling presidential thrillers.)
Assuming we can all agree that knowledge is a good thing, then Google Analytics is one of the best things you can give your website...and it's free. Let me tell you one way I'm using it...
I now keep a timeline diary of all changes to my site. Because Analytics lets you pick a date range for any of your stats, I can test the extent to which changes help...or hurt. For instance, I just switched from a text link to a graphic link to my behavior ebooks. I now know that I'm getting three times the clicks I did before. Prior to Analytics, I would have had to "go with my gut."
I guarantee you that you'll find much useful information about your site when you install Analytics, and I can pretty much guarantee that it's going to make you want to make changes. (Sorry!) When you see that your MWR (Most Wanted Response) link is only getting clicked on 0.4% of the time, after you finish crying you're going to want to do something about it!
You'll want to pay extra close attention to those "bounce rates" and "entrance keywords." If visitors are clicking away from a page with distressing regularity, perhaps you can do something about it. Perhaps you could do a better job of delivering on what the search engines sent them to you for.
In other words, if someone is looking for information on poppy production, give it to them! Presumably, you did the research when you wrote your book. Provide a link to another page on your site where you give the lowdown on top heroin producing countries, then tie it all in to your book!
The magic of Google Analytics is that it tells you precisely what's going on with your site. Who's showing up, what they're looking for, and whether or not they're finding it. And the price is right!
3) Zero Traffic to Analyze? Hmm...
The internet is a rather one-of-a-kind medium. Anyone in the world can advertise their wares at a marginal cost of $0.00 per visitor. Of course, the flipside of that is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a medium where conversion rates (turning a visitor into a buyer) are lower. Google Analytics can hammer that point home.
Getting 4% of visitors to click on a link can indicate a very successful link. Let's say that link leads to your sales page. What's a typical conversion rate once people arrive at your sales page? That's a hard question to answer, but research I've seen would seem to suggest anywhere from 0.1% to 0.5% for an author site.
Let's assume the upper end of that range. 4% of your visitors move on to your sales page, then 0.5% of them purchase. That's...
1 out of every 5000 visitors. How long does it take you to get 5000 visitors? If you're getting 10 visitors a day, you'd be doing well to get 1 sale a year! (Sales to people who know you will skew these numbers. The numbers I'm referring to relate to the typical search engine visitor.)
So let's look at what we've got: the cheapest advertising medium in history and the poorest conversion rates. Translation: to make it work, you need a LOT of visitors.
Is your site built for traffic? It could be.
If you're new to the newsletter, you might not know that I've written a lot about traffic-building techniques.
If you're a long-time reader, you know that I credit all my website knowledge and website success to a company called Site Build It.
They give you the tools and the knowledge to design and write a site that attracts traffic in big numbers. If you don't know what it takes to find yourself on page one of a search engine's search rankings (and most webmasters don't), Site Build It is the company that shows you how it's done.
Is your website performing? Are you giving Google Analytics anything to analyze? Site Build It is the answer.
Want some thoughts from me on what an SBI site in your niche might look like? Submit your existing site for my review. (But don't do it if you can't handle some constructive criticism!)
4) New Pages on the Site
When you signed up for this newsletter you were promised updates on new stories posted to The Shared Self Publishing Experience. Here they are!
Remember to read the comments. (Because when writers write back in response to my questions, sometimes that's where the best information is.) And please post your own comments as well!
Note: The posts I recommend most highly are bolded.
Religious Journey Toward Writing
"Partnership Publishing" in the UK
Viewpoint of an Independent Author-Publisher
Black People Don't Play Soccer
Cover Design by Book Cover Express
Clive's Website Blog
WRAPPING UP
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