Let me explain.

Many people spend a lot of time or money (or both) trying to build more traffic to their sites, when in fact, they could easily increase sales with the SAME amount of traffic and NO added expense. But only if.

they knew what was wrong with their sites.

What do I mean by "wrong"?

I mean why aren't people buying as much as they could be?

Specifically, why isn't the visitor-to-sales conversion ratio as high as it could be? Something must be "wrong". Maybe it's the headline. Or maybe the pages load too slowly. Or the "Order Now" button is hard to find.

It could be lots of things. Question is, do you know what it is and, if not, what are you doing to find out?

In this article, I'm going to discuss how you can use tracking software to locate trouble spots in your pages. With this knowledge, you will be able to INCREASE your sales, with ABSOLUTELY NO increase in your current level of traffic. Sounds good, right?

As an example, I'll refer to a site that we recently built at http://www.b-better.com that sells a weight loss book.

Firstly, if you don't have visitor tracking software on your server or use a good client-side log analysis software, then get one! Today!

You need a tracking script or log analysis software that can tell you where your visitors are coming from, what the entrance page to your site is for each and every visitor, exactly what path those visitors take through your site, how long they stay on each page and if possible, what link they clicked on to leave (or they may have just quit their browser, that you can't tell).

The script we recommend and install for our clients is a free script called AXS and you can get it at http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/

Although it's been around for a few years without a major revision, it's still a good script, it gets the job done and it's free! OK, let's see how to analyze the information you get from your tracking script. I'll explain how we did this for the weight loss site. We were able to boost the visitor to sales conversion ratio from around 1% to a very respectable 8% - with NO change in traffic at all.

This site is designed around a sales letter spread over 6 pages. Ideally, visitors should read a page, click from one to the next, and finally place their orders on page 6.

Now using the AXS tracking script, we could see that the site was getting good solid, targeted traffic. The script indicates which engine a visitor comes from and what search terms were used. Very valuable information.

Analysis showed that many people read only till page 2 and then left. They stayed long enough on each page (the script can tell you that down to the second) to have read every word, but yet they weren't clicking through to page 3. And of those that were, a large percentage were leaving at page 5. They never made it to page 6 where the pricing info was!

Aha! Now we knew exactly where we were losing them! We knew where we needed to tighten up the sales letter. And we knew that the price wasn't the cause (or at least not the only cause) of the poor CR.

We made changes until we got visitors moving smoothly from page 2 to 3, and again from 5 to 6. Thanks to our tracking script, we could verify this easily.

Kaching! Time to order! But wait.

.. visitor to sales CR still hovering around 2-3%. Not good enough. Something was still wrong. By now, we knew for sure that the culprit was that last page. This was super valuable information that we would never have had if:

a) We had no tracking software installed

b) We had tracking software but we never bothered to actually ANALYZE the stuff (hello? does that sound like you?)

or

c) We had put the whole sales letter on one long page

In the case of c, we wouldn't know at which point it was that the sales letter lost it's hold on the visitor. The first few paragraphs? The middle? Where?

But we did know and so we were able to focus our changes on just those pages and sections that were at fault (that's what I mean by "wrong"). The final result?

A whopping 8 times (1% CR up to 8%) as many sales with the same amount and quality of traffic!

To recap, the steps to take are:

• 1) Install good visitor tracking software (either server side or client side)
• 2) Determine the sales path you want visitors to take through your site, from entry, to more info, to check- out.
• 3) Analyze the logs to isolate the pages where you are "losing" the visitors. Maybe your logs will show that too many people are getting distracted by irrelevant pages on your site that don't actually lead to a sale. If so, take those pages down.
• 4) Modify your pages, gather more data and re-analyze until you see improvements.

That's it! Follow this blue-print and within just a few weeks, you will see a MARKED jump in sales with exactly the same traffic. Now imagine what will happen when you really start to explode your hit counter?!