Baseline traffic and conversion measurements

[seopadawan]

I have a fairly well established web hosting site that has been flagging recently in signups and sales and I've just started to really take a look at trying to track my traffic and sales conversions. I just signed up for Google Analytics and am wondering if there are any baseline measurements I can use to judge just how much overall traffic I should be getting (although I know that's kind of a general query) and what percentage of those visitors should be signing up for services. Again I know that's kind of general and the definition of should can be interpreted different ways, but hopefully someone can give me some ideas to give me something to measure against. Thanks.

[AussieWebmaster]

Well chosen keywords on PPC will allow you to track as well as some analytics-enables for the website and you have a model for futgure growth even after variousb waves roll through the site

[beu]

You could also use Google Website Optimizer to test and optimize your landing pages. Doing so should help you to discover what works best for your site. As a result of this testing, discovery and optimization you should see an increase in conversion rates.

[Jazajay]

Hi
Coming in from a slightly differnet angle the average conversion rates for most websites is around 6% ecomerce do the worst job at around 2.3% and electronic ecomerce are at the bottom of the heap at only 1.2%.

However it is not impossible for you to get around 10%

On average it only takes 2 clicks to lose 54% of your visitors. If they clicked 2ice they are intressted otherwise they would have hit the back button first so you need to see.
a. how many visitors only click 2ice
b.WHY?

You can forget gimics as gimics tend to = lost customers.

The main thing you can do is
1.test it in FF and IE at least FF has around 10% of the market share.
2.Maximise click to information ratio.
Why not place a contact us form on the home page as you are into lead generation.
3.Make your site easy to use.
4.Stick with what people know blue links contact us not email us, a lot of people online wont notice the second one.
5.Text is read first online images are seen second if at all.
6.Ads aren't looked at much people are bomobarded with 1000's of ads today so they ignore them any thing that looks like an ad so any ads change them.
7.Watch some people use your site and see what they do. don't promt just give them a task and see how long they can complete it in, if they do, and what they click on and what they dont. Make sure it's some one who doesn't know your site.
Thats the best thing you can do