This is a guest post by Neil Jones who is head of marketing for eMobileScan, who are one of Europe’s Leading providers to the AIDC industry. Specialising in Handheld computers like the Motorola MC9090 and the Datalogic Memor.

You can do this 1 of 2 ways, to count the amount of visitors you receive each day or you can track the actions these visitors take while on your site. One of these methods has outlived its usefulness and the other is what we as webmasters and site owners should be tracking.

Using traffic is no longer a useful way to gauge the success of your site. In truth, it’s the offsite factors that most likely brought the visitors to your site, either through your link-building efforts which have helped to improve your rankings, or maybe through your social interactions on Facebook or Twitter or it could just be that you are ploughing money into Google Adwords. Whatever tactics you use to bring people to your site, is only the first step and should no longer be a gauge of the success of your site.

What is vastly more important to the future success of your site is what your visitors do when they get to your site. Properly tracking their actions and counting your onsite conversions is a true gauge of the success of your site and as the internet continues to mature, more and more of us are realising this.

Why is traffic an out-dated metric?

Instead of answering this question, let me ask you one, would you prefer to have a 100 visitors a day and convert these at 2% or would you prefer to get 50 visitors a day and convert these at 5% ? Or if we look at it another way. What if you had half the visitors (50) but you were able to double your conversion, you would still end up with the same amount of conversions every day. But, as your visitors have halved, this could affect the amount of link-building you need to do, your adwords spend would be decreased and maybe the biggest advantage of all is that less of your time will be spent trying to generate more traffic. That time could be used on other areas of your business.

Why conversions mean everything?

Simple because they directly affect you!, if no one is buying how will you pay the wages this month? Traffic won’t pay your bills for your, sales will!

The next question

If you’ve read this far, I guess you’re probably thinking, it’s easier said than done and you're right. It takes time, persistence and determination but would you prefer to concentrate on increasing conversions or would you prefer the constant slog of building links?

Where to Start?

The first thing to do is to find out where your conversions are coming from , what keywords were used, what content was consumed and what calls to action brought that traffic to a conversion. If you don’t have any conversion tracking set up, then you are effectively blind to what is happening on your site.

Knowing where your conversions are coming from is your starting point, take the lessons you have learned here and apply them to the rest of your site. Once you do this, you then need to start thinking about how you can improve things, to do this you need to test.

Testing

Testing is not something that can be covered in a few paragraphs but here are the basics:

Commit to test for at least 6 months. If the first test is unsuccessful, do not give up. Testing is about small increases over time. So give your testing the time it needs before throwing in the towel.

You can visit his website at eMobileScan.co.uk.

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