A Clicks-to-Bricks Site Optimization Checklist

November 4th, 2009

checklist Because I live in the optimization world, I sometimes assume that certain web site strategies are common sense and obvious. I sometimes forget that the only reason why they are common sense and obvious to me: Because I analyze and optimize web sites all day, every day. That’s a bit of an unfair advantage!

At FutureNow, we work with clients in a variety of industries and business models: e-commerce, lead generation and catalog. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some clients who are driving traffic from their web sites to physical store locations. These clients share some basic challenges, so I’ve decided to cover things you should be focusing on if you’re an online business trying to drive traffic to a physical location.

First, decide what action you want your visitors to take. We know that you want your visitors to come off your web site and visit your physical location, but what actions do you want them to take ON your web site that demonstrate their interest in coming to your physical location? These are what we call micro conversion points. “Micro” because they are stepping stones on the way to some sort of purchase, which we call a macro conversion.

Here are some examples of actions a site might want the visitor to take to show their interest in moving forward. The following points should be tracked as micro conversion points, and you should optimize to increase these individual conversion rates.

A “locations” page where you feature your address and map with directions. If visitors get to this page, they are interested in where you are located, which shows strong motivation and intent.
Some sites feature a “Find the nearest location” tool.
Booking an appointment for a service or holding/reserving a product.
Contact us page, phone calls and emails are demonstrating that visitors are looking for answers to questions.

Tracking these micro conversion points is important, but it’s also important to follow through and track whether visitors who take these micro conversion actions are resulting in physical store purchases. Many companies track one or the other, but they seem to have a hard time tracking micro conversion rates on their web sites or they have a hard time connecting actions on a web site to actual sales in the physical store.

Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to get the right tracking in place to start seeing how your online efforts are resulting in ‘brick and mortar’ sales.

Tracking whether a store purchaser was originally a web site visitor:

Are you tracking all in-store purchases, asking each purchaser whether they went to your web site before they came to your physical store? This will help you find out general stats on how many visited your web site prior to purchasing.

Are you collecting email addresses and sending out surveys to in-store purchasers to find out how they came to your store?

For those who identify that they came to your web site before coming to your physical store, are you asking them if they already knew about your store and were just coming to your site to find the address/location or to call the store?
Are you asking them whether they were actually searching for something online, and found your web site as a solution to a problem (and didn’t yet know about your store) and they only found out that you had a physical store from your web site?

Tracking phone calls from listed phone numbers on your web site:

Is the phone number listed on your web site unique from other marketing efforts so that you can track it separately?

Is the phone number you list on various pages unique from the other pages on your site? In other words, if you feature a phone number on the about us page, is it a different number than the one on your contact us page? This would help you identify what pages visitors are making a decision to call from, and will also help you identify what types of things they are asking after visiting specific pages on your site.

Are you collecting enough information from the caller on the phone, so that you can match this up if the visitor turns into a sale in the physical store location?

Purely “clicks and mortar” E-commerce sites see the importance of optimization before the Holiday Season because it directly impacts their sales online. “Bricks and mortar” companies that use their web site to drive traffic to their physical store don’t see the direct impact as strongly, but this could be because they aren’t tracking the impact effectively. If you’re in this situation, use some of the tips above to begin tracking and optimizing. You still have time to optimize for the holiday season and beyond!

In Analytics, Customer Insight, Improving Conversion, Local, Optimization Tactics, Retail, Web Analytics, Website Optimization

Add Your Comments

Comments (27)

MAS
November 4th, 2009
11:45 am

Great piece!

Also like the bit about metrics and measurement of response behavior.

in the end if one can localize presence on the web with useful local info, you can convert web interest into foot-traffic!

Thanks!
MAS
Mathieu
November 4th, 2009
1:31 pm

Probably a Live Chat option in the website can help people get answers for first few queries/doubts that might prevent them from walking into the store. What say?
Eric
November 4th, 2009
7:11 pm

I have different email address for different things just for this reason. I know that its not always accurate, but I can usually tell where someone came from just by what email address they send the email.
John Chan
November 4th, 2009
10:00 pm

Great article. Multi-channel tracking is really hard as you need an integrated solution for that from phone to website to other channels.
art
November 4th, 2009
11:04 pm

found a great tool to track keywords that generate phone calls…click to call ratio’s. Each keyword has a unique phone number.
Insurance
November 5th, 2009
3:06 am

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mik
November 5th, 2009
4:25 am

thanx that was Great article
Nyubi
November 5th, 2009
5:01 am

Nowadays optimization is a must!
Thanks for the article, spot on indeed
Raisins
November 5th, 2009
5:52 am

That’s a good effort you have put on the network through your blog. Multi-channel tracking is really hard as you need an integrated solution for that from phone to website to other channels. I appreciate your work.
Mohsin
November 5th, 2009
7:59 am

Hey Melissa.I read your “U2 Experience” article and commented there too. Then I thought that I would try to be as regular here as possible. Even these one do provide good piece of info. How about using Google Analytics to track the user activity on my page?
searchlens.org
November 5th, 2009
8:51 am

If you want customers to visit your site they might need to have a teaser. One example could be discount coupons that are available only at the website. They could have unique number, so you know where they are coming from.
nigeria flights
November 5th, 2009
10:58 am

Well, it all right. Actually different experts of site optimization do their own comments. But some things are very essential in this regard.
If designer do their best in design of the site, content writer also do their best and then person responsible for marketing or optimization also struggle for his best then it is confirm no other thing is better regarding the optimization of the site.
Erik
November 6th, 2009
2:32 am

Those are some considerate points you have made. A lot of business are just now figuring out that you can drive business from the web to your local store. I have to say that Google Maps is a very good technique.
AditechSEOService
November 6th, 2009
4:13 am

Hey..
thanx for sharing such a informative article..
kaos
November 6th, 2009
10:27 pm

Great artickle.I will begin Optimize my site.
Essay writing
November 7th, 2009
2:09 am

Great post to optimize u can also use Google analytic it will be more helps to see the source of traffic and we can track easily
Samantha Edwards
November 7th, 2009
5:16 am

I just started optimizing my site and I’m still searching some of the link building strategies.
News Publishing Script
November 7th, 2009
10:10 am

This is an great piece of work, website are no doubt becoming tools for converting web traffic into foot traffic. I really liked the bit about having different phone numbers.
Although Google analytics is good but its always better to keep trying new things.
Blast Off Network
November 8th, 2009
10:27 am

Great tips. I would also recommend that a site owner be very keen on the ease of use aspect of the site. Nothing drives me more nuts then having difficulty navigating through a site.
seo tips
November 9th, 2009
12:22 am

Driving real traffic(to physical location,local store) from virtual traffic (website) is possible if you are looking only from local point of view.Why waste time on optimizing these ‘locations’ page .There are not many online business which can survive from local customers alone.
Chat Line
November 9th, 2009
5:56 am

we all feel recession chills, that’s why we have to think of a good cost-effective way to survive…
Creative Design
November 9th, 2009
12:24 pm

I will be taking this into consideration for my next e-commerce site.
sökmarknadsföring
November 10th, 2009
6:00 am

Gr8 man, I ll fallow this list to make my things easy…
Cheers,
Personal injury claims
November 12th, 2009
4:06 pm

Tracking offline leads is one of the simplest pitfalls I come across. You wouldn’t believe the number of companies who just advertise their normal domain name (with no tracking appendage) and listed the same sales number as on their website!
Predictive Dialer System
November 13th, 2009
1:21 am

Great post . Another Idea that you can use is .. on your website you can give out a 5% or 10% discount code that each visitor can get and use when they visit the store .

This way you give them a discount which means more sales and also you know which customer actually visited you thru the website .
Dieta
November 15th, 2009
4:08 am

Good Insight Thank you very much. I’m going to put this too good use.
Tom Wanek
November 17th, 2009
9:19 am

Tracking phone calls from the site is a big one. I know of many e-commerce outfits that don’t even have a separate phone number from its brick-and-mortar store. And tracking is almost non-existent.

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