This is the thrid article in a series entitled “A Systematic Approach to Bridal Shop Marketing“. In the last article, I showed you how to convert your bridal shop website visitors into prospects. If you’ve completed that step you are now driving tons of traffic to your web site and getting them to perform your calls-to-action. Now it’s time to focus on how you can measure the effectiveness of your website. Specifically, your website’s conversion rate.

As Bridal retailers, we routinely measure our closing ratio for our in-store product. We also monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns by tracking coupon codes, asking brides how they heard about us, and reviewing the “referring sites” in our web statistics software. The more retailers I talk to, the more I’m finding out that there has been little attention paid to the effectiveness of their website. In today’s world, simply having a web site is not good enough. Your web site MUST be doing its job of driving foot traffic in to your bridal salon.

Most web sites have a conversion rate of less than 1%. Conversion can be influenced by many different things: the placement of your calls-to-action, the quality of the web site visitor, how compelling your marketing copy is, etc. In the last article in this series we talked about how to establish effective calls-to-action. Now, we’ll look at how to measure your results using Google Analytics.

The rest of this post will assume that you are familiar with Google Analytics. If you are not familiar with Google Analytics, I advise that you read my previous post entitled Setting up Google Analytics for your Bridal Shop’s web site.

Now let’s look at the steps needed to measure your web site performance.

1. Establish web site goals
2. Measure
3. Tweak

Establishing web site goals within Google Analytics

Before you can measure the effectiveness of your web site, you must first establish “Goals” for your visitors to perform. These are the same as your calls-to-action and you must tell Google what they are before they can be measured. Before we get started, if you are a BridalLive Marketing Tools customer and would like to establish goals for your Marketing Tools submission, please read my previous post entitled How to use our Bridal Shop POS Software to measure website conversion.

To establish goals inside of Google Analytics click the “Edit” button next to your web site profile.

Next, you’ll want to add your goal. Click “Add Goal” on your web site settings page as seen below.

Next, you’ll want to name your goal and choose the “Goal Type”. If you simply want to measure how many times a web visitor visits a web page on your site, choose “URL Destination”. This is the easiest type of goal and the only one that we’ll discuss in this post. Now, enter the URL of the page on your site that you’d like to measure.

Once you’ve defined your web site goals, it’s time to start measuring.

Measuring your Web Site’s Effectiveness with Google Analytics

Google provides a lot of nice graphs and stats that help you visualize your web site’s performance. To view the Goals stats, navigate to the “Goals” section in the left navigation bar.

On the overview page, you’ll see a “Goal Performance” graph that shows how many conversions you’ve received and what percentage of visitors are converting. It’ll look something like the graphic below:

There are a variety of other great reports that Google provides within the “Goals” section of its Analytics software. Take a look through and be sure to visit often to keep tabs on how well your site is working for you.

Tweaking your website

It’s important to remember that measuring performance is only half of the equation. Once you’ve established the means to measure your performance, you must now work on improving your site’s effectiveness. Some things that you can play around with are:

1. Change the location of your Calls To Action
2. Simplify your home page
3. Make your Call To Action stand out more
4. Place your Calls To Action in more places on your web site

This concludes the discussion on measuring web site performance.

Follow the links below for the rest of this series:

1. Part 1: Your Lead Machine
2. Part 2: Conversion Principles
3. Part 3: Measuring Conversion
4. Pre-Appointment trust building and differentiation
5. Fostering post-sale word of mouth

Stay tuned via Email, RSS, or Twitter. You are not going to want to miss the rest of this series.

I hope everyone enjoyed the webinar last night on blogging. I’ve included some notes from the session below.

Getting Started with Blogging

3 Step process:

1. Install
2. Configure
3. Design

Installing your blog

If you don’t have a host like BlueHost that has a simple WordPress installation feature, then you’ll have to follow WordPress’s Famous 5-minute Installation

Configuring your blog

The most important things to remember here is that you want to make your blog “Public” by making the neccessary selection under the Privacy settings. After you’ve done that you’ll want to make sure your Permalinks are set up properly so that the links to your blog posts are keyword rich. To do this, set the “Common Settings” to use a custom structure of “/%category%/%postname%”.

One of the last steps in configuring your blog is to install plug ins. Here is a list of plug-ins that you’ll want to install:

1. Akismet – blocks spam comments
2. All in one SEO Pack – helps your posts be keyword rich
3. Google XML Sitemaps – builds a “map” of your site ans submits to Google and other search engines routinely.
4. Subscription Options – or something like it that allows people to subscribe to your blog.
5. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Shows a list of related posts at the bottom of each post. Great for keywords
6. Sociable – or something like it that allows people to book mark your site on social sites.

Designing Your Blog

When it comes to making your blog look pretty you have a few options.

1. Free Themes – search within WordPress to find and install free themes
2. Premium Theme – use a site like Templatic to find some really nice premium themes
3. Custom Theme – use a site like Elance.com to find a WordPress freelancer who can make a theme that matches your website

I’m looking forward to the next webinar where we’ll look at how you can measure website conversion rates using Google Analytics.

This year’s Tampa Seminar was amazing. There were some excellent sales and marketing sessions led by Jim Butler of Arizona’s Bridal Warehouse and Bridal Training Systems. Jim really knows what he’s talking about and if you are serious about growing your bridal business, you need to be paying attention to what he has to offer.

Jon Saltzman (Jon’s Bridal) gave 2 talks. One was for Newbies and the other was a great contrast between Special Order and Off-The-Rack shops. Lisa (Formals Of Litchfield) and Barbara (Mary and Tux) had a great presentation on how to make bridesmaids a more profitable part of our businesses.

On Monday, I spoke about “How to use today’s technology to gain a competitive edge”. During the talk, I gave away a few prizes. Angela Ng from Bridal Image in San Francisco and Lynn Atkins from Charlotte Bridal both won books. The grand prize, a FREE COPY OF BRIDALLIVE, was won by Beth Clark of Bridal Chateau. Congratulations to all the lucky winners.

Rachel and I enjoyed meeting everyone. We’ll see you next year!

The Better Bridal Group seminar starts Monday 12/7/2009. Are you ready? If you haven’t yet registered for the event, jump over to www.bridalconvention.net and get signed up already! Last year (although we couldn’t attend) there were over 50 bridal stores represented sharing their ideas and networking. This bridal seminar easily pays for itself.

This year I will be giving a talk entitled “How to use today’s technology to gain a competitive edge”. I’ll address how changes in marketing have allowed savvy bridal shops to leverage new technology products. I’ll also be demonstrating how you can turn your website into a lead generation machine. After that, we’ll do some hands on demonstrations of some excellent software products that can help streamline your marketing efforts.

There will also be some excellent sessions led by Jim Butler of Arizona’s Bridal Warehouse and Bridal Training Systems. His materials on sales and marketing are a necessity if you are an independent bridal shop looking to get ahead of the curve.

I look forward to meeting new shop owners and developing new friendships.