The Most Important Website Usage Statistic

By: John Anghelache

How effective is your website at making sales?

One of the most important factors is to look at your website usage statistics and see how long people are staying on your site. Usually, the longer someone stays on your website the more likely they are to buy. Why is that?

The answer is simple. People searching online crave two things… and… one of them is content. Whether you have an e-commerce site or a simple sales site people still want good content before making a buying decision. Let’s look at how you can give them what they want in both cases.

For e-commerce sites providing good content goes beyond product description. You can also include helpful tips within your product description. Face it, most of the time, a product description makes for dry reading. It’s nothing more than a boring list of features. Spicing up the description with helpful tips will keep people on your web page. Tell them how they can use the product in various situations.

Which leads to another important point: What keeps people on your site is the… words. Yes, I know a lot of web designers insist on making sites with lots of bells and whistles. But it’s the words that keep the people engaged when shopping. Graphics, pictures and interactive stuff is nice if it somehow demonstrates the benefits of your product.

So each of your product descriptions should be written in a conversational style. And they should offer some helpful tips for using the product and deriving the maximum benefit from it. Again, video demonstrations are also a good idea to include but don’t rely on them solely. The words are what engage website visitors and persuade them to buy.

On the other hand, if you have a simple one-page mini sales site, your content must be valuable. Let me explain. The vast majority of sales sites are nothing more than obvious sales pitches. There is nothing wrong with that per se.

The problem is that a lot of people (once they realize the site is nothing more than sales talk) will just click away. To keep them on the site as long as possible you need another strategy. You need to include valuable information along with your sales message. For instance, you can give away some helpful information that the reader can actually use. And you can do this without disclosing proprietary information.

The whole point is to keep the website visitor’s attention on your site for as long as possible. You can accomplish this by making your site’s experience fun, somewhat entertaining and valuable. Make your product descriptions fun to read and give away tips that people can use to get the most out of the product you sell. Keep people engaged with good solid information. Add some graphics and even video that actually shows off the benefits of the product you’re selling.

If you do this you’ll notice your website usage statistics will show that people are spending a lot more time on your site. The more time they spend there the more chance you have of them buying something.