Business Tools

Free and Low-Cost Tools to Boost Your Web Sales

Brian Offenberger
Brian Offenberger's latest SEMA webinar provides details on the low-cost web tools available that help companies generate more qualified web raffic, leads and sales.

Save money on evaluating and enhancing the effectiveness of your website by following the tips and tools provided in the SEMA webinar presentation, “Low-Cost Online Marketing Tools You Need Now.”

During the session, presenters Brian Offenberger, CEO of the Aftermarketer Club, and Bill Leake, CEO and founder of Apogee Search, offered an array of tools that companies can use to evaluate their websites, improve web results and boost sales.

The presenters highlighted tools available in three areas:

  • Lead Generation Tools—Creating more qualified web traffic, leads and sales.
  • Web Effectiveness Tools—Determine your website's effectiveness and pinpoint what areas of your site need to be improved.
  • Conversion Improvement Tools—What you can do to turn your website visitors into actual customers. How many visitors come to your website and actually do what you want them to do.
The first category covered was conversion improvement, how to get visitors to do what you want them to do when they visit your site. The presenters recommended Google Analytics, a free tool that allows you to:
  • track all of the activity on your site;
  • discover conversion rates, the links people are clicking, time spent on the site;
  • learn where your visitors are coming from

Leake says that one of the most important things to measure on your website is what people do when they are there. “You want to determine where your visitors go on your site—what pages do they hit, what pages do they fall off of, what pages do they stay on for a length of time and, in a lot of cases, what marketing campaigns brought them there in the first place.”

According to Leake, Google Analytics is powerful, feature rich and gives you the same tools that companies may have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for through a web analytics company.

Another conversion improvement tool highlighted during the session was visitor eye tracking. Offenberger highlighted a tool from a company called crazyegg. The company provides a free trial that gives you the ability to see what people look at when they are on your web pages. Called heatmaps, the tool shows where people are clicking on your website, what visitors look at on a web page, how and where they scroll and more. The tool helps to make web pages more effective and guide visitors where you want them to go.

“The better you get [your website] tuned and optimized the more you are going to sell,” said Offenberger.

To further determine what visitors are doing on your website, Offenberger suggested a company called ClickTale, which provides a tool that records where visitors move their mouse.

“When they come to a page on your site, where are they moving their mouse? What are they going on? Are the scrolling up or down?” said Offenberger. “Finding out how visitors interact is a big part of making improvements and getting more sales.”

Download the rest of the presentation and learn how to determine which areas of your site need to be improved and ways to generate more qualified web traffic.

For more information on SEMA’s webinar program, visit www.sema.org/webinar.