A new proprietary analytics dashboard that gives art sellers and printing companies a complete, linear view of their conversion funnel.
When you’re in the business of selling art, or you’re printing art for others, traffic is precious.
Maybe you have enough of it, maybe you don’t.
Maybe you think you need more traffic because you are not seeing sales, when your real problem is that you just need to convert the traffic you already have.
Regardless of which situation you are in, there is one indisputable fact that remains:
Traffic is expensive, hard to obtain, which therefore makes it a very precious commodity and you should treat it as such.
Because, if you want to maximize your art sales, you simply need to convert as much of your traffic into paying customers as possible. It’s as simple as that.
This is why the 20 Must Have Features to Sell Art Online are so crucial. This is why displaying Trust Elements are so crucial. This is why your home page must be set up as a page of subject matter categories in order to minimize bounce rates and should not be some big slideshow of images, which we’ve already documented as a conversion killer.
An Example
Let’s look at a practical example.
Let’s say you currently get 100 unique visitors per month and have a website that converts at a 1% conversion rate.
This means you will convert 1 order per month. Let’s assume your average order size is $200. This is $200 per month, or $2,400 per year. Are you following me? Good.
Let’s assume it is possible to improve that conversion rate to 3%. This means you will convert 3 orders per month.
It sounds like a small improvement, but it is not. It’s a 200% improvement – instead of earning $200 per month in sales, you’ll be earning $600 per month! And instead of earning $2,400 a year in sales, you’ll be earning $7,200.
That’s an income increase of $4,800 just by converting the precious traffic you have at a slightly higher percentage.
Do you now see how important it is to maximize the conversions of the traffic you already have? Great.
Maximizing conversions of your existing traffic is the easiest, simplest, cheapest, and most immediate way to make more money. It doesn’t require you to improve your SEO and rely on Google for results. It doesn’t require you to buy advertising or spend more money to bring more fish into the boat. Besides, none of this makes sense when your boat is already leaking. It’s leaking conversions you could already be making.
And for those who are playing with larger numbers, the differences become even more significant. Just imagine if you were doing $20,000 per month, and you increased your revenue to $60,000 (a 200% growth), just by optimizing your conversion rates. That’s serious money.
But now that you can see the importance of maximizing your conversion rates, you can see how important a role technology plays in determining how much money you will make from your art business.
Enter The Conversion Doctor
Maximizing your conversion rates is so important, that we decided to build one of the most exciting features ever announced here at Art Storefronts.
It is another feature that does not exist anywhere but here.
Furthermore, if you understand and care about conversion rates as much as we do, this feature is likely to impact your business over the years far more than any other feature we currently provide.
Today, we are proud to announce the release of The Conversion Doctor.
The Conversion Doctor is the first-ever “conversion dashboard” that allows you to see every single step of the conversion funnel for all of your traffic sources.
This isn’t any old boiler-plate dashboard of conversion metrics. Oh, no. This is a conversion dashboard specifically designed for those who either sell art online, or sell art & photo printing services online.
How it Works
Let’s say you’re an artist or photographer and you want to analyze the quality of a traffic source such as Google Organic.
With The Conversion Doctor, you can see what percentage of your visitors became a contact (i.e. “Contact Conversion”). You can then see the percentage of visitors that actually reached a shopping page.
Then, you can see the percentage that actually reached an individual product buying page. After that, you can see the percentage that actually added something to their shopping cart. And finally, the percentage of visitors that completed a checkout.
What the Conversion Doctor Can Do for Art Sellers
If you’re an art seller, watch this video and see how quickly we are able to diagnose conversion problems of several photographers.
These are photographers who otherwise have built seemingly great websites.
After watching this video and implementing the advice, these photographers are going to dramatically improve the performance of their websites and their sales for years to come, thanks to the Conversion Doctor.
Read the transcription from this video
Welcome to the Success Coaching Video Series, and in this video we’re gonna focus on one of our newest features, the Conversion Doctor.
The Conversion Doctor is a dashboard that shows you exactly what is going on with all of the traffic of your site. For example it shows you when a contact is created on your site, or in other words, a lead is captured. It shows you when your visitors visit a shopping page.
It shows you when they actually visit an individual product buying page, that means they’re looking at a specific image and they’re contemplating whether they’re going to add it to their shopping cart, and they’re probably looking at your pricing and your options, and then of course, the add to cart conversion rate, which is the action of when they actually add something to their shopping cart, and then the checkout.
So this shows the entire funnel that we want you to see as an art seller from start to finish. And the purpose of this is so you can diagnose your traffic, your site optimization, and your setup problems so that you can maximize sales from the traffic you receive. Now before we get started, what I wanna point out is that this Conversion Doctor is a feature that you will only get at Art Storefronts.
This is not something that you can replicate in your Google analytics. So what we’re gonna do now is audit a few of our customers and show you how you can do the same using this Conversion Doctor. First, we’re gonna look at Dave Sansom Photography. So Dave is a golf course photographer here, and he’s got a great home page of subject matter categories. This is fantastic, and fantastic photography overall, the quality of the images are really good.
And Dave is new to the platform, and he reached out to us to ask us to see, y’know, what we saw with his site, after he has launched and has collected some data. So now going back to the Conversion Doctor, for a period of the last 30 days or so, we can scroll down and see a couple of issues here. So the first things first, is we can see that, for contact created with the lead capture tool that he’s implemented, he is capturing 62% of his direct visitors to sign up to his e-mail list. This is a fantastic number, so great job on this, Dave. I went ahead and loaded your lead capture tool on this page here, so that I could look at it. I think this is pretty good here.
I think you could be doing better. I think maybe if you changed the opacity of this background image, I can’t read what this says here. There’s also a lot of text, maybe you can make it a little bit more concise, but it’s forcing me to scroll, as you can see, so I think that you could probably optimize this a little bit and do better, but given the numbers that you’re getting right now, that is really good, in particular on your direct traffic.
What I’d like to see, though, is your Google/organic traffic I’d like to see this number be higher, like in the 15 to 20% range, so you don’t have a ton of Google/organic traffic yet, I know you just recently got started, but this is a number that you’re gonna want to look at.
So going forward, looking at the number of people that are visiting a shopping page here, your direct is 11.25, your Google/organics is 61.82. Going to your product buying page, this is good, you’ve got people coming right through to your product buying pages, 8.21%, 41.82 on the Google/organic. Seeing that your Google/organic is only 55 visits here, that’s not a lot of data, so these numbers can be, like, abnormally high, and this lead capture could be abnormally low, so like I said, just keep a look at it, I would expect these to balance out maybe a little bit more, but the big issue I see here that the Conversion Doctor is showing us, is that you have a bottleneck right here. So for whatever reason, these people are not adding something to your shopping cart even though they are on a product buying page.
So this right here is a perfect example of how the Conversion Doctor immediately points you to the exact problem on your site, and you’re not sitting here for months or years with the exact same website, wondering why people are not buying and what it might be. Is it your home page, is it this, is it your pricing, is it that, you immediately know that visitors are getting to where you want them to get, however they’re not taking this specific action.
So the first thing we wanna do is go to the product buying page and see what we see. So let me go ahead and do that, and I’ve come right here to this page. Now, the thing I notice here immediately, and I think this is your biggest problem right now, is you’ve got a scrolling navigation bar, which is part of the feature of the sleeve theme. However, you’ve added this extra section down here, with your phone number and date, hours of operation, and your e-mail address.
This is great information, but it does not belong here. This information should go somewhere else. Maybe down in your footer, maybe in a header area, like around here or something of that nature. There’s gotta be somewhere else you can put that. Because it’s blocking these tabs, and a lot of your shopping options. I mean it’s, you can see here on this screen, it’s taking up, y’know, a decent percentage of the screen now, probably like, I don’t know, 20% maybe.
And otherwise it would take a much smaller, it would probably only go to about right here otherwise. So you need to immediately remove this and find another place for it, because this may be the sole reason that people are not you know adding things to their shopping carts. So that’s the first thing you need to change. Now when it comes to media types, I don’t think you have any problem here. I can see you’re using Skyline Art Prints, one of our fulfillment partners, and they’re all great media options here.
You’ve got a range of fine art paper, canvas, metal, photo paper, metallic photo paper, and even a wall decal, there’s no issues there. If I click on Size, I can see you’ve got a lot of different size options you’re offering, so there’s no problem in your product offering. There’s certainly no problem with your pricing.
I mean you’re offering things from very low to very high here, so there should be no reason why anyone’s not buying anything, I think your biggest problem is that your extensive navigation here just seems to be blocking the buying experience, and making it difficult on people. So I would go ahead and remove that immediately, and I believe that will resolve your bottleneck.
Now the next artist we’re gonna look at is photographer Robert Jones here. And as you can see, Robert takes some very, very nice photographs of, you know, old cars, and some different types of subject matter and does a pretty good job of selling them. Now after looking at Dave Sansom, who is a new customer, let’s look at Robert Jones through the lens of the Conversion Doctor for the same time period. So instantly when you look at his traffic here, you can immediately see something standing out.
Robert Jones does not have a lead capture tool implemented and so he’s only collecting 1.90% of the e-mail addresses of people actually visiting his site from the direct. If we go back to Dave Sansom, we can remember, he’s collecting 62%, think about that, that’s 62 out of 100 that he’s collecting. So out of 329, that’s a pretty significant number. And for Robert Jones, 1.9%, that’s roughly two out of 100. And so remember we put an article out about the caveman versus the romantic art seller. And one of the most important things is collecting an e-mail address of the people who are interested in your subject matter. Why? Because not everybody, in fact, the vast majority of people who visit your website, are not ready to buy right now.
They will be ready to buy it later, when the timing is right for them. They may not have a spot on their wall for something, they may need to give this to somebody as a gift, such as a spouse, but rarely do people come to your website on the first visit and have an immediate need to buy.
And so capturing their e-mail address is the way that you really monetize the traffic that’s coming to your site, because once you get their e-mail address, you can follow our e-mailing strategies and make sure that you stay in front of your audience, you stay relevant, you show them new content, you build a connection with them, so that when the timing is right, you have a huge advantage over art.com or SaatchiArt or any other art seller out there, because you actually have a relationship and a connection with your potential customers as opposed to these other cold websites who do nothing of that nature. They can never do what you do.
All they can do is just send out general messages, but you can actually really dive into the connection that these people have, psychologically, with your subject matter. So adding the lead capture will return a huge number for you in terms of future sales. And it’s a big gap right now, and it’s gonna be a big gap every single month that you continue to progress without capturing those e-mail addresses.
Okay, so after that, I see your shopping page visits from direct are 38%, only 19.8% and 7.69 on Bing, again Bing, these numbers are really low, so they’re hard to look at, but for your direct traffic, your 38% is not bad, but if only 38 out of 100 people are visiting a shopping page, that means just literally clicking into a gallery page, like a store page, or a product gallery page as we call it. Only 38 out of 100 visitors that are coming to your site are actually getting that far.
Same with Google/organic, only 19% are actually getting that far, and so if we wanna look at Google/organic in particular, and I think this is good, because these are largely fresh people coming to your site, you can see the 82% are new sessions, versus people who already know you, maybe coming back, maybe it’s people who work in your company, you know so this data can get a little bit messed up. But your Google/organic is pretty fresh. And so if you look at, you’ve got a 19.8% Google/organic, if I go back to Dave Sansom, I look at, and he’s got a 61.82, so he is literally getting twice the amount of people to look at his images than you are. And so why is that? Let’s take a look.
If I go back to your home page here, I notice that you are committing one of the worst mistakes that we have identified with artist and photographer websites, and that is having a big slide show of images on your home page. This is the worst thing that you can possibly do for your sales. It is like putting a big wall in front of your visitors, saying Here, wait, just stop right here, you can’t look at anything I’m showing you, you need to stop and wait, and look at the four or five or seven images that I’m going to show you on my time frame. This does not work. We have plenty of articles, too many, that have shown how bad this is for your shopping, but it’s pointed out right here in the Conversion Doctor. You’ve got a problem right here with that.
Again if I go back to Dave Sansom’s home page, you can see he properly has a gallery of subject matter categories, which is what we recommend doing. You can do this with a product gallery page. But immediately, people need to see what your content is when they land on your home page. And from here they start clicking in, they get into your shopping pages, and then you actually have a chance of them getting to your product buying page and adding to cart and so forth. Now if my analysis is correct, I would expect to see high bounce rates from your visitors as well.
And remember a bounce rate is the percentage of people who immediately leave after visiting your home page, or while they visit your home page. So it’s, they land on your home page, they don’t like what they see or they get frustrated, and they immediately leave.
So if I go back to the visitor stats here now, we can use the Conversion Doctor to look deeper into other statistics. And so here, let’s look at your bounce rates. So for Google/organic, we’re looking at 61.07%. That means that 61% of the people who visit your home page are immediately leaving, that’s six out of ten. That’s an extremely high number.
Now if I go back and I compare it to like, Dave Sansom, for example, his Google/organic bounce rate is only 27.27, so he is a third of what you are, and obviously a part that we’ve documented is having a gallery of subject matter categories is what resolves that problem.
So what I wanna show, is that if I go back to the Conversion Doctor here, you’ll notice these little blue tooltips here, and this is for everyone, if you have a bottleneck at any specific stage, all you have to do is hover over these tooltips, and we’re gonna show you the different articles and tutorials that you need in order to resolve this specific bottleneck or problem. So you can see right here we’ve got the specific ones that I would want you to watch, Robert, is Lesson One and Lesson Two, specifically Lesson One on site optimization, your home page, a gallery of subject matter categories.
This will solve your problem and in subsequent months, you can run another Conversion Doctor report here in your dashboard and find out what improvements have been made. So as you can see the Conversion Doctor is a very valuable report, it will help you diagnose problems immediately, and stop you from wondering what is happening with your visitors and why they’re not buying and instead help you to focus on the problems with your site, the bottlenecks, because once you resolve all of these bottlenecks, all of a sudden, people start flowing through.
All the way from becoming a lead to visiting your product pages to actually making sales, and once that bottleneck is broken and it’s working, then the sales start rolling in consistently.
And that does it for this video on the Conversion Doctor. We hope you enjoy this tool and you start using it as soon as possible and make it a regular part of your monthly routine.
What the Conversion Doctor Can Do for Printing Companies
Or, let’s say you’re a fine art and photo printing company and you want to analyze the performance of your website; specifically, what percentage of your visitors are actually reaching your upload page, what percentage are actually taking the step to upload, and what percentage of these are actually buying.
If this is you, watch this video and see how quickly we are able to diagnose multiple problems of an Art Storefronts customer using the Conversion Doctor:
Read the transcription from this video
Welcome to the Art Storefronts success coaching video series. In this video, we’re going to highlight one of the newest features in Art Storefronts, The Conversion Doctor. And here, we’re gonna focus on using The Conversion Doctor with fine art and photo printing companies.
So The Conversion Doctor is the first conversion dashboard that has ever been created for art and photo printing companies who are receiving files from customers who upload them, right on their website, and who proceed to a buying page. They may crop the file during that process, and then they proceed to add that product to their shopping cart and checkout.
Now within that process I just mentioned, is an entire funnel of conversions.
And what we have found, is that there can be significant bottlenecks at every step of the process, depending on the way that you have set up your website, your text, your pricing and your entire user experience on your website. And now The Conversion Doctor is going to diagnose your traffic and your site optimization and your setup problems so that you can maximize sales from all of the traffic you receive. And traffic is precious and so maximizing every bit of it, is a goal that you should have.
So to show you how to diagnose problems through The Conversion Doctor, we’re going to work with ChromaZone Ink, which is a fine art and photo printing company that we work with. So going back to The Conversion Doctor dashboard here, we’re gonna start looking at their statistics.
So the first thing that stands out to me, over the last 30 days, is your contact created conversion rate. It’s extremely low. So you’re only collecting at five percent on your direct traffic. And this is a direct result of not having a lead capture tool implemented.
So something that’s interesting here, if you look at the percentage of contacts created and the percentage that have added something to their shopping cart, you are literally only collecting the email addresses of people who are likely adding something to your shopping cart.
And then half of them are checking out. And so, you’re leaving a ton of people on the table here that would have signed up for your email list and are interested in you, they just weren’t ready and prepared to upload a photo and buy something from you that day. The problem is that once they leave your site, you never know who they are, they may never come back, they may have already bought from a competitor or they’re considering doing so and you’ll never know who they are. And that is the point of having lead capture.
So just to give you an example of another customer, Atom Prints here, is a fine art printing company that we’ve documented before. But you can see, they’ve got a lead capture tool on their site. And they also, you know, they do fine art giclee printing. They are a, you know, hahnemuhle using printing company, so they’re doing very high quality stuff over here.
And if we look at their statistics, during the same period, take a look at this. So, with their direct traffic, they’re collecting 35.5% with the lead capture tool. That means that 35 out of 100 are signing up. So you can see, they’ve also got a higher Add to Cart Conversion rate and a Checkout Conversion Rate. So those are things that we can go into, you know, after the fact with this Conversion Doctor. But first and foremost, these numbers right here are extremely important.
So, unlike, you know, your direct traffic here, you’re only getting five percent, you can see that Atom Prints, getting 35%, that means that out of 100 people, they’re getting, actually, you know, nine people to Add to Cart. But let’s just say it was five, like yours is right now, that means that they would be getting 30 other email addresses of other qualified artists and photographers, who potentially might want to buy from them. And the reason I say qualified, is because the lead capture tool is something that pushes away the tire kickers, and really qualifies the people who have an interest in what you’re doing.
And so, in Atom Prints case, if you’re a professional artist or photographer, and you’re looking to get prints made, and the lead capture tool comes up, and there’s a nice offer there, and, you know, they promise that they’re gonna send you some information and help you become a better artist or photographer, there’s a lot of things that you can do with a lead capture tool, but, you know, the main thing is, providing a first time customer discount.
Not subsequent discounts, but a first time customer discount, in order to raise your conversion rate. And that’s how these numbers tie together. You’re not only gonna get more email addresses from people, but you’re gonna actually get more people to execute on the lead capture and on actually placing an order with that first time customer coupon. And so, Atom Prints, using the lead capture tool, is getting a higher conversion rate and he is acquiring more customers, obviously at a higher percentage here, with his traffic.
All starting with that lead capture tool. So the moral of the story is, going back to ChromaZone’s Conversion Doctor report here, you can see, is that the consequence of not having the lead capture tool, is that you are just earning a lower or ROI on your traffic.
And in your case, traffic is very precious because you don’t have very much of it. Now the next thing I notice, in the next step in the conversion funnel, is the Upload Store Visit Conversion Rate. So as you can see here, your direct is 17.86 and your google organic is 39.44. If I want to compare the direct, which are usually people that know your business, with the same for Atom Prints, you can see, you have a 17.86% Upload Store Visit Conversion rate. And they have a 21.76% Conversion rate.
So, it’s about double what you have. And these are just people who take the step of visiting your Upload page. Now it doesn’t mean that they actually uploaded because as you can see, people will drop off on the Upload page, and this is something that everyone can optimize. Why are these people not uploading a photo? What information is not there that they expected to see? A good way to actually solve that problem, is to ask your customers to add a Chat tool on that page.
And you don’t have to man the Chat tool 24/7. There’s great Chat tools, in facT we have one in our knowledge base, that we recommend called Zopim, Z-O-P-I-M. You can implement it on any of your pages during the checkout process and get your customers to ask questions. And typically, when someone asks you a question, you can assume that there’s at least 10 other people who had the same question, but didn’t do anything, they just left your site.
But going back to ChromaZone here, you can see that as you get to the Uploaded Photo, your numbers get even lower, the Product Buying page, I could see that these numbers are jumping up a little bit. This is good. You may wonder why the Uploaded Photo is lower than the Product Buying page and this is because you have customers that are coming back, who have already uploaded a photo.
And so, if they come back to the Upload Store, and they click on an image they’ve already uploaded, and they don’t upload anything, they’re gonna go back to the Buying page and start the buying process. And so that’s actually a good sign that you’re retaining some customers and they’re coming back and shopping. So that is a good sign. Now going one step further, we get into the Add to Cart and the Checkout Conversion rate. I think there’s some troublesome issues here, these numbers should all be higher.
As I’ve showed with Atom Prints, they’re looking at, you know, eight and nine percent up here, with a six percent conversion rate. This google pay per click, this is for pay for click ads, so you wouldn’t expect a really high conversion rate, although I think Atom Prints could do better than this.
So this is an area of opportunity, is to figure out why these people are dropping off so much after adding something to their shopping cart. This is where you can go into the Unsold Carts section and potentially look at trying to bump up this number because there’s too many people that are lingering there, just not checking out. And so, as you can see, The Conversion Doctor report here, is extremely valuable.
We’ve just spoken about, you know, maybe three or four really high value opportunities to think deeply about the experience you’re providing to your customer from the time they land on your website and whether you’re capturing their email address to whether they actually visit your Upload Store and whether they upload an actual photo, whether they reach the Product Buying page and whether they add something to their shopping cart and then check out.
There’s a lot of issues that can happen in between there. But that’s where all of the money is. And so the purpose of this Conversion Doctor report, you can see, is to get you focused on all of the right problems and opportunities immediately, so that you can start solving all of them and maximize your sales from the traffic you’re receiving. And so, one thing I wanted to point out here, is these little blue question marks. If you have a bottleneck in any of these areas, we highly recommend reading the articles that we have placed in here.
So that they can help you to resolve the bottleneck. We’re gonna give you ideas, and we’re gonna give you information about what is happening with other fine art and photo printing companies on our platform, that have experienced these problems, that have resolved these problems, so that maybe one of those is yours and maybe not. But it will get you thinking about exactly what the problem you’re experiencing is, and how to potentially resolve it. And as always, feel free to go into our Member Forum to ask any questions if you feel like you’ve hit a rut. And that’s it for now on The Conversion Doctor report.
We hope you find it extremely valuable and that you make it a regular part of your monthly routine. You should be looking at this regularly because it’s gonna help you make a lot more money from your Upload tool and from the visitors and the traffic that are coming to your website every single day. Thank you so much.
Wrapping Up: What You Need to Know
The main purposes of The Conversion Doctor are to:
Help you diagnose critical problems that are preventing people from ordering
For example, you may have a decent amount of traffic coming into your website right now. But they aren’t ordering, and you have no idea where they are getting hung up. The Conversion Doctor will tell you exactly where this is happening, so you can start thinking about how to fix it.
Help you understand which traffic sources are producing the best results
Just seeing an overall traffic count is and checkout conversion rate is not enough. Often times, certain traffic sources are great at capturing email addresses for future sales. Other traffic sources are great for capturing immediate purchases.
If you were only looking at a checkout conversion rate, you are likely to dismiss the other traffic sources that are producing tremendous value in the form of audience building and future sales opportunities. And a poor decision like this would be a colossal mistake for the future of your art business.
In short, we built The Conversion Doctor to help you maximize conversions on the precious traffic you currently have, as well as the traffic you plan to build in the near future.
Where to Find the Conversion Doctor
The Conversion Doctor is available on the stats dashboard in your ASF Site Manager.
Note: This feature is only included to those currently on the “Artisan” plan, the “Art Gallery Baseline” plan, and the “Print Studio Baseline” plan.
Interested? Click Here to Request a Demo from a member of our friendly sales team.
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