But yes at the beginning of the month i pour over the previous months logs to track things like traffic improvements, referring keyphrases, traffic sources etc and part of this is the top 5 entry pages to see the how visitors are entering the site in order to replicate this across other less performing pages. Also checking the top 5 exit pages to find ways to reduce people leaving.

After a few months you should have a fairly “sticky” site, meaning most pages are working to pull visitors and also the visitors arn’t leaving en masse from the one weak point.

This is especially true with e-commerce sites. Pages with the highest exist rate are the weakest link or the point of failure where you loose the most sales.

I use this approach on “all” websites, but especially e-commerce sites.

It’s very simple to fix, and not to mention a very cost effective solution. Sometimes the high exit pages may just contain a lack of information or lack of links to other related content on the site so it becomes a virtual “dead end” and people bounce.

It costs nothing but a bit of time to add more information, links and illustrations and make that page go from the highest exit page to one of the lowest. You can use it to channel traffic where you want it i.e. to your cart or purchase pages.

I strongly recommend doing this “before” investing in expensive advertising campaigns, because if the site isn’t making maximum use of it’s current traffic then alot of the traffic from the advertising campaign will be wasted.

They were getting great traffic but very few sales, and on a deeper analysis of their stats i noticed a massive bounce rate at the cart.

So i went in their as a Shopper and not as a SEO, and done some dummy run purchases and the cart was horrible. It was very difficult to go back and add more items to the cart, and checking out one item was confusing.

All i done was tweaked the layout, and added CLEAR step by step instructions with some shiny graphics walking them through the entire process.

People like step by step easy as 1-2-3 type processes with the least amount of complicated forms, input fields and steps to reach the final destination.

The site went from $80 days to $300 days overnight, not huge money but a massive increase and ROI for the company.

So in addition to what Gary said, pour through your stats every day and understand your visitors, what they are searching for, how they navigate and most importantly where they are leaving your site.

Make it your goal to rework your top 5 exit pages each month and reduce the volume of traffic exiting from these pages. If you do this every month, eventually your top exit page will be the “Thankyou for purchasing, your item will be dispatched tomorrow at 9AM” page.

Also get friends and family to do dummy run purchases, or even offer a group of people a few dollars or a small gift to do a trial purchase and fill a short questionaire on the positive/negative of the process and how it can be improved.

Sometimes we get tunnel vision on our own websites and just don’t see things from a customers prospective, or what we think is great really might be a nightmare to others.

Also look at the shopping process of successful sites and emulate a similar experience.