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3. A Worrisome Bounce Rate

A bounce rate in the 20 percent range is good. Bonobos' rate tops 30 percent and, because a company blog is featured prominently on the site, Avinash Kaushik guesses that the effective bounce rate is even higher, since some visitors are probably reading the blog and then leaving the site.

If Dunn and Spaly can bring down their bounce rate to 20 percent and maintain a decent conversion rate (the number of visitors who make a purchase), their sales could increase by as much as $10,000 a month.

How to do this? Marketing consultant Beal believes that Bonobos' homepage devotes too much space to PR hits, to the blog, and to goofy product names such as Snapdragons and Jive Cats. Meanwhile, different styles of pants are not grouped by categories such as fabric or style. "They should make it easier for a visitor to figure out where to find corduroy pants or weekend wear," Beal says. "A new customer is not going to know what 'Snapdragons' means."

4. An Opportunity to Go Global

As one might expect for a New York clothing company, most of Bonobos' traffic comes from North America. However, the site's map overlay shows that it attracts a significant number of visitors from Australia. Beal recommends that Bonobos capitalize on this fact by adding a currency calculator, touting the availability of international shipping, and eventually building a separate international site that sells Bonobos "trousers," reflecting the most commonly used term in Australia to describe pants.

5. Shopping Cart Woes

The Goal Funnel tracks customers during the sales process. This funnel shows that among users who put items in the shopping cart, 63 percent (or 1,222 people) failed to complete a purchase -- and 511 of them left the shopping cart and exited the site altogether. The problem, Kaushik believes, is that the site asks for a coupon code early in the process. "That's an invitation for someone to leave your site to look for a coupon," he says. "And if they don't find it, they may not return." By taking steps such as moving the coupon field to the end of the sales process, Bonobos' rate of abandonment could fall 10 percent, adding about $20,000 a month in sales.

6. Everybody Knows Your Name (Unfortunately)

Keywords are the search terms that most often lead people to a site. Bonobos' top keywords show that nearly all of its customers search for it by name; few people stumble upon the site while looking for "men's pants" or "pants that fit." This makes sense given Bonobos' aggressive PR strategy. It also suggests a way to drive more traffic. A basic search-engine optimization program could begin to draw in people who have never heard of the company but are looking to buy pants.

Another number caught Kaushik's eye: the site's bounce rate for "content targeting" -- meaning ads placed through Google's AdSense or similar programs -- is, at 55.1 percent, quite high. "It doesn't look like the traffic is converting well," he says. To lower that rate, he recommends that Dunn and Spaly try tying their ads to a different set of keywords or rewrite their advertising copy.

Bonobos Reacts to the Feedback:

"Our reaction is, Hallelujah!" says Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn. "We couldn't agree more." Dunn concedes that the low conversion rates and high bounce rate are problematic but says that makes sense, given that the goal of the start-up's website has been to tell the Bonobos story. The founders decided to play up the blog and their PR because they didn't want visitors to think they sold existing apparel labels such as Polo or Levi's. "Our problem is that we want to emulate large e-commerce sites like Zappos and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), but we also want to be a brand," he says.

The next iteration will probably take steps to improve conversion and bounce rates by organizing the pants by fabric and style and by adding a navigation bar similar to what you find at traditional online stores. Dunn loves the idea of offering coupon codes later in the sales process but disputes the suggestion that the high number of page views reflects customer confusion. "My read is that our site is engaging," he says, citing an online contest that attracted close to 200 entrants.

And about that mini-boom of Australian Web traffic? Dunn believes that was the result of the company's being mentioned on the blog The Cool Hunter, which is popular in that country. Bonobos will eventually create international sites -- at that time, Dunn promises, the all-important pants-versus-trousers question will be revisited.

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Max Chafkin

Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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