Tag Archives: web analytics
Redesign of Manufacturing Website
This home page redesign project for Hamilton Caster in ways was more challenging than revamping an entire site.
While the old site looks dated, it ranked exceptionally well on major search engines. To avoid
mucking this up, we analyzed the site structure, website analytics and researched competitive sites.
Hamilton Caster is an international manufacturer of casters, wheels and trucks with customers ranging from Mercedes Benz to the NFL.
Home Page as Marketing Weapon
Web visitors take about 3 seconds to decide if they’ll remain at your site. Impact, speed and a meaningful message are critical. With Hamilton, we wanted visitors to rethink the importance of caster selection by showing the heavy duty customers that specified them.
Expandable Sites Stretch Your Investment
The design of the new home page features 5 target industries. The setup expands to add new industries or swap out additional executions. Aspects of the design have already been applied to the interior of the site, which is now ready for additional development.
Design informed by Web Analytics
Our team used web analytics information to identify popular pages on the site, important landing pages other then the home page, navigation paths and search engine performance.
Testing Design for Roadworthiness
While aspects of design are subjective, usability is not. With Hamilton Caster, we tested our work from paper prototypes through final design and programming to ensure
users could find critical navigation to find their way through a large site. Testing at each step saves time and money on rework at later stages.
Dig Into Interactive at Ideopia
Ideopia not only designs, builds and maintains websites, we create the fabric of digital and off-line marketing that keeps them healthy: fresh content, tech checks, SEO, blogs, social media,
and email marketing.
More Ways to Measure Your Site's Productivity
Many of us need and want to measure the output of our web sites in sales. This is particularly important with long sales cycles and cases where the sale isn’t completed online. By defining intermediate measurements, you can identify trouble points, enhance information offered, or remove steps from the process. Analytics need to be customized for each site, but here are a few tracking ideas we use:
- Purchase – Yes, the sale!
- Specific action – The visitor downloads content, engages an interactive application, visits a key page.
- Registration – Whether this is a lead form or an email signup, this is an important indication of engagement.
- Call for more information – A prospect calls to make purchase or get more information.
- Extended visit – Flag visits that exceed the average visit length. Investment of time can indicate serious interest.
Naked HTML: Do your web visitors give a hoot?
Sheer volume of web traffic, as we pointed out in our article on Bounce Rate, doesn’t tell you whether visitors had a good time at your site, learned anything, or absorbed key messages about your brand. Although there are some exciting new analytics tools that monitor the quality of engagement, you can get started by investigating the average time visitors spend on your site and per page. The underlying assumption is simple. If people like your page, they’ll spend time with it. If they’re bored silly, they’ll move on. Here’s what to look for:
- What’s the Average Time Spent on the site as a whole?
- Compare directories on the site, e.g. your about section vs. products. Where are visitors spending the bulk of their time on your site? Does that match your web strategy?
- Are your visitors spending time on critical pages, e.g. product overview, pages that differentiate you from your competitors, etc?
- Sort pages from highest to lowest Avg. Time Spent on Page. What’s performing well, what’s not?
- Are there pages that drive a high percentage of viewing that don’t directly advance your business, e.g. the photo gallery with everyone popping brewskies at the office tailgate party? These pages are valuable, but keep in mind that they could be distorting your view of your site’s overall performance.
Use this information to build on content that already engages your visitors, and improve or eliminate pages that don’t.
The most important website metric isn’t traffic.
Bounce rate: It’s the Biggy
Talking up your web site’s traffic has become a testosterone charged tradition wherever marketing types gather. While consistent traffic growth over time is certainly impressive, a snapshot in time of a website’s traffic is essentially meaningless. For one it’s relative to market size. A site in a super niche market, e.g. weightlifting equipment for physicists, may do quite well with a 1000 unique visitors per month, while a major consumer site like Coke could be withering on the vine with a million visits.
Traffic says nothing about what visitors do when they come to your site, whether they are likely to return, or how effective the marketing was that got them in the first place.
That’s why we like to zero in on bounce rate. Like P/E ratio, it’s a measure of efficiency. In one tidy number, bounce reveals the ability of your site’s content, marketing, usability and technical performance to suck in visitors and hold them prisoner.
The high cost of bouncing customers out of your site.
Google defines bounce rate as the number of people who leave your site after viewing a single page. High bounce will hit you in the wallet, too. Although the source may be a relatively small technical problem, it’s wiping out the marketing, content, design and programming investment made in that specific page.
In the real world, it’s like investing in an ad campaign to drive customers to a new mall store called “World of Botox.” Hundreds of coupon clutching customers show up, but 89% of them just peer in the shop window and leave.
In web terms this is an excessive and unacceptable bounce rate. Bounce rate measures the efficiency of a web page. Based on advertising, web marketing and search results, visitors approach your site with a defined set of needs and wants. When they aren’t met in a few seconds, most will leave.
High bounce rates drop web site ROI like a stone. If the bounce rate on any of the key pages of your site, especially the home page, is hovering around 50%, it time to move to Devcon 5.
How to determine your site’s bounce rate.
Any respectable web analytics package will report the bounce rate of all the pages in your site. Sort the report from highest to lowest, paying particular attention to critical pages like:
- Your home page.
- Any page with an important form, especially a multi-part form.
- eCommerce pages and checkout funnels
- Any page that you’ve targeted for a transaction, e.g. white paper download.
Keep in mind that some pages will naturally have a very high bounce rate, like “Thank you” pages and privacy pages.
The pathology of bouncing
There are a number of potential reasons for high bounce rates, and sometimes they exist in combination. Though solving a high bounce rate test may take some research and diagnostic work, spotting the issues is mainly a matter of common sense.
For example, speed. If there’s a line around the block to get into the World of Botox, only the most dire cases will wait. The same goes for your website. Except the web is more unforgiving. If your page doesn’t load in a few seconds, 70% of your visitors are already Googling or Binging the competition.
Lack of instantly recognizable relevant content will also keep your customers bouncing. What if, for example, all the wrinkly World of Botox customers show up only to find the store’s window packed with vitamins and cosmetics. When your site doesn’t deliver the goods as promised in advertising or a search description, you’ve broken a pact and possibly turned off a user forever.
At the top of our bounceability list is speed, or lack thereof. Depending on the speed your customers are connecting to the internet, most will only wait one or two seconds for a page to load. The most common problems are large graphics, animations and videos.
Visitors to your site may not understand how your page is organized, or where to find what they want. Key links may use unclear wording, e.g. “Our Happy Place” instead of “About.”; the type size is too small; the placement isn’t logical. A simple usability test will quickly uncover these issues.
One of the underlying causes of high bounce rate is a failure to match your products and services to specific landing pages within your site. Navigating a website isn’t like strolling through Walmart. Most of us expect to click and instantly arrive at the meat counter. The home page can’t do it all, especially if your offerings are diverse or have audiences with little crossover. The solution is to develop landing pages or even mini sites designed around specific customer needs.
High Bounce Rate Causes and Solutions
Slow Load Time
- Shrink image sizes and optimize code.
- Nuke pokey Flash apps.
- Is your server the culprit? Run a speed test.
- Check load time of pages with high bounce rates.
Content
- Make sure that the content of the page is clearly summarized in instantly visible and crystal clear headlines, and subheads.
- Add additional pages or sections to bring more focus to content structure.
- Clean up design clutter, set copy for readability.
- Edit copy for conciseness.
Marketing
- Make sure the advertising or search ads match the content of the targeted page. If not, turn off the ad, or point it at a more appropriate page.
- Develop landing pages focused on a single topic.
Learn more about web marketing on Ideopia’s eVitalize mini site.