Our revamped website design has been live for a month now so instead of just assuming that it is doing wonderful things for us, we’re taking a detailed look at what is working and what’s not.
This doesn’t have to be a lengthy process, you can do it internally and with very low cost tools – in fact if you’re savvy you may be able to do it purely on free 30 day trials of software!
What to look for
Always start with your homepage – this is where most of your traffic will come in and also most of it will leave. You can use your Google Analytics account to see what your bounce rate is and if it’s high then people are probably not getting what they’re after, quick enough, when they reach it.
Something that people often talk about is how it’s important to have high converting content above the fold. This is less so now with people happily swiping down a tablet or mobile, but your greatest real estate is the top around the navigation. Even the bottom navigation is popular as it’s where visitors will look for signposts.
Next you want to look at your main product pages as these should be your highest convertors. If by some miracle they’re not then they should be, it’s what you’re selling!
There are some great heatmap tools out there that show you where people are clicking on your website. Google Analytics does provide their own for free but it rolls up results across the site into one figure so you don’t know which page it’s from just that a certain button is doing well. We’re currently testing out Crazy Egg which gives you plenty of functionality within the trial and make it clear where our users are looking.
Another thing to look at is what people are searching for within your site. Most sites have a form of internal search and this is commonly used when visitors are struggling to find their desired content. If there is something coming up quite frequently then it’s worth looking at how you can make that content more prominent on your site.
A lot of marketers (myself included) will make assumptions about what we think our visitors want to see and where it is best placed, often however we are proven wrong by using tools like GA and heatmaps. A final thing to bear in mind is to give your test long enough to give results ( a month at least) and if you’re comparing over times make sure they are fair and cover the same weekdays/weekends.
