Tag Archives: website traffic
Running web analytics on your small business website is great, but let’s be honest – how many of us actually know what all those fancy numbers and graphs mean? If you’re running analytics simply for the sake of collecting data, what’s the point? Analytics are only useful if you take the data that’s generated and use it to create an action plan for your online marketing strategy. From traffic to conversions, here are four quick tips to help you make your analytics actionable.
1) Understand Your Entry Point
All of the popular analytic packages provide you with information on your top landing pages. If you haven’t taken the time to review this portion of your report, make time. Many small business owners assume that their homepage is the top performing landing page, but this is very rarely the case. If visitors are entering your page from the services section their experience will be slightly altered. If visitors are entering your Chatham-Kent website in an unexpected area, take some time to review that page. Does it contain enough information to convince people to stick around? Is your navigation clearly defined for easy surfing? Is your UVP (unique value proposition) clearly visible? Make sure your top landing pages contain all the right information to ensure a smooth experience for your potential customers.
2) Find Out Where Your Traffic’s Coming From
Make a habit of analyzing your traffic sources on a regular basis. Traffic will normally come from a handful of clearly defined sources: organic search traffic, paid ads, referral sites, and direct traffic. Traffic sources go hand-in-hand with keyword reports, so if you’re smart, you’ll review those stats at the same time. This information should help you discover:
- What your visitors’ expectations are: Traffic sources and keyword analysis should help you better understand what your customers are looking for when they find your site.
- What your visitors already know: A visitor that is searching for your company name or a specific product/service that you offer obviously knows more than a visitor who’s used a general search term to find your page. If you find that people are using specific keywords to find your site, chances are good these visitors are further along in the buying process. Are you providing them with a clear conversion path?
- If your visitors are finding what they want: How’s the bounce rate on your entry pages? Are visitors finding the right keywords on your entry pages? If visitors are finding your page with the right keywords, but quickly leave after just a few seconds of viewing, you’ve got some work to do.
3) What Happens Next?
The key to actionable analytics is being able to find patterns in your traffic. Once you find your entry pages, take a look at where you visitors navigate to next. What are the most popular pages on your website? Are these pages linked by prominent calls to action, are they listed in the navigation, or are they embedded in text? Why would a visitor navigate to that page next? What questions could possibly answered by surfing to these pages? Give it a little time and eventually you’ll start to discover patterns and persuasive pages will start to stand out. Are you making the most of your best performing pages?
4) Do Your Visitors Have An Exit Strategy
People are going to leave your site, the key is understanding where they leave and why. If your visitors are navigating away after completing a conversion, that’s great. That’s what’s called a planned conversion, and it’s music to a small business owner’s ears. Bounce rates, on the other hand, are the kiss of death. Bouncing is bad – it means that a visitor has rejected your website as a useful resource. If you have a high bounce rate on your homepage – eek! It’s time to make some major changes. An exit rate simply tells you how many people have exited your site from that page (visitors have likely navigated there from elsewhere on your site). If you find pages on your site that have a high exit rate, try and sniff out why. Look at the most popular entry paths to that page. What were visitors hoping to find by navigating to that page? What did they find instead? Was the link that lead to that page misleading or is your content too confusing? A few simply changes could change an exit page into a valuable stop on the way to a successful conversion.
Are you having trouble understanding your web analytics? Then give us a call – we can help you make sense of even the most complex data.
You’ve heard me complain about Flash on the CIK blog before. Sure it looks pretty, but what does it actually do for your website’s design? The answer is nothing, unless you consider sucking up your bandwidth as a major bonus. If your Chatham-Kent business is looking into website redesigns, remember – Flash is not your friend. Sure, Flash can be useful in some situations, but it should only be used when absolutely necessary (creating animated text = not one of those situations). So, without further ado, here are five of the most frustrating reasons why Flash sucks (believe me, there are plenty more).
5) It’s a Bandwidth Hog
Sure, this isn’t as big a deal now as it was ten years ago, but still. Why create a site that sucks twice as much bandwidth as a standard HTML site? Believe it or not, some of your customers are still surfing using dial-up, which means they’re still waiting…for…your…website…to…load…
4) You Can’t Bookmark a Page
This drives me looney! Websites that are designed entirely using Flash do not have standard HTML URLs. So, the deeper you dig into a site, the more confused your browser becomes about your location; in fact, the next time you find yourself stuck on a Flash site, check your browser address bar as you flip between pages – chances are good it will show the homepage address for every single page within the site! This wonderful design flaw means there’s no way to bookmark a page that you’ve found useful, or easily share a link to an internal page of the site. Website design is suppose to be all about making things easy for visitors, so please don’t make things impossible by using a Flash-based site.
3) There’s a Loading Screen for Pete’s Sake!
Let’s get one thing straight – I don’t want to wait for anything, whether it’s my coffee or an organ transplant. Waiting sucks. So when I have to site and watch that little green loading bar on your website, it makes me very, very angry. If you’re website is so complicated that I must wait for it to load, do everyone a favour and redesign it. Chances are your customers will be confused by your fancy-pants features and end up bouncing anyway.
2) You Can’t Optimize Flash
Search engines hate Flash almost as much as I do. But, unlike me, who has the pleasure of turning one up every now and then, search engines simply ignore them. A search engine can’t read the garble of code that is Flash, so it simply chooses to ignore it. So, remember all that money you paid to your website designer to “optimize” your Flash site… ya, that was not one of your smartest ideas.
1) There is Absolutely No User Benefit to Flash Sites!
In case you forgot, your company website is suppose to be a tool that customers use to learn more about your business. Your site should therefore be built to provide the visitor with as much value and usefulness as possible. Don’t built your website because you think it looks cool. Build it so that your user can navigate it easily and discover exactly what it is they’re looking for.
These are just a few of the reasons why I hate Flash – feel free to add more in the comments!
