In part 1 of this two-part blog series, I explained some of the user behaviour “ground rules” – in other words, how you can generally expect customers to interact with your website, and the cues which you can expect them to understand. In this part I’ll look at the second step to improving your website experience for your customers.
Step 2: Checking how your customers interact with your website
If you’re reading lots of conflicting information about what kind of content performs the best, you can use your website statistics to find out what’s really going on with your website. If you’re not already set up, a relatively easy option is to create a Google Analytics account and install their code on your website.
Once you’ve got access to that data you can start using it to help you make lots of small changes. Those changes should all work together to improve your customers’ journey through your website, and ultimately generate a better response, whether that’s sales, leads, purchases, or bookings.
Start by asking lots of questions. Which page do your users arrive on when they visit your website? What are your most popular pages? Which pages do people stay on for the longest? You could try to keep more users on your website for longer by adding a link from your most popular pages to the ones that people stay on for the longest. The more time that users spend on your site, the more likely they are to reach out to you or make a purchase.
You can also consider some paths you’d like your customers to follow in an ideal world, and see what happens in reality. When you get a contact form query, or when somebody calls you, where do they come from? Do you think it’s because of the content on the page or the way the contact information was presented on that page? Can you place similar content elsewhere, or present the contact information similarly elsewhere?
Not sure if an orange button or a green button is going to produce the best results? Or whether a banner with a picture of a cat or a dog will get more clicks? Or, do you want to test whether an idea you had when you checked your Analytics will work better than what you’ve got now? You can A/B test it!
A/B testing is a technique you can use where you want to compare two possibilities and measure which one produces the best results. Once you have enough data to declare a “winner”, you can simply show that winning button or banner to all of your visitors.
So, you start by randomly showing half of your visitors the banner with the cat, and the other half the banner with the dog. Then, you adjust the buttons on those banners so that you can tell which banner was clicked in Analytics. There a few ways to do this, and the best method would depend on your website. Finally, after you think enough customers have seen the banners, you can declare your winner. If 20% of those who saw the cat banner clicked the button, and 30% of those who saw the dog banner clicked on that, then dogs win!
Hopefully this article has given you a few ideas about how to check what your customers are doing on your website and guide them towards your website’s goals (remember rule 4 from the first part of this blog?).
We can help with implementing the ground rules and measuring how your customers behave on your website – just contact us to discuss what we can do.
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