How effective is your website? Moreover… What makes up an effective website? Where do you begin? These are all key questions you need to ask yourself to ensure your website is performing soundly.
Website effectiveness can be measured in a number of ways. How effective the website is once the user has arrived there is what I’ll be focussing on. So these tips obviously rely on traffic getting onto the site in the first place!
The Basics: What are website goals?
Every website must have well-defined goals. The number of times the goals are achieved constitutes the effectiveness of the site. A goal is what you want your user to ultimately do once they have arrived on your site. It will also be measurable so you can clearly see whether it has been achieved.
A goal could be anything from signing up to a newsletter to filling in a contact form. An example would on an e-commerce store such as Amazon; of course the goal would be for the users to make a purchase using their checkout.
It is important to note that as well as the website owners having their goals, the user will have their own goals too. Like with the Amazon example, a user goal may be to find a particular product for a reasonable price. Marrying up Amazon’s and the users goals is pivotal to achieving the purchase goal.
What is your customer journey?
Exploring what is called the ‘customer journey’ (a.k.a. ‘user journey’) will help you discover how the user reaches your website goals. It can be defined as a common route that users take from arriving at the site to achieving their goals.
“Knowing your customer journey is key”
Try mapping out your customer journey route in a simple diagram, helping you understand how the users reach your goals. The simplest journey on an e-commerce site would be:
- User searches for product
- Finds product
- Adds to basket
- Goes through checkout process
But is anything ever that simple? Of course not! Users may go in cycles around the site. For example, they may find a product they want, put it in the basket and then go back to searching for another product and so on.
Being aware of the customer journey is pivotal and sticking with convention is, for once, probably a good thing! Your site should be laid out with this in mind and by ensuring a smooth journey from the users’ perspective; this will ultimately lead to your goals being achieved.
How do I measure my goals?
Here’s the jackpot question: How do you measure whether goals are being achieved? Well, there are many tools, e.g.:
- Website analytics
- Sales tracking
- Voluntary survey
“If you don’t measure your goals, is there any point in having any?”
Website analytics focuses more on quantitative data. Figures. Numbers. Being able to view data such as bounce pages (pages where people left immediately) and exit pages (pages where people left the site) allows you to begin to piece together the customer journey. You can identify where people lose interest or get stuck on the site, known as ‘roadblocks’.
Adding a voluntary survey to your website allows you to gather more qualitative data. Knowing more detailed and quality information can help you fill in any gaps from the analytics data. Although, it may be easier to place a survey on an e-commerce site than any other.
What do I do now?
You’ve got the information… Now, use it! Knowing this information allows you to take action to improve your customer journey, which in turn achieves your goals and consequently makes your website more effective.
It could be as simple as to just change the location of an ‘Add to Basket’ button.
“You’ve got all the ingredients – Now you need to make it happen!”
So, in essence – define your website goals, establish the customer journey, measure the effectiveness of this journey in achieving these goals and take action to improve!
I hope you found this article useful in helping you measure the effectiveness of your site! Please feel free to leave any other ideas you may have.
