effective web design in Vancouver

Does Your Web Design Work For You?

Posted by Cucumber Helen |

Hard metrics are at the core of every business strategy. Web design is no different. While it’s nice to have a fancy-looking site, the deeper question needs to be asked: Does your website work for you, or do you work for your website?

The ultimate goal of a site is to help you grow your business through sales. So even if you’re not selling directly through your site, the site should act as a sales too to evoke an emotion – to get people excited about your products and services! Use your site to show the main benefits and reasons why people should buy from you.

A clever website not only looks good, but works well because it has a solid strategy behind it, including a consideration of the sales cycle and its processes.

Let’s assess your website

What is the purpose of your website? Is it an informational site, or is it an e-commerce site? The goal of an informational site is to promote the brand and inform the visitor about your product; the sales aspect is done separately. An e-commerce site drives sales directly from the site.

While both website formats have their own specific goals and different ways to cater their web design, assessing website performance uses surprisingly similar metrics. Regardless of your site goals, you should aim to use these key performance indicators (KPI’s): Traffic, Conversion, and Sales vs. the amount of investment spent. Using Google Analytics, Traffic is easy to quantify. Conversion, too, can be measured with tools such as AdWords or Analytics.

But when you’re unable to link visits to sales, how do you know if your web design is working for you?

Web Design Performance Metrics

Informational websites can sometimes have difficulty linking web visits to sales. Since sales are done separately, such as through an in-store sales channel, how do you assess whether or not your website is working?

We’ve compiled a list of strategies that may help you pinpoint the effectiveness of your website. A website exists to inform, satisfy, or otherwise engage the visitor. These metrics quantify just that!

  1. Clicks on Page – Are your visitors engaged?
  2. Pages browsed – Do you have a variety of interesting content?
  3. Time spent on site – Does your content spark interest and thought?
  4. Downloads – Do visitors often download your owned content?
  5. Hot Spots – Using heatmaps, are there certain areas of your page that induce engagement? Where?

These metrics allow you to roughly gauge the quality of content on your site. Whereas your marketing campaign is more concerned with the number of total visits, these web design metrics clue in to whether or not, and how, your website engages customers. But once you figure out how things are performing on your site, what do you do to freshen things up?

Do your homework! Freshen your content with some data-backed demographic research:

  1. Traffic source – Where are your visitors coming from? If the majority are coming from a PPC campaign, emphasis should be placed on your landing page(s)
  2. Page Visits – Which pages are the most popular? Why? Consider tying those page(s) in the content of your lessor-visited pages, or adopt a similar tone of voice
  3. Traffic trends – How are your overall visits this month compared to last month? What time of day do you have the most visitors? How does traffic change in the off-season? Noting changes in your traffic trends will allow you to cater new content at different times of the year.

Ultimately the purpose of your site is to evoke an emotion. Engagement and interest spark naturally from a pleasant emotion, and what is more pleasurable than a webpage that is on-topic, relevant to your interests, witty and fun?

Web Design, Marketing and Branding work hand-in-hand in the customer experience. We offer full-service marketing because we believe that all these aspects support and build upon each other. Do you agree with us?

Let us know what you think about your web design! Interested in crafting a truly unique marketing experience for your visitors? Visit us at our marketing agency in downtown Vancouver, or give us a quick email. We’d love to talk about how we can bring value to your business! We always have chocolate.