Are You Redesigning Your Website? Consult with Analytics

When redesigning a website, considerations for usability should go hand in hand with considerations for the site’s visual appeal and identity.The following ideas are only a starting point for thinking about what information about a website’s operation you may utilize when contemplating an enhanced design, even if they don’t aim to cover all you would want to think about.

Rate of Bounce

This refers to the proportion of users that arrive at a website and immediately exit, or bounce, without seeing any further pages.The bounce rate is a crucial statistic to consider since it shows the percentage of visitors that leave a site right away, indicating how well and how quickly your website engages visitors and conveys its content.A significant number of visitors departing right away may indicate that the site isn’t appealing or that it isn’t immediately clear what the site is about. Look at the way your company’s or service’s message is being conveyed on the website if the bounce rate for your site is more than 40%.A makeover might improve the visibility of your message.

(Another factor to consider that might point to similar problems that require fixing is the length of a visitor’s visit, as well as their likelihood of returning to a site, which is crucial for online stores.) If visitors are only staying for little periods of time on your website and aren’t coming back, that could be a sign that it’s not providing the necessary information quickly enough.

Top Exit Pages

Looking at the pages from which visitors leave the site is a potentially useful exercise.If a site is doing what it should be, visitors should be leaving on the page which represents the end of their journey (the ‘Contact Us‘ page, or a confirmed purchase page).If customers are departing before they reach these pages, especially if it is on a page of the site that is critical to what the website is communicating (‘Our Services‘, or registration pages for an online shop), you must evaluate what is causing them to leave and how to keep them on the site. This may include adding additional information, changing the navigation to maintain the flow of the journey, or even considering how to make an online transaction as simple as feasible.

Keywords

Although Google’s Webmaster Tools provides more information on keywords where your website is accessible, Google Analytics provides helpful information on what keywords are used to discover your site and then visit it, the popularity of the term (the number of visits it produces), the number of pages visited, average time on site, percentage of new visits, and bounce rate.This plethora of data provides a strong indication of how the site compares to specific expectations. If a search phrase that you deem important to your organization is obtaining bad results in any of these areas, you should look at the site to determine why its content isn’t delivering in this area. If you’re redesigning your website and adding new material or places, it could be good to examine what terms and phrases your site is currently being discovered under and if there’s a way to profit on that.

In-page Analytics

The in-page analytics provided by Google Analytics may be the most helpful tool of all for anybody thinking about a redesign. This feature enables you to look at each page of the site and track the number of times users click on different parts of the page as well as other information for each page (bounce rate, percentage of visitors arriving and leaving the site, etc.).This in-depth evaluation provides a clearer picture of the usability of your current website and highlights any issues that may be present, such as poor navigation (if visitors aren’t clicking on an essential page from the home page), particular pages that aren’t functioning, specific pages that are working, and what visitors to the website respond to and express interest in.