For many businesses, their website is a key component of their marketing strategy. It commands a sizeable chunk of their marketing budget and is intended to be a key force in attracting new business enquiries.

Therefore it makes sense to regularly test how visitors are engaging with it – exploring its usability to see what is drawing in visitor attention and what is putting them off. Of course, the Google Analytics data which is freely available to businesses can give a lot of valuable insight, but sometimes it only tells part of the story.

We’ve been helping a number of clients recently to improve their On-page Conversion, or rather move more visitors from being simply passive viewers of a web page to interacting and (more importantly) activating its calls to action (CTAs).

A new breed of website analytics

In addition to Google Analytics we use other studies including heat maps and confetti mapping. These enable us to see how a web page is viewed through a potential customer’s eyes. For example, heat maps show the warm vs cold areas of a web page in terms of where people look (or don’t), where they click and where their mouse hovers. They also give an indication of which sources are providing a volume of good quality visitor traffic. The picture above shows a confetti map analysis of a home page showing visitor activity on different days of the week.

Simple corrective measures

This insight invariably signposts a number of simple corrective actions which can then get a web page working more effectively for you and delivering the results you want. For example, in some cases the studies have prompted:

• Moving or simplifying key information to increase the instances of it being read
• Simplifying the design if too many visuals and text are causing confusion
• Simplifying or making calls to action clearer
• Bringing calls to action towards the top of the screen, rather than buried elsewhere
• Making the site more responsive to mobile or tablet browsing, if much of the visitor traffic stems from those devices

So, if your website is a key facet of your marketing approach, it is sensible to periodically put it through its paces and evaluate just how well it is doing in channelling interest into enquiries. Consider this tool in your marketing kitbag as one that will always need assessing and fine-tuning in order to continually attract good quality enquiries to you.

If you’d like additional ideas about how to evaluate how effective your website is please get in touch with Clever Marketing.