There’s a well-told adage that you only get one chance to make a first impression. This is especially the case in the online sphere, as the average user will only spend 58 seconds on a website, with 55% of visitors dedicating less than 15 seconds of their time to perusing your site. This means that within 15 seconds of someone clicking on your website you need to make a big enough impression to make them want to stay.
To make the best possible first impression on the people who visit your website, it’s essential that you understand your online visitors and what they want. In doing so, you’ll be fast-tracking your business into gaining more business leads and improving the overall quality, and level of user engagement on your website.
When people visit your website, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to track what they’re doing. Google Analytics will allow you to collect the following information:
In a perfect world, this information would tell you that people love your site and you don’t need to make any improvements! However, as wonderful as this would be, even if you have the best website in the world there’s always room for improvement.
By using a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll be successfully analysing the habits of your users, and identifying the areas of your site that are working well, along with the areas that might need a little extra work. This might mean removing the links or pages that no one clicks on, or making each page more user-friendly.
A/B testing is a fantastic way to improve your website based on real information about what your users prefer.
Essentially, A/B testing involves creating two versions of the same web page, and seeing which one achieves the best results. This is because half of your users will see one version, while the other half will see the alternative version. You can do A/B testing with anything as simple as where to place your social media plugins, to something as big as the overall display/layout of your page. This technique is so effective that even Facebook uses it when they’re testing the effectiveness of their proposed updates.
The online marketplace is an incredibly competitive realm, which is why understanding your audience and tailoring your web content/design to their needs/wants is so important.
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