If you’re a marketing consultant working today clients are asking you to improve their website’s performance. To me, improve = increasing the number of leads and sales their website produces. As opposed to a re-design.
You may use some great tools to evaluate what’s happening on a client’s website. I’m recommending one in this post that is fundamental to my work in this regard. Please leave a comment if you want to recommend a tool that works for you.
Diagnosing the Problem
You can identify a problem website page a number of ways (percentage of traffic that exits, average time on page, you can even look at GA’s Visitor Flow funnels and start to wonder what content should be added to the page, based on where people are going after that page).
So, now that you know there’s a problem with a page, what’s next?
Diagnosing the Solution
You and I can take a look at the client’s Services page content, for example, and draw some reasonable conclusions around what to change. A better way is to actually watch visitor behavior on that page and let visitor behavior tell you what needs fixing.
I use a tool called mouseflow. Mouseflow (www.mouseflow.com, and no, I’m not an affiliate) is one of many tools out there that records visitor sessions. It lets you see what actually happens by recording mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, everything. And it’s cheap; about $15 per month for 1,000 recordings. See the video.
The difference for me is remarkable. You and I can look at a page and decide to add a video or a graph or bullets to more effectively tells the story. But a tool like mouse flow lets us actually see how people engage with that video or graph or bullets.
