written by Sarah Roberts | January 1st, 2013
You diligently update your website, keep it current, have the most gorgeous photography you can muster. Your visits are up. But here’s the thing about the web: it’s a book that’s never finished. It can always be better, another chapter written, another edit done. It can be endless and overwhelming – but there are great tools to help you.
Do you use Google Analytics to keep an eye your web statistics? If you don’t, it’s a good idea to measure who is coming to your site, how they get there, how long they stay (the number of things you can track are endless).
All those statistics can be awe-inspiring – and for all us visual learners, there are tools that will show you exactly what’s happening on your site. My favourite is Crazy Egg – easy to install with a piece of code and you can track several pages. There are other services as well, but Crazy Egg’s interface is easy to navigate, the support is responsive, and it’s fairly inexpensive. It shows you with a heat map where people are clicking, and also has a confetti interface that shows one dot for every click – even when people are clicking in areas that are not clickable.
On our site, we use a lot of valuable real estate on our homepage with a photo to represent the weekly Thrifty Foods flyer that is published every Wednesday. We had a suspicion and wanted to really know – did our customers know that if they clicked this big image it took them to the online flyer? Did adding a snapshot of the flyer cover help?
The good news is that we now had the proof – the bad news: the vast majority of our online audience was scrolling right past the big image, and going to the bottom right link in the footer to get to our flyer (notice the bottom right!).
Since we started tracking this data, we have made changes to some of the layout of our homepage, and we’ve also implemented Crazy Egg on another pages to see what we can improve.
Do you use any software like this? Have a story to share about a change you’ve implemented? Would love to hear it!
Sarah Roberts
Sarah Marlayne Roberts is a public relations and digital media strategist based in Victoria, BC. She has extensive marketing, social media, public relations, and special events experience from her work in television (CTV Television, Canadian Idol, Juno Awards, The Bachelor Canada) and with some of Canada’s most vibrant brands including The Edmonton Oilers, the legendary Hudson’s Bay Company and now, Thrifty Foods. Her focus at Thrifty Foods is on the company’s digital presence including the web and social channels, working to reflect the in-store experience online. In her spare (?!) time, Sarah also blogs about pop culture and other stuff you shouldn’t live without at STUFF by Sarah and works with small business clients on maximizing their online presence.
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