Driving website visitors towards a goal: A key to online success
One of the fundamental keys to success on the Web is to know exactly what goal you want to achieve from your website.
As people move throughout your site, multiple components should work together to ultimately "drive" visitors to reach that goal. For example, your site might begin by capturing the attention of visitors. They then read information, register for a workshop, contact you directly, and finally make a purchase.
To determine your website's goal, ask yourself: What do you want people to ultimately do when they visit your website?
Do you want them to click ads, tell their friends about your site, buy one of your products, learn about a particular topic, keep coming back regularly...? There are many possibilities.
Chances are that you have several goals. But how do you know whether your website is achieving these goals and thereby reaching its full potential? Is there opportunity for making the site even more successful?
In this article, we'll show you an informative activity which can help you run a more successful site.
The activity
Try to think of about 3 to 5 main goals that you want to achieve from your site. Write them down and then rank them in order of importance (some ideas of common goals are provided above).
Next, ask friends, work colleagues, and (if possible) customers to look at your site. Then invite them to write down 3 to 5 goals which they think your website is trying to achieve. It's best if you can collect this information anonymously to help ensure you get truthful responses. The greater the number of people participating, the better the results will be.
Finally, compare the goals that you want to achieve with the goals the other people think your website is trying to achieve. Write a list of all the different responses you get, and then order them from most to least commonly selected.
There are now a few things you can do with the information you've obtained.
If the responses from other people are different to yours
If your own responses differ to what the majority of people think your site is trying to achieve, it is not necessarily a bad thing.
When the results differ, you have two options. In some cases you could implement both.
The information might suggest that your website has potential for being successful in a special or niche area that you didn't previously realise. If this is the case, explore the possibility of expanding into that area, or even creating a second site for that purpose.
Alternatively, you could change your site so that the goals you want to achieve are better met. This might at first seem to be a huge task, but the required changes could be easier than you think. For example:
- Is the navigational system (navigation bars, links etc.) on your site designed so that visitors are "driven" towards the area of the site where you want them to go (for example, the ordering page)?
- Is there too much information on your site? Can it be written more concisely? The more concise your site's content, the more room there is to add links, text and graphics that "direct" visitors towards doing what you'd like them to do (For information on writing for the Web, see the article 'Making your site's content Web-friendly: writing for the Web' ).
- Are there any unnecessary pages that distract visitors? Before you decide whether to remove them, determine whether the page provides any search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits or helps to attract visitors.
- Place your own ads on your site and use them to act as additional navigational features that drive people towards your goal.
- If you have a webpage that provides information about a product, do text and links on the page direct people towards making a purchase?
- Use images effectively, especially if you are not sure where to begin. People's eyes are attracted to images. Eye-catching, link-enabled images are great for capturing people's attention and driving them to the page you want.
If the responses from people are similar to yours
If you find that responses from people are similar to your own, the information you have collected is still helpful, because there will be new ideas that you can translate into new opportunities.
Related articles
- Capturing and keeping the attention of website visitors
- Increasing visits to your site by including more content
- Avoiding confusion when modifying websites: the just-noticeable difference principle
- Elements of good home page design
