Use Analytics to Plan Your Website Redesign
When you’re planning to redesign your website, your analytics are a valuable resource to help shape your new website strategy. Website redesign and development can be a hefty, time-consuming process from start to finish. Unless you’re a newbie business on the internet, your website (hopefully) has Google Analytics in place already with a long data history that’s full of useful information about how visitors are navigating your website. Here are a few sections of your Google Analytics account you should dig into as you plan your redesign.
Goals
Last week I talked about four types of Goals you can set up in your Google Analytics account – Destination, Duration, Page/Screens Per Session, and Events. If you’ve set these up already, plan for the changes you might need when you launch your new site. Long standing websites often need to have their navigation structure reorganized. If you have a destination goal set up that includes a funnel, plan to update the path or sequence of activities you expect visitors to take to reach that destination.
Popular Pages
Keep your most visited pages in mind when you’re planning your new website. Part of our website redesign and development process is to audit the website navigation structure and page content. As long as we know which pages are your most visited, we’ll be sure to keep them in place and even make improvements to them. By prioritizing these pages, we can make sure they keep performing for you. At the same time, we can ditch pages that aren’t working.
Technology
Everyone knows that your website must be mobile-friendly in order to compete online. Naturally, when we start a redesign with one of our clients, we want to ensure that their new website is compatible with every possible screen size, device and operating system. Realistically, it’s almost impossible to be perfect on every device out there! However, the Technology report provides a baseline of the most popular technology your visitors are using to browse your website. This will help prioritize the optimization strategy we use.
Exit Pages
Exit Pages are the last pages your users visit before leaving your website. Look at the pages that have the highest exit rate percentage and ask yourself why people are leaving from those pages in particular. Are they dead ends? By that I mean, are there no calls to action (CTA) on these pages? Are there no internal links to guide visitors to other areas of the website? Content and navigation strategy on these pages should be considered if you plan to include them on your new website.
Your Google Analytics data is an incredible, free resource you can use to not only track your current website’s performance, but also to plan for a new, improved website. These are just a few of the data sets we consider during the planning phases of a new redesign project. Your business’ priorities may be different, but the data doesn’t lie. It’s a great way to justify decisions you’ll make in the planning process and then determine whether they were the right ones!
By Brenna Love
By Ryan Thompson