12.03 – Driving Engagement & Sales
This is where it gets fun—and complicated. Fun, because you have a blank storyboard in front of you and many tools at your fingertips for crafting and telling your brand story. Complicated, because there are more than 2 billion registered websites, and the competition for views and engagement will only continue to increase.
For perspective, if you’re searching for “furniture stores in Colorado,” you’re likely to get more than 63 million results to sort through, up from 3 million just a few years ago. Businesses lucky enough to get clicks have the added challenge of keeping visitors on their site. This is where the design and messaging of your landing pages matter a lot.
Integrating Key Design Elements
Your images and headlines create the first impression visitors get of your website and let them know within seconds if your business is relevant to their needs and personality. Much of this first impression is unconsciously created by the moods and persona reflected by your page’s style and words. Once you’ve assured your visitors’ unconscious mind that your site aligns with their persona through colours and style, you need to engage their conscious mind with resources beyond just products for sale. These resources include interactive tools, decision support, and educational content that help visitors make informed decisions.
Organising your site to optimise clicks on key buttons that take visitors to different pages furthers engagement and ultimately leads to transactions. But that is another strategy altogether.
Here are some elements to keep in mind when designing your site to create a memorable first impression and maximise visitors’ dwell time and engagement.
Designing Around the Golden Triangle
Website features and design trends change often. Instead of constantly keeping up with trends, focus on how the conscious and unconscious mind processes information. For web browsing, this process is referred to as the golden triangle.
Google research shows that most people start on the left side of the masthead (top of the page), browse right, and then read the top three results before choosing one. Studies by groups like MarketingSherpa show that people follow a similar pattern on web pages: starting at the left, moving to the upper-right corner, and then browsing down the left side.
Place your core messages, calls to action, and links to your most compelling content within this triangle. It’s called the golden triangle because this is where most clicks to subsequent pages occur. If your call-to-action buttons and offers are outside the triangle, you may be missing golden opportunities for new business.
Instead of designing your website around current trends, design it around how websites are browsed. The top inch of your page, the masthead, is critical because it’s where the eye stops first. This is the place on your website where you need to hammer home a consistent, memorable, clear brand identity, tease a current promotion, or broadcast breaking news.
Defining a Style that Fits Your Brand Persona
Your website’s style should reflect both your persona and that of your target audience. Your website builder platform will include hundreds of design templates to choose from. Ask yourself the following questions to help you choose one with optimum appeal:
- What’s your brand’s personality? Spunky, traditional, reserved, outgoing, daring, rebellious, or trendsetting?
- Which characters, celebrities, or types of people embody that personality?
- What do these people wear every day? To a formal event? Would they show up at a black-tie event in a tux and red high-top sneakers? Would they get married in a black dress?
- What are the status levels your characters or personas seek? What are their aspirations and goals?
- What books do they read? What television shows do they watch? Which Instagram and Twitter accounts do they follow?
- What are the values and causes that matter most to them?
Now take a step back and start thinking of creative elements that embody your answers. How can you use some of them to appeal to your customers? How can you create this appeal quickly with graphics, words, headlines, and images? What do you need to do to ensure that visitors know, consciously and unconsciously, that they’ve found a brand that understands and celebrates them and their personality?
Dwell time and engagement are heavily influenced by the colour, fonts, and layout of your page. If you want people to feel excited and energised by your site, use energetic colours, fonts, images, and layouts. For example, fun fonts like Chalkboard create a playful, whimsical feeling, while traditional fonts like Times New Roman project an academic, authoritative, or informative tone.
As you work on the design elements that enhance visitors’ dwell time and engagement on your website, you also need to establish the metrics that matter most for your success. Make sure you take note of some of the upcoming key performance indicators (KPIs) for your website.
Minding Your KPIs
Clearly, your first goal in creating a web page is to drive traffic and keep visitors engaged and going deeper into your site. But that’s just the beginning. You need to know what people are doing once they get to your site, which information captures their attention, and how long they stay on your page.
Another KPI many don’t think about is the exit page. Where are customers leaving your site? Is it your product page? Your blog? Your About Us page? Monitor it often to identify content that’s causing visitors to look elsewhere.
Without this information, you don’t know if your site is relevant to searches for your category and to consumers in general, and whether it’s set up to spark customer journeys that end in a sale or another desired action. The following sections present some KPIs to monitor continuously to ensure your website is optimised for lead generation, retention, and sales.
Google Analytics, a free tool in your Google account, provides a dashboard for all your KPIs and other metrics. Setting it up for your website is straightforward. Monitoring your site’s traffic and performance should be part of your daily routine.
Bounce Rate
A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that don’t go past the first page they land on. On average, according to reports from many different analysts, bounce rates range from 20 to 90 percent of visitors, depending on the industry and the quality of the site. On average, 50 percent of visitors leave after viewing just one page of a website.
Note the average bounce rates by industry from Siege Media’s 2021 bounce rate study, which set a benchmark for your own site:
- Travel: 82.58 percent
- B2B: 65.17 percent
- Lifestyle: 64.26 percent
- Business and finance: 63.51 percent
- Health care: 59.50 percent
- E-commerce: 54.54 percent
- Insurance: 45.96 percent
- Real estate: 40.78 percent
A good bounce rate goal is pretty much any number under 50 percent. For e-commerce sites, the average bounce rate in 2022 was 20 – 45 percent, with the best sites hovering around 36 percent.
If your bounce rate falls below 10 percent, it’s typically an indication that the Google Analytics code has been inserted into your site more than once. If you’re using a template website, the code may be inserted into the template infrastructure and your SEO plug-in. Analytics tags can duplicate each other and create a false positive when it comes to bounce rates.
Here are some ways to keep your bounce rate low:
- Give visitors a reason to stay engaged, like a limited-time promotional offer.
- Present something inspirational and relevant, such as a video on proven solutions to challenges your customers face or educational insights that will help them succeed at their goals.
- Don’t offer links to outside pages because once visitors leave, they likely won’t come back, and you get a ding on your bounce rate percentage. Instead, embed in your own content any information you want to share from other organisations.
- Implement a more intuitive design and content flow, and make sure visitors have easy access to desirable information.
- Build a slider at the top of your landing page so people can quickly view your hot topics, business news, and educational tools, and then click through to the relevant page. Slides are an easy way to get visitors to go deeper into a site without having to scroll.
If you refresh the messaging on your landing page frequently, you can test which words, offers, images, videos, and other content are most relevant by comparing bounce rates and session durations.
Navigation Patterns
A heatmap provides a visual view of how people navigate around your website. This tool shows you what visitors do on your page, where they click, how far they scroll down on a given page, which images, buttons, and links they click on, and which ones they ignore.
A variety of software services offer heatmaps that you can use to assess visitors’ navigation of your website. Some top-rated platforms are Hotjar, Mouseflow, and Smartlook.
Session Duration
The longer people stay on your website, the stronger your chances of converting them to customers. The Google Analytics metric for this KPI is session duration, which measures the average time a visitor is on your site, from their arrival on the landing page to their exit. It’s calculated by dividing the total time spent across all sessions by the total number of sessions.
A good session duration benchmark for websites is generally 2 – 4 minutes per visit. Average session duration varies by industry and the quality of the site.
A session is not the same as a visitor. You may have 100 visitors and 200 sessions on your site in one hour, meaning that 100 unique visitors landed on your site for two sessions in that hour.
Another Google Analytics metric is time on page, which refers to the average time visitors spend on a specific page on your website, not on the site in general. Measuring time on page helps you determine which content is most relevant and what kind of content you should continue to develop and post.
If your average session duration and time on page numbers decrease, it’s time to think about changing your site to give visitors a new experience that offers greater value and more personal engagement. Here are some ways to do this:
- Include a brief emotionally relevant video on your home page. Video is one of the most engaging mediums because it usually takes less effort than reading. According to Wyzowl’s 2019 report on video marketing statistics, 83 percent of marketers claim video has produced a good ROI, and 84 percent say it has helped them increase traffic to their website. It also helps increase dwell time because it keeps people on a site as they watch a point of engagement.
When integrating video on your website, it’s best to host videos on a YouTube channel so their size doesn’t affect your website’s load time. You can embed captures on your page so they play within your site instead of redirecting viewers to YouTube. Videos can substantially increase your session duration as well.
- Add one-question surveys to your landing page. Leading questions like ‘What do you believe is the most important marketing activity for lead generation?’ can make visitors wonder if they’re doing the right thing and how they compare to others. Showing participants others’ results is also key to engagement. Platforms like HubSpot offer simple surveys you can add to your website.
- Set up a live webcam and stream the video. If you run a kennel, you can livestream dogs frolicking together during group play. If you have a home improvement business or sell recreational equipment, you can show your employees installing a new kitchen in a client’s home or landscaping a public playground – or even someone using one of your kayaks to rescue a puppy from a river. With eye-catching live videos, you’re likely to achieve more time on page and a great average session duration.
Pages per Session
If you have an engaging website that’s meaningful to your audience and provides the information or products they seek, they’ll view more pages while they’re on your site. To see how you’re doing, review your page view counts and unique page views on your Google Analytics dashboard.
Page view counts tally more than one view of the same page by an individual visitor to your site. Unique page views count only one view per individual, so you don’t get skewed data if one person continues to go back to the same page during a session, giving you the impression that a particular page is more popular than it actually is.
Page view averages vary, but if you can achieve two pages per session and around two minutes per session, you’re doing well.
Measuring the impact of your website content and designs is as easy as opening your dashboard on Google Analytics. Monitor your KPIs often to identify where you have the most traction and where you need to rework or replace content.
