Quite often, simple changes can net big results when designing for e-commerce. But where do you find these small loopholes that need to be fixed? Most often, your web statistics software holds the key to the answers.
Site usability. It sounds a complex term that is thrown around by high-paid web design experts – but the reality of it is quite simple: Is the user of a website able to do or find what they set out to accomplish on your website?
If they came to buy something, did they find it and successfully purchase it? If the user was doing research, did he find the information he was looking for? Or if he was trying to create something using tools on your site, was he able to complete the task without getting stuck somewhere along the way?
It’s just that simple. Does your site make your users successful at what they’re trying to do? If you’re users aren’t accomplishing their goals, then perhaps you should take a look at your website statistics to help better understand your website’s usability.
Web statistics are excellent for understanding exactly why your users aren’t being successful. It can point out problem spots like confusing pages, broken links, or hard-to-find problems like pictures and links that are being over-emphasized and distracting your users from the elements of your site that will make them successful.
What statistics are going to tell you where your problem spots lie? This is going to be unique to each site, but there are a few good places to look:
1) Exit pages – where are people leaving your site from? If one page is being left more than others, it should probably be examined
2) Most popular/least popular pages – Are these what you expected to see?
3) Referrers – Are the search engines sending you traffic, and if so, was it for the keywords that you expected?
These are just a few examples of how statistics can be used to determine if your site’s users are getting what they want or need from your site.
Once you have a good idea of where the problems lie, is to set a course of action to make changes to your site. Before you going making large changes to the site, you’ll want to set a plan so that you can measurably compare what is happening when you make your changes and learn what works (and doesn’t work) for next time.
Here are some tips to help understand the impact of your changes.
1) Have a baseline. Understand the behavior of your users before you start changing anything. Without a baseline, you have no basis of comparison for your changes.
2) Change one thing at a time. Understandably, this makes the process of improving your site slower, but understanding the impact of a single change is important. If you change too many elements at one time, you’ll never know if people’s behavior changed, for example, because of the new picture instead of the new color and text on the “Click here” button.
3) If possible, test options against each other. Often called split testing, this pits one option against another, to determine how they perform with similar amounts of traffic. All things being equal, your analytics should show you which page/image/button, or whatever else you’re testing performs better.
In the end, a web statistics package plays a very important role in determining where efficiencies can be made in a website design, and very often, quite simple changes can be made to drastically enhance the performance of a site. Be sure that the next time you’re reading your website statistics, you’re not just reading them for the numbers. Read them with a critical eye towards your website and let them tell you how to improve upon it.
