Dave Chaffey talks website optimisation with Grant LeBoff

What does it take to build and improve a successful website? It all starts with the analytics

Your website is the most important asset you have for attracting and converting customers. Optimising it for SEO and conversion is critical for growing your business. In this talk Dave Chaffey talks with Grant LeBoff from Sticky Marketing about the key things you need to consider to improve the effectiveness of your website. Watch it to find out what you need to do to take your site to the next level.

In a noisy office? Don't have headphones? No problem, instead of watching the talk you can just read our transcript instead:

Grant Leboff: So Dave, when we're talking about digital marketing, obviously the one piece of real estate that I think everybody owns these days is a website. What are the things businesses need to think about when they're starting to look at their website and how effective it is?

Dave Chaffey: I always start with the analytics. I think it's going deeper into the analytics than just looking at those curves of visits and number of page views through time. You have to look at the paths through the website to make sure that you're getting people deep enough into the websites to learn about your products and services. Two practical techniques I'd recommend there in Google analytics, forward and reverse path analysis.

Forward path analysis is say, looking at your home page or other entry or landing pages and seeing what messages and what customer journeys are pulling people through. Make sure you have primary journeys. Rather than giving too much choice, you limit choice and direct people to what's going to help them and help you as a business. That's the forward path.

Now with the reverse path, is if you took an outcome page such as signing up for a webinar or downloading a brochure you see which pages on the site are actually contributing to that. You might find, for example, you've got some pages with a high level of traffic, but they're not linking through to your outcome page. You can think then of how you can tweak the page template to improve that.

Grant Leboff: When we talk about landing pages, for example, the home page being an obvious one but others as well, what are the characteristics for you that make a good landing page? What does someone have to start to think about with the landing page?

Dave Chaffey: Right. I'm laughing here because there are so many things, aren't there? I think if we take the homepage and we say it's a small business so it's not a well known brand, it is about the fundamentals of who you are, what we do, where we do it. I think most people get those right. The key one that's missing is, what makes us different and what can we offer you online that our competitors can't. There's a checklist of four there, before we get on to the design, that's the content that should be available.

Grant Leboff: What about the calls to action? One of things is, once a customer's landed on any landing page, whichever one it is, it's about what we want them to do next. How, for you, does that work? How have you seen it done well?

Dave Chaffey: I think with a tailored landing page where you're perhaps driving AdWords traffic, it's got to be super simple with a single call to action to take people on to the next stage, as you say. With the home page or category pages, you do need to give a bit more choice, but not too much. One practical thing you often see that 'gets me', is people still use these carousels. They've gone out of fashion a bit with the development of mobile sites, but you know these sliders where there's a series of four or five images and it's perhaps quick for the agency to create and the marketers like the bright images. But really, you're giving too much choice there and you could be missing key messages. One thing I'd recommend there is, carousels aren't a hundred percent bad, if you look at say the HSBC UK site, you'll see they've got key panels or tabs which actually just give four main choices or four main messages. That's a technique you can apply there.

Grant Leboff: All of this really comes down to clarity, which I think you see a lot of businesses they just want to tell everything in one go, so they throw it all on and it doesn't really work. How do people start to prioritize, do you think? Because that's one of the issues, isn't it?

Dave Chaffey: Oh yeah. I think perhaps the bigger the company is, the worse the problem. You get the problem of the hippo as well. Do you know that one? The highest paid person's opinion, and they'll say, "It needs to be done this way." Of course they've got their views and they probably don't represent the customer. What's really important to help prioritize is to have a process which is often known as conversion rate optimization. It's not just about conversion rates, it's really about the whole value from the website.

It's about designing a process that you're reviewing all of the customer journeys and all the touch points in a structured way. What that might mean, at Smart Insights, we talk about 90 day planning. That will say, "Okay, well let's prioritize where we're going to have the biggest uplift." It might be the homepage, it might be a deeper, for retailers it could be product or category page, because that's got a lot of foot fall. In each 90 day period you should be setting hypotheses of, "What if we change this call to action? What if we change the messaging or the right side bar? What impact is that going to have?" So to run a batch of tests and do it in a structured way.

Some big businesses now, it's amazing the resource and scale they're doing this. In the UK, we've got Shop Direct and they were actually running 50 tests a month. I saw a presentation by their CMO. They work so well that he's then said, "We're going to scale this up to a hundred and fifty tests per month." The interesting thing was, not only the scale of it, but how they couldn't actually second guess the customer behavior. You actually get a third, they'll give you a significant uplift, a third that make no difference really, but then a third that you're actually doing worse. That's why it's important to run so many tests and be quite creative with all the ideas.

Often, when we've worked on CRO, we'd like to think we know about marketing, we haven't seen that much uplift from small tweaks in terms of messaging or position of calls to action. You get big boosts by big changes not by meek tweaking as it's sometimes called. So be bold!