Setting a strategy and establishing goals are only two of the standard approaches to building a small business. Your business website can be an extraordinary source of information, but you need to be prepared to collect and analyze the information your website provides. If you’re not using the information your website generates, you could be missing out on some great opportunities. Enter data driven website design.
What you get from data driven website design
What makes data driven website design so useful? If you get absolutely nothing else from it, data driven website design can help you identify your target audience. By itself, that’s a gold mine, but you can learn much more about buying habits and trends. You can also gain valuable insight into the best way to optimize your website for search engines.
Basic data. Your website can reveal simple, basic facts about your audience. Their gender, their age and location can help you define your strategy, select products and services that they’re interested in, and appeal to their buying preferences. At the same time, this information can help you determine which keywords to focus on, what colors to use and which navigational aids will be most helpful and appealing to them.
Deeper insights. Beyond the basic information about who your customers are, your website can help you answer more important questions. Are your customers returning? What brings them back? What chases them away? You can also analyze what they look at and how long they stay. By tracking this information, you can fine tune less appealing pages, products and services to make them more serviceable.
Optimization strategy. Collecting data isn’t enough. You need to be willing to let the data tell you what to do and where to go. It helps to know what you hope to accomplish with your collected data. In part, this means knowing what you want to know before you start!
Data driven website design can boost your optimization strategy
Your optimization strategy should reflect the makeup of your visitors. Are they new? Are they returning visitors? How long do they stay once they’re on the site? Your data collection should also identify the most popular pages on your site. It should also be able to tell you how they got to the site. Did they use a search engine? If so, what search terms did they use to get to your site? How do you rank among other sites that use those same search terms?
Data driven website design should also help you make decisions about design evolution. What percentage of your visitors are coming to you from mobile devices? Do you need to modify your website to accommodate them? Grantstreet Creative’s website designs are all responsive, which means your site will be mobile device friendly immediately.
If you’d like more information about data driven website design, and using data to support strategic marketing decisions, please contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell, Dave Ramsell, or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
Photo Credit: Tokyoform, via Flickr.com
