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Internet Marketing with Usability and Bounce Rates - From Technicalities to Customers
The creative aspects of internet marketing are often the ones that get most attention. The site design is tweaked, re-tweaked and completely redone; the copy is groomed with a fine tooth comb, but the technical aspects often languish and silently sabotage your efforts.
Here is why two undervalued aspects of website design and internet marketing services should be at the top of your checklist.Body Text (approximately 550-650 words in length) Words - 627 Density- 36/627=5.7%
Two of the least discussed aspects of internet marketing are usability, and bounce rate. While usability is generally considered a developer's problem, not a marketer's problem, it will quickly concern the SEO team when all that hard-won traffic starts to disappear in a haze of convoluted click paths.
Bounce rate is equally undervalued - this is a person who could be interested in your site, and is highly likely to convert, but somehow gets the impression that you are not what they are looking for. These less-discussed issues are part of the pillars of successful website design and search engine optimization campaigns. Here we look at how to correct problems with them.
Issues with usability of the website design can be difficult to determine. Visitors will often leave on all different pages of the site, so a particular page can rarely be identified as the problem. Click path analysis, a web analytics activity that is actually quite rare, is needed to determine usability issues. You will often see visitors going back and forth from page to related page, not staying long on any of them, and repeatedly visiting those they have already been to.
Your web analysis tools may also show you that visitors are taking much longer than usual to complete an action, either in terms of time or in terms of clicks. If the site owner can find his way to completing a transaction in five clicks, but visitors are repeatedly found to take ten, then usability is often the culprit.
Usability is a complex interplay of different factors in your website design. It usually comes down to parts of your navigation being visually unclear, and is sometimes related to having compromised goals for your site. If your website is trying to achieve too many different things, it can affect the usability for every goal.
Usability labs are the best, most comprehensive way to solve these issues. Your internet consulting service can set up a usability lab where people who have never seen your site before will all be asked to complete several actions on site.
Eye tracking software is needed, and the internet marketing team should instruct subjects to speak all of their thoughts. You should be able to identify the exact links and directions which are unclear by hearing what people are thinking, while eye tracking requires more in-depth analysis but is relatively objective.
Bounce rate is another metric that many site owners aren't aware of. It measures people that visit one page of the site but do not interact with it any further. It is tempting to think of these people as irrelevant to your internet marketing, or even to put them in a category of 'maybe-later' converters. Yet a high bounce rate can reveal terminal problems with your web marketing strategy.
Bounce rate can be measured either as visitors that leave before a set time (perhaps 20 seconds), or visitors that come to one page of the site but interact no further with it. A combination of the two will give you the truest results. Bounce rate is due to a disconnection between the message that your external marketing sends to potential visitors, and what they find when they enter the site.
It can be hard to see internally - however online marketing agencies are usually experienced at identifying the exact source of the problem.
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