Mr. Kall

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

3 Key Metrics That Tell the Truth about Your Website

By Rob Kall, President, Bookt LLC

Does Web Design Matter?

We’re used to thinking of web design as a subjective matter. I like this, he likes that, etc., and of course, to a certain degree it is. But more than that, design does have a clear effect on people’s behavior online. No one takes the science of measuring this more seriously than Google, a company that meticulously performs A/B testing on all new design ideas to measure which alternative yields the highest desired outcome. You can do the same and this article outlines some important metrics that tell the truth of your current and next website design.

How Can It Be Done?

Before we start with the nitty gritty details, let’s just discuss how you can measure your design's effectiveness. Let’s say you currently have an online booking website for your lodging property. It seems to work ok, but you feel it looks a little outdated, you are not sure about the SEO effectiveness and you cannot effectively measure your online conversion ratio. A new design has been presented and you love the look, but will it perform better? (For questions about SEO and online conversion, please see previous articles I have published on this site on the subject).

One way to measure the design effectiveness, is to set up the new second site, then use a tool like the Google Website Optimizer. I won’t go into all the technical details here, but your web design company should be able to help you get it configured. Fully set up, you will then perform a split test where some of the users are directed to the new design and some to the old site. You can then collect metrics how each design performs. It’s not unusual to notice that certain aspects of a new design does not perform as good as the old one when first tested, but with simple adjustments you can many times address those issues and then reap all the benefits of a more updated solution.

Attributes of a Well Functioning Website

While there are a myriad of factors that affect the effectiveness of a website, this article focuses on design (color, layouts, images, navigation and placement of calls to action). So we will therefore concentrate on metrics that directly correlate to those factors. A metric like online booking conversion ratio is obviously critical, but it tends to be more dependent on the ease of use of the booking engine and how competitive your pricing is. Instead I will isolate 3 metrics that are tightly correlated to your design:

• Website Bounce Rate
  
• Avg. Time on Site
  
• Percentage of Visitors Reaching a “ Goal Page”

What is Website Bounce Rate?

A bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves after arriving to a page on your site without visiting any other pages. A bounce is registered when instead of clicking on a link on your site; the user does one of the following things:

• Closes an open window or tab
  
• Types a new URL
  
• Clicks the “Back” button
  
• Lets the browser session time out (usually after 20-30 minutes)

Bounce rate is directly correlated to the ease of navigation, attractiveness of the design and content found on your landing page (typically your homepage).

Frankly, a high bounce rate (>45%) means that site visitors do not find your offering meaningful, or that your navigation is vague. A low bounce rate (<25%) means that visitors are enticed and wish to click through. Use bounce rate to adjust your site’s design and content, and make sure that your marketing reflects your offering found on related landing pages.

Why Does Time on Site Matter?

First, is higher time on site always better? Yes, unless you suspect it is because the site loads extremely slowly or your navigation is so complicated that the visitor may get “lost”. If your site has an integrated availability search with multiple room types and offerings, the typical user will review at least one or two of those room/property types before making a booking decision. That will usually take a couple of minutes, so if your avg. time on site is less than 5 minutes, they are probably writing you off prior to that stage. Two ways to improve this number is to set up dedicated photo gallery and unfiltered review pages. When reviewing analytics for successful travel sites, I always see those types of pages having a large proportion of page views. Also, remember, many online bookings happen on the second or third visit to your site, but without the time spent doing information gathering during the first visit, the return visit that yields the online booking may not have occurred.

How do I Determine Goal Pages and Measure Them?

I introduced the concept of a goal page above. So what is a goal page? For most of you, the most obvious one would be the online booking confirmation page. A page that is only displayed after a completed booking. But if our objective is to measure web design effectiveness, I think a better goal page is the “Start a Booking Page”. If you got to this page you are a serious prospect and you found the site worth exploring. The price, availability or other attributes may not be right, but at least the design made the visitor consider a purchase. Using that page also has the additional benefit that it it is easier to measure and you tend to have a larger data sampling. Measuring how many people reach the page can easily be done within a tool like Google Analytics using the “Goals” feature.

Conclusion – Evaluating Your Results

So if you have set up your split testing, run the results for at least a few days (travel website traffic and behavior varies between weekdays and weekends) you should now have some data to evaluate:

• First look at the bounce rate, is it higher or lower? If higher (and your design/photos is as or more attractive than your old site), chances are that your primary call to action is buried or hidden. In my opinion, an availability quick search in the top left or right corner is almost always the best way to give users a clear next step.

• If time on site is lower consider adding more image galleries, reviews or activity/attraction descriptions.

• Lastly, how to evaluate your goal page data? I would take the data from both sites, remove the number of visitors that bounced (to avoid the mistake of thinking that your goal page conversion is better, just because your bounce rate improved) and then compare the percentage of the remaining visitors that reached your goal page.

If the number is higher, your navigation and presentation of your site offering has improved. If not, chances are that your availability search, room description etc., does not sell your property as well as it should. Again, look into adding more photos and videos, integrated user reviews and cross reference your units to the attractions and activities in the area.

So this was all about objective metrics when evaluating a website design but in the end, don’t forget your gut feeling. If a new website design gives you a good feeling, it will probably work better.

Rob Kall, President of Bookt LLC, is a 'technopreneur' at heart. Drawing upon his 12+ years of experience in developing and implementing real estate and property websites he founded Bookt in 2007 to fill a void in the global vacation rental industry. Mr. Kall is a master of emerging web technologies, especially as applied to the travel industry, as well as behavioral targeting and engagement, deciphering marketing trends into widgets and applications, and online distribution hubs beyond the GDS. Mr. Kall holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Boras, Sweden. Mr. Kall can be contacted at 800-941-0868 or rob@bookt.com Extended Bio...

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