Why should any work on a website begin with analytics?

[shammis606]

All site improvements should be done thoughtfully, based on specific analytical data. Otherwise, you risk not getting the desired result and repeating the same mistakes as before. In our article, we will tell you how we help clients improve their site using hypotheses.

What are hypotheses and why are they needed?
A hypothesis is an assumption based on analytical data about changes to usefulness of self employed database a site that will affect specific indicators with a certain degree of probability.

How we develop hypotheses for our clients at Synapse
Stage 1 - selection of target audience
The client and I select a narrow target audience and describe it in detail to identify the company's potential clients:

what benefits do they get from working with her,
what pains and fears they have,
what questions do they ask when they contact you,
what are the objections,
how they make their choice when buying/ordering,
at what stage of decision making are they?
Stage 2 - website/landing page analysis
By analyzing the audience, we understand what the page these people land on should be like. It should cover the user’s “pains” and needs, answer their questions and objections, that is, provide all the comprehensive information needed to make a purchase decision. The page should motivate the user to contact the company.

Stage 3 - analysis of visitors' behavior on the site
After selecting a specific target audience, we analyze where and by what queries people come to the site, how they behave:

what pages they look at and what they focus on;
where they click;
what information are they missing on the page;
which block is skipped;
what question of theirs is not answered, etc.
Stage 4 - building a hypothesis
Based on this analysis, we build a hypothesis: what needs to be improved on the site so that users are more likely to leave a request or make a purchase.

What are the advantages of this method of work?
Hypotheses save you money
When you invest money in contextual advertising, SEO and other tools to attract people to the site, you expect a return. But if the page that people come to is not a conversion page, you will not get the expected result from investments in promotion. Website improvements based on these hypotheses will allow you to receive more applications/orders with the same budget for attracting users.

You can continuously build and test various hypotheses, measuring the results and evaluating new points of site development. Accordingly, invest money only in the improvements you need, aimed at achieving certain indicators: traffic, conversion.

+ If the result has a positive effect on the change in conversion, then we continue to make further improvements.

- If the results are negative, we don’t waste any more resources and test other hypotheses.

For example, hypotheses can warn against large investments in website redesign just to make it look prettier. After all, if the user could not find the information he needed on the website or the products in the catalog, then improving the visuals will not fix the situation. Yes, the website will be more attractive, but the number of applications will not increase. It is better to analyze what users lacked to make a purchase and then make improvements aimed at increasing conversion, and not at decorating the site.

Another example: a company is launching a new service. To promote it, the client wants to create a landing page with advanced functionality for 80,000 rubles. What will you do if the new service is not in demand? To insure against possible losses, we suggest first making an inexpensive business card website , connecting contextual advertising with a minimum budget to it and seeing whether users click on the ads and view the page. If calls and applications are coming in already in the first month, it means there is demand - now you can work on the landing page for a specific target audience and attract more people.

Hypotheses save your time
One hypothesis requires about 20-30 minutes of your time:

Answers to the manager's questions about the target audience and setting a specific task for the specialist.
Coordination of the finished hypothesis and the work plan for it.
After a month of driving traffic to the improved site, you need to return to this hypothesis and measure the results again, compare them with the initial ones and those that were predicted. After that, you can draw a conclusion: did we achieve what we wanted or not. Decide which next hypothesis to take into work: for this or another target audience, the same section or another, etc.

Enough chatter - give real examples!
Ayutthaya
The website of the Thai massage salon "Ayutthaya" came under our service in 2017. We were faced with the task of increasing the number of applications from interested users who came to the website from contextual advertising.

First of all, we looked at which queries generate the maximum number of clicks. Most of them contain a specific service name, but the ads link to the main page, as it looks more attractive.

Developing a service card
Like the entire site, the services section consisted of text pages with pictures, so together with the client we decided to improve the section and make it more interesting for users to motivate them to leave a request.

We recorded the current indicators, determined how we wanted to improve them, and formulated a hypothesis for achieving them:

If you redesign the service card and add a “Sign up for a service” form, the conversion from the new form will be at least 1.5%.