This is a new section I’m adding, called, “Questions from clients”. I hope that in answering some of the pressing questions from my clients, that I might answer some of your questions as well.
“Should we remove this image and it’s link?”
Earlier this week, I had a client ask me about a updating their homepage, and if we should remove a link to another page. The link (a large image) was certainly noticeable, however, it detracted from the look of the page. I started a discussion about removing the image to bring the page into better visual alignment.
However, I also know that the look of the page should be secondary to effectiveness of the page. The client wasn’t sure he wanted to remove the image feeling that this page had to be one of his most popular pages.
Is the page really that popular?
This specific page was a lead generation page. However, based upon my experience, I believed that the client was not getting a good return from that page. This was my belief based upon the design of the page, and my work with other lead generation pages that I’ve been able to track. But that was my “gut feeling”, and I don’t want to pull a page that is leading to revenue generation for a client.
As always, I feel like I should let the client make decisions, but it is my job to properly inform them so they can make good decisions based upon facts that will help their business.
So instead of relying on a gut feeling for how popular a page is (or how popular we hope it is), I decided to look at the Google Analytics report. While on the phone, I found that this page was:
- the thirtieth most popular page, out of 60+ pages on the site,
- it averaged less than a visitor per day, and
- ~20% of the users who view the page, left the site immediately after viewing the page.
Making a decision
I was still missing one important piece of information however. “How many leads, which convert to sales, are you getting from this page?” So I showed the client the information, and asked him the question. My two suggestions were to either:
- rework the page to focus on better lead generation, or
- pull this page, and let the leads come from other pages.
As I said, I like to let the client have the final say, and we discussed this, and came up with some plans for the future of this page. But in the end, we made well informed decisions for updating the site, so that we would have the best result for the website and the client’s business.
About Walter Wimberly