How to Direct Traffic on Your Website

Getting Users to Where You Want Them on Your Website

The question of how users interact with websites has been on the minds of business owners and web developers alike since businesses started using the Internet back in the 90s. Times were a bit simpler back then in some ways, but this question proved difficult to answer with the technology available at the time. Hit counters provided some answers with the amount of time a user refreshed a page, but that provided little to no insight on how they were getting there or why.

Site traffic analytics evolved over time, and now with the widespread use of Google Analytics, everyone has access to detailed understanding of where users came from, how they got there, and where they’ll go next. Everyone from the mom and pop shop down the road to multi-national corporations are using analytics to determine what’s working and not working on their website.

Using Analytics

We’ll be the first to admit it’s a little overwhelming at first, though. The first mistake business owners make in analytics is diving in without a goal. It’s easy to get lost in the graphs, numbers and statistics without having something to achieve. Let’s start with a goal we’ll call directing traffic.

Let’s use the Deep Fried Advertising website as an example. When we built our new website, we went to the analytics with the question “where are users going on our site, where do we want them to go, and how do we get them there?” The first question is where they’re at now.

Deep Fried’s Transformation

A lot of people look at analytics backwards. When seeing a high traffic user path on your website, continuing to funnel traffic in that direction may not always be the right way to turn. Take a look at your business goals, and play traffic director. Are users ending up on the right page? In our case, users were landing on our site and immediately clicking over to the “About Us” page. Here’s how we looked in March or 2016.

From looking at our analytics, we were able to determine that users were landing on our homepage and clicking through to “About Us.” While not necessarily a bad thing, that’s not the best way to make a sale. No one is going to become a customer from reading company or employee bios. Through form completion tracking, we were able to determine the most important part of our website from a sales perspective was “Our Work.” The next step was getting people there. We had to change the path of our funnel.

With the new funnel path in mind, we started crafting our new site. We needed people to see our work, so in a way, our homepage became a landing page. We offered two ways to click through to the desired page and a collapsable menu showing everything else. We chose an aggressive approach to designing a new site where we were in control of how people interacted with it.

Now it’s your turn

We figured out how direct traffic in a way that directly impacted our business. All we needed was to figure out a goal and how to get there. With the help of analytics, business owners have the power to influence their customers in endless ways. Take advantage of that power by using the aggressive approach to website design. Direct traffic, gain customers. Simple.

Since we had so much fun directing traffic on our site, let us take a shot at yours! If you think users are getting lost on your site and can be re-directed to positively benefit your business, get in touch. We’d love to help.

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