Do you suffer from a lack of imagination? We do! As a result, people do “wrong things” on our website and it hurts our customer engagement. But it’s not the visitor’s fault they’re doing the “wrong thing.” It’s our fault for making it an option and our lack of imagination to anticipate this. The good news is there’s a way you can detect and correct these things.
This morning I was shocked to discover an engaged visitor came to our website to research our business, but got thwarted by a bogus home page. Yes! A bogus home page that we didn’t even know existed. What makes this worse the person was a warm lead that converted on one of our content offers yesterday and came back to investigate us more before engaging further. Instead of finding wonderful information on our website, they found a page we didn’t know existed and we lost credibility with this visitor. Tragic!
But how did we discover this? We use Lucky Orange to study user behavior on our website. You can see the actual behavior of this visitor in the video below. They reloaded the page 3 times to make sure they were in the right place and spent some time investigating our “home page.” But they left when they couldn’t find useful information. OUCH! It will be very hard for us to recover from the lost trust with this particular visitor. Watch for yourself.
Do you want a guarantee? Run a usability diagnostic and we’ll guarantee you find actionable insights. You will uncover hidden issues that are hindering your users. If it doesn’t deliver actionable insights, we’ll refund your money.
How did this happen?
This is the home page our visitor should have seen.
We use the Hubspot marketing platform and didn’t realize they created an alternate home page when they setup our install. The warm lead in the video converted on one of our Hubspot landing pages. The URL for that page was http://hub.allies4me.com/hlp/8-obstacles/. So, the warm lead decided to go to our home page by manually typing hub.allies4me.com. But our actual home page is at allies4me.com.
It only took 30 seconds to fix. But first we had to know there was a problem. This bogus home page has been live for over a year and I’m now wondering how many leads we lost because they went to the wrong home page.
What You Should Do
You should install a tool like Lucky Orange. Start recording and studying your site visitors. You will be surprised by what you find because everyone uses your website differently than you. More importantly, you will start to see your visitors experience through their eyes. It is common to find issues unique to tablets, mobile phones and different screen sizes when you do this. This is especially important when you’re launching a new campaign.
There are a number of tools that have this feature. We use both Hotjar and Lucky Orange. Both include user videos, heatmapping, polls and form analytics. One thing I like about Lucky Orange is it is constantly recording visitors without intervention on my part. Lucky Orange is also aggressively priced and gives you a lot of features for a good price. The Lucky Orange integration with Hubspot offers more utility and ability to jump to user videos directly from the contact timeline in Hubspot.
Whatever tool you choose, you should start today and discover issues keeping your visitors from converting into customers.
You should consider something else to improve your visitor engagement. Once or twice a year you should run usability testing on your website. It isn’t expensive, and we always learn something new that needs to be addressed. It’s also a way to verify your current market assumptions are aligned with your website. It’s very likely that things have changed. Regular usability testing is a systematic way of staying on track.
Do you want a guarantee? Run a usability diagnostic and we’ll guarantee you find actionable insights. You will uncover hidden issues that are hindering your users. If it doesn’t deliver actionable insights, we’ll refund your money.