Your website is the foundation of your business. Studies show that it only takes 1/10^th of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. Site visitors form an opinion about your website within 50 milliseconds of landing on your page and decide whether to stay or leave.

That said, it’s no surprise that having a website with poor user experience sets your business up for lost opportunity and wrong first impressions.

We hear this a LOT. You regularly look at your website. You know how to navigate it. You update it when information changes or needs updating, but is it actually effective? Is your website doing its job? Does it represent your brand? Is it converting? What traffic are you seeing? What ROI are you seeing?

These are questions you should be asking to determine the effectiveness of your website. It’s time to stop thinking of how you see your website and time to start thinking of how your prospects experience your website. 

Marketing analytics can be overwhelming enough without having to translate the different terms included in your marketing reports. Understanding the terminology can be essential to ensuring you understand the results of your marketing efforts.

After looking over your marketing analytics, do you feel like you leave with more questions? You are not alone — our team of consultants are regularly asked to explain the difference between a bounce rate and an exit rate, and explain why the bounce rate matters.

Back in the 1990’s (after Al Gore invested the internet), there was a mad rush for companies to stake out their real estate on the world wide web. My boss at the time hired her tech-savvy brother-in-law to build a website. He took photos of our corporate brochure to create the company’s first website. It was literally an online brochure. It was awful.  

Unfortunately, there are a lot of company websites out there that haven’t changed much since then. Sure, maybe they’ve changed their graphics, created new copy, and updated the look and feel, but the website remains a static digital brochure that offers little value to the prospect. If you’re planning to redo your website, these guiding principles can help you launch a site that will engage your prospects and actually generate leads.