Monday, June 20, 2011

Why your new website doesn’t have the Conversion Rate you planned

So, you spent a small fortune getting that new transactional website designed and developed by a leading agency. You told the boss that with an improved ‘user experience’ you would have a higher number of online purchases than with the old site you currently have (perhaps even giving a new and higher percentage figure of just how many conversions you would achieve) …. and you have just launched it.

So why has the number of conversions you predicted not happened? Why, when you take a look at your analytics dashboard, have those ‘look to book’ ratios not shot up as you predicted?

Well here’s something that your web agency may not have told you, when you set out your expectations at the beginning of the project….. Conversion rates don’t usually start off as high as you planned for a new site.

But why?

Existing users now get a different experience
According to user experience best-practice you should have a site that relies far more on ’recognition’ rather than ‘recollection’…. but the fact is that for a lot of sites, a certain proportion of regular users know their way around.
For example, if you consistently use one online banking site, do you find you start to move the mouse to the part of the screen where the ‘login’ section is, even before the page has fully loaded? I do!
For these regular users, this new site will be a disconnect with what they are used to and some may even think they are on the wrong site. All this confusion makes them think and this is the opposite of what you need!

More tomorrow, as its getting late.....

2 comments:

Mia Foster said...

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Hayden Sutherland said...

Mia
Err... thanks, I'm a little overwhelmed by your praise, but glad you like the blog and have subscribed.
Please feel free to comment on other posts you like.
Hayden