Knowing Your Website’s Knowledge Gap
If your company’s website isn’t meeting conversion-rate projections, the obvious, most likely culprit is the site’s user interface design, i.e., the visual information presented to visitors that’s supposed to guide them to the point of purchase. When action is necessary to understand why the design of your website isn’t yielding an acceptable conversion rate, the seemingly logical first step is to analyze the site’s data. Seems pretty reasonable.
Although web analytics will tell you how design alterations impact traffic and conversion rates, they use data from what you already suspect to be a flawed site as the baseline comparison.
Instead, focus on learning the ways in which your website’s foundational structure is affecting visitors’ ability to easily find the information your site aims to provide.
That’s the crux of the Search Engine Watch article, “A Knowledge Gap Analysis Will Tell You What Web Analytics Can’t.”
Regarding the use of analytics, the article states, “Website analytics are reactive in that they can only be collected after you publish the changes. Using analytics as a design refinement tool forces a reactive, trial-and-error design and development process that devours time and resources. Rarely does this approach result in any dramatic improvements.”
The article’s author also provides a convincing argument for conducting an entirely different type of analysis: “One effective method to determine the accuracy of a site’s design is to conduct a knowledge gap analysis. This is a straightforward process of identifying the differences between what your user personas suggest your users will actually know at each step of the task and the knowledge required to complete the task correctly.”
There’s lots of great advice in the piece, so if you’re not satisfied with the rate at which you company’s website is turning visitors into customers, I encourage you to read it in its entirety and then take action.
