Do you know who your website’s target audience is and did you keep them in mind when your website was developed?

The main function of most websites is to generate new leads and business. Further goals can include providing useful content (perhaps through a blog) and becoming a thought-leader in the industry. Before determining your goals it is important to identify and research your target audience. Once you know who you’re speaking to, you can develop goals for your website.

About.com defines a target audience as “a specified audience or demographic group for which an advertising message is designed.” This holds true for websites too as they are, in essence, a business’ advertising “brochure” on the Internet. As such a business’ website needs to be enticing and easy to navigate to ensure visitors have a favourable experience and convert in leads or new business.

It is important for your web development agency to have a thorough understanding of your brand’s target audience in order to cater for their needs. Hence, your target audience has to be defined and researched long before the website is developed. Now the question: How do you define your target audience?

Firstly, think about the aim of your website. As an example, a travel operator might want to increase their sales by convincing visitors to book tours online or increase their leads through the number of visitors who download a brochure or fill out a contact form.

Secondly, what group of people would make use of your website? Determine how big your audience is and what their interests are. Based on this create different personas within the target audience. The target audience and personas can be determined based on demographic information like:

- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- Job
- Interests

For instance, a persona for a tour operator could be the middle-aged breadwinner of a family interested in family holidays. The second persona could be an individual that is a regular traveller interested in a packaged group tour. Try to come up with as many personas as possible to ensure you take in consideration all visitors to the website. Based on these personas determine what they would want and how they would interact with the website. This information will help the web developer to determine:

- The overall look and feel of the website
- How the navigation should be laid out to ensure smooth usability
- The number of pages that need to be included in the website

Thirdly, think about what other interests each persona might have. What other websites might they frequently visit? How will they find your website? Also consider:

- The speed of their Internet connection
As a rule of thumb use lower resolution pictures on websites to ensure that the website’s loading time is kept to a minimum.
- The type of browser they will use
The website should be compatible with all browsers but make sure that it works perfectly in your target audience’s favourite browsers.

And finally, think about the goals you want your target audience to complete. For the tour operator, goals could include things like downloading a brochure for a packaged group tour, an online booking for an activity or requesting more information about a bespoke travel package.

Now that you have an idea of what each type of persona would like to derive from your website, you can ensure that the information they are looking for is easily accessible.

Happy New Year from the FormFunction team! May 2010 bring loads of exciting, well-paying projects For many January is the month of starting anew, implementing revised business and marketing strategies and deciding on New Year’s resolutions and goals. If you haven’t tried it yet, make some New Year’s resolutions for your website and digital strategy. The overall objective of most websites is to generate new leads and business in order to make a return on investment. To get you started, below we’ve listed three possible resolutions to help make your website more profitable.

1. Invest in quality content

You can have the most visually attractive website on the Internet but if your content doesn’t provide visitors with the information they need, your website will fall short and ultimately you will lose money. On the other hand, if you have content that is informative and well-optimised your website will rank well and searchers will be able to find your website through search engines.

2. Improve website usability

Going hand-in-hand with good content, your website’s usability plays an important role in how your visitors perceive and interact with your website. We have discussed website usability in more detail in our post “Web Development Pitfalls to Avoid”, but at a minimum, it is important to make sure your website is easy to navigate and that it is compatible with the most popular website browsers.

3. Reporting

ROI plays a key role in any business decision. Management wants to know what they are getting for the money they are spending. It is important to think about what actions you want visitors to perform on your website. Maybe you want them to buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, listen to a podcast or request a brochure. Either way, it is important to set up goals in your Analytics software and to track and measure the performance of these goals.

The same goes for what visitors are doing on your website. Are there any pages that have a high exit rate? Re-look the content and navigation on those pages. When you compile website reports on a monthly basis you will be able to gauge the performance of your website as well as identify areas upon which you need to improve. Some areas to track can include visitors to your website (separated into the total number of visitors and the number of unique visitors), top website content, top exit points, top traffic sources and the best performing keywords to name a few.

These are only suggestions and of course there are many more areas that you can focus on to enhance the performance of your website. Do you have any specific areas on your website that you are going to focus on in 2010?

Do you know how effective your website is and if it is showing return on investment? A website can be described as your business’ virtual storefront in the online world and hence needs to entice new leads and clients to come inside and look around. We have already touched on a few design and usability issues to consider in our Development Pitfalls to Avoid post. Still, it is alarming how many companies underestimate the power of a user-friendly website and are perfectly content with a pretty, but functionally useless website.

By installing an analytics package you can transform your website into a powerful marketing tool by measuring visitor engagement with your website. There are various analytics packages available, either paid-for software like SAS Analytics or free platforms like Google Analytics. Below are a few of the questions that you can answer by analysing the metrics you’ll get from an analytics package.

How many visitors and page impressions has your website received?

Your analytics package will show the total number of visitors to your website during a certain time period as well as the number of absolute unique visitors, the number of new versus returning visitors and which browsers visitors are using to view your website.

How did visitors find your website?

Under Traffic Sources in the Google Analytics dashboard you are able to see which keywords and key-phrases visitors used to find your website as well as which websites and search engines directed traffic to your website. The most popular keywords and key-phrases can be used in your keyword strategy to enhance your search engine optimisation campaign.

Are your visitors converting?

An analytics package allows you to assign goals you would like visitors to complete and to measure the success of these goals. Goals can include completing a contact form, downloading a brochure or signing up for a newsletter – all actions that can turn visitors into leads and ultimately clients.

Which pages on your website are the most popular?

Under the Content tab in your Google Analytics dashboard you are able to see which pages are the most popular and which pages have the highest exit rate. You should pay special attention to pages with a high bounce rate. This information can be found under the Visitors tab. Pages with high bounce rate are those that visitors land on and then leave immediately, rather than continuing to browse the site. This could indicate that visitors are not finding the information that they expect on the page, or that you’re navigation is a problem. If visitors from search engines almost immediately click away from your website it is highly likely that your website’s content is irrelevant to the keywords or key-phrases they searched for. The Site Overlay tool is handy to see which menu items and links are clicked on the most.

When used correctly your analytics software can help improve your website’s usability and navigation structure and ultimately your visitors browsing experience. It is wise to compile monthly website analytics reports to track your visitors’ behaviour and to determine whether the changes you make to your site have made any difference.