In the previous issue of D2D, we talked about conversion rates and how that can help you measure your design ROI.
As a business owner, it’s crucial you’re always calculating your return on investment with anything you’re putting money into. Otherwise, how will you know it’s worth continuing?
To look at this from a different angle, we’ll dive into a few additional areas to explore whether your trending in the right direction (or not).
Bounce rates
When it comes to reviewing your website for success, an important statistic to consider is your website bounce rate.
The bounce rate is measured by the percentage of people that land on your website, and then leave — rather than continuing to click through to additional pages.
As you’d imagine, a high bounce rate is no bueno.
You want visitors spending as long as possible on your site, so if they are frequently bouncing, something needs to change.
So what could be causing a high bounce rate? Well, there’s many factors — but here’s a few:
- Bad design: There’s plenty of statistics proving that a poorly designed website is off-putting and does not make a site feel credible or trustworthy.
- Didn’t meet expectations: Maybe this was a blog post someone clicked on, and the article just wasn’t as good as the headline implied — your content needs to deliver.
- Confusion: Have a busy, cluttered site? This, too, is an easy way to cause users to quickly abandon.
In order to review your bounce rates, you do need an analytics tool installed — such as Google Analytics or Fathom.
Within these dashboards, you can gain insights into your bounce rates to find out if your pillar pages need to be revisited for improvements.
According to this article, an average bounce rate for most websites ranges from 26-70%.
Don’t panic if you find yourself in that range — the biggest thing is to find out if you’re trending in the wrong direction (or higher than 70%).
Customer support
Sort of a secondary factor into finding out if your design ROI is paying off is to review the time spent on customer support.
Do you feel like customers are calling/emailing more with issues on your website?
Are they having trouble checking out or finding what they need?
If it seems that support has increased, there could be a major problem with your website.
Determine what your customers are asking about, and see if you can’t revisit your website to improve the user experience. It’s crucial your site is as user-friendly as possible — so don’t bury important content or products, making it impossible to find.
Simplify, but don’t complicate it.
Your customers are your number one tool for measuring the friendliness of your site — it’s important to listen, evaluate, and react.
By improving on elements of your site, you could decrease the amount of customer support — and therefore, decreasing the amount of time/money spent on that support.
Revenue
Last, but not least, one of the more obvious areas you can review to determine if your design ROI is net positive is to take a look at overall sales.
Are sales trending upwards? Or are they declining?
Review how long either trend is lasting, and figure out what may have taken place prior to that change.
Did you make an improvement to your website, and found that sales slowly started to increase?
Did you see an uptick in customer support, and therefore a decline in sales?
Many times, there are signals you can point to that contribute to the changes in revenue. If you did make changes, evaluate those closely for the first 30 days to determine if it’s working (or not).
The beauty of a website is you can continue to test and tweak.
Eventually, you’ll find something that worked, and helps turn that downward trajectory around.
The worst thing you can do is let sales sink, and do nothing — so be proactive, review, test, and analyze so you can ensure your design ROI is positive.
Thanks for reading,
