When a website redesign takes place, the first thing Im always interested in is how that redesign translates into better marketing performance. If youre an SEO or an online advertiser who owns his or her own business, you may feel that your website needs a face-lift from time to time to maintain that fresh look and feel.
Instead of just relying on the assumption that your website needs a re-design, why not findout a way that actually proves if your website truly needs one or not?
Today, Id like to share how I go about measuring the impact of a website redesign using Google Analytics to see just how advantageous redesigning your website can be. After reading this post, you should be able to put together an easy-to-digest report that shows you how the quality of your traffic increased after redesigning your website.
Some website owners redesign their websites just to give it a better look and feel while others do it to improve marketing performance. Regardless of the reason, one thing is apparent: people like to redesign their websites to keep up with change.
As the years pass, you might have noticed alot of popular websites undergo face-lifts every few years. Lets take into consideration Search Engine Journals website, which is an industry leading news source for all things related to search marketing. Earlier this year, SEJredesigned their website to a more modern and user-friendly interface and structure. Managing editor for SEJ Kelsey Jones wrote an announcement post, stating:
We are so excited to debut a sleeker design and a new logo which we feel is a better, updated look for SEJ.
The post Kelsey madegoes further into the new features of the design that was debuted in April of 2014. With SEJ being an on online marketing focused company, they took a benchmark report of their traffic performance and compared the performance of their traffic after the redesign took place to see how the traffic performance increased. I was fortunate enough to receive a comparison report (which we can use an example) that showed the decrease in bounce rate and increased time on site after the redesign took place and the stats are outlined in the image below.
Report obtained by SEJ staff
We also comparedhow the traffic quality performed three months prior to the redesign (January to March of 2014) withan equal date range (three months after the redesign, from April to June 2014). As you can see the web site redesign resulted in a positive2.98% drop inbounce rate, as well a 5.22% increase in average pages per session.
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How to Track The Impact of Your Website Redesign by @seocompanymiami