Does anyone else have any data or research they are prepared to share on what % of visitors actually see (their) homepages?

The reason I ask is that I suspect the % is much higher than many realise. The homepage is always given the most attention (along with the buying process typically) and it sometimes seemed assumed that this page will form the key part in most site users' journey.

However, and this is particularly true of sites with lots of content and reasonably good organic search rankings or a lot of deep-linking activity going on (e.g. PPC campaigns and advertising with links to special landing pages), our own recent experiences and conversations suggest the average % of site visitors who see your homepage to be less than 40% and possibly less than 10%. Certainly for this site, E-consultancy.com, over 90% of our unique site visitors do not see the homepage, and on a few other large sites that we have done web analytics work on recently this figure was over 80%.

Of course, one has to look at how far those visitors who enter at a page other than the homepage actually penetrate the site. This various a lot depending on where they have come from. Typically, a large % of these deep-linking visitors come from natural search links where the visitor come to only one page on your site before 'bouncing' back to the search engine and off somewhere else. Either you failed to engage that visitor properly or the search result wasn't actually relevant to the user.

My point is not that we should stop focusing on the homepage, but rather we should perhaps focus more on the pages deep in a site and think more carefully about how to engage those users who arrive there first. And quite possibly this represents the majority of your unique users and therefore the largest opportunity to make a significant difference to your performance.

So what can be done to engage users at lower levels in a site?

• Navigation. Certainly best practice usability helps here - making it clear to the user what the content of that page is and making it easy for the user to see where he / she is in the site. Also, links to other relevant content and a link to a sitemap.
• Search. A good internal site search engine available from all pages allows deep-linkers to see, within one click, what more you have available that might suit their needs.
• "Most popular". Perhaps on every page there should be a short list of your most popular offers / content? Give it your best shot to engage those deep-linkers with what you know to be your most powerful offers within one click of arrival.
• Customisation. For the more advanced you can, of course, customise the entry page dynamically based on the content of the referring search string. So if the referrer is something like http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=web+measurement&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB (which we often get as we rank top on this for Google) then we could customise the arrival page, or elements of it, to all the best things we have to offer on 'web measurement'.
• Customer Service. There are some increasingly interesting dynamic FAQ / bot / knowledge base / online survey-poll type applications coming through which are effective in allowing users to ask simple questions to find out quickly if you have what they want. These are proving effective ways to start a conversation with a site visitor i.e. to engage them more effectively. Even if their entry page does not immediately satisfy them these sorts of tools and services may well 'rescue' some of these deep-linkers before they rebound elsewhere.

Any other ideas?

Ashley

It probably depends on how the site is linked to other sites - maybe deep links abound. Also, visitors are known to bookmark individual pages deeper into the site for future reference and so skip the home page. I know for our clients' properties that home pages take the most of the initial clicks (up to 80% of clicks) but as users get more familiar with the site, that tends to decrease as they bookmark more.

On 13:18:39 3 November 2004 textor wrote:
>on www.bobsguide.com webtrends shows the home page is
>included in 18% of visits last month.
>
>This has been a consistent pattern over the last 8 years.
>
>
>Bob

On the subject of customising homepages, we recently built a customised search term referrer managerfor a client, who are seeing very good results.

It involved over 1600 ppc search terms listed on google,overture and mirago, all of which fed to a homepage, but a homepage that didn’t just offer the usual blurb about what the company does, but also understood:

• Where the user came from (eg. google)
• 2) What search term was used (eg. ’cheap fast cars’)

Given an understanding of what the viewer was looking for, a customised homepage focused on *exactly*  what the user expects is generated (by using a database that helped map search words to products) - offering more hooks into content and helping to foster trust and facilitate transactions. From there, creating dymamic pages suited to users is the goal.

By breaking search terms out into product, action and emotional words, you can match the level of both aspiration and budget(in our example) that a user might be looking for as well as providing persuasive copy - You could of course sell just about anything using this technique.

Our research suggested that its not an overly common technique in use or where it is, the level of usage is basic, and we’re certainly not the first to do it, but it offers the opportunity to get a lot closer to prospective clients and anything that provides a closer match is going to better your bottom line.

The client in question has seen revenues increase by over 30% in 3 months, which frankly, isn't bad for a first release.

Nick.
Director
http:www.diligent.co.uk/

On 09:45:28 2 November 2004 Ashley wrote:

Does anyone else have any data or research they are prepared to share on what % of visitors actually see (their) homepages?

The reason I ask is that I suspect the % is much higher than many realise. The homepage is always given the most attention (along with the buying process typically) and it sometimes seemed assumed that this page will form the key part in most site users’ journey.

However, and this is particularly true of sites with lots of content and reasonably good organic search rankings or a lot of deep-linking activity going on (e.g. PPC campaigns and advertising with links to special landing pages), our own recent experiences and conversations suggest the average % of site visitors who see your homepage to be less than 40% and possibly less than 10%. Certainly for this site, E-consultancy.com, over 90% of our unique site visitors do not see the homepage, and on a few other large sites that we have done web analytics work on recently this figure was over 80%.

Of course, one has to look at how far those visitors who enter at a page other than the homepage actually penetrate the site. This various a lot depending on where they have come from. Typically, a large % of these deep-linking visitors come from natural search links where the visitor come to only one page on your site before ’bouncing’ back to the search engine and off somewhere else. Either you failed to engage that visitor properly or the search result wasn’t actually relevant to the user.

My point is not that we should stop focusing on the homepage, but rather we should perhaps focus more on the pages deep in a site and think more carefully about how to engage those users who arrive there first. And quite possibly this represents the majority of your unique users and therefore the largest opportunity to make a significant difference to your performance.

So what can be done to engage users at lower levels in a site?

• Navigation. Certainly best practice usability helps here - making it clear to the user what the content of that page is and making it easy for the user to see where he / she is in the site. Also, links to other relevant content and a link to a sitemap.
• Search. A good internal site search engine available from all pages allows deep-linkers to see, within one click, what more you have available that might suit their needs.
• "Most popular". Perhaps on every page there should be a short list of your most popular offers / content? Give it your best shot to engage those deep-linkers with what you know to be your most powerful offers within one click of arrival.
• Customisation. For the more advanced you can, of course, customise the entry page dynamically based on the content of the referring search string. So if the referrer is something like http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=web+measurement&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB (which we often get as we rank top on this for Google) then we could customise the arrival page, or elements of it, to all the best things we have to offer on ’web measurement’.
• Customer Service. There are some increasingly interesting dynamic FAQ / bot / knowledge base / online survey-poll type applications coming through which are effective in allowing users to ask simple questions to find out quickly if you have what they want. These are proving effective ways to start a conversation with a site visitor i.e. to engage them more effectively. Even if their entry page does not immediately satisfy them these sorts of tools and services may well ’rescue’ some of these deep-linkers before they rebound elsewhere.

Any other ideas?

Ashley

I also advice clients to be *very* careful of analyzing their web stats  - be sure to segment those people who land on the home page and then leave. These people are not "engaged". They should be considered separately from the rest of your traffic.Similarly, those who land on a deep page via a search engine, who then go to your home page and then leave, should be considered separately.These two types of visitors may not be the sort whom you want to pay to attract. And make sure you watch them over time (via cookie) to see if they come back within a set number of days and surf more.

On 18:09:57 9 November 2004 matthew_tod@logantod.com wrote:

I can confirm that the homepage is in long term decline as search rises. We have been watching this trend on over 30 sites this year, and it is a one way bet. Fewer and fewer visits begin at the homepage. We have clients now who have less than 10% of visits starting at the homepage, and the vast majority of visits never get to the homepage.

So those many hours of debate, and expenditure of dollars on ’engaging homepage design’ are going to be a thing of the past shortly.

But it is interesting to note that many visits include a trip to the homepage at some stage... usually when a visitor is lost they click top left to get taken to the homepage. So many people do get to the homepage - just not at the start of their visit.

This raises the issue of what should be on the page? Should the homepage be a service oriented page or should it belong to the marketing team and covered with promotions?

Take a look at the stats, see where visits to the homepage originate from. You will see a very significant number that come up from deep within your site, from visitors who originally found your site via search. These are very valuable visitors (they convert at a *much* higher rate) and so we all need to make our homepages work for them.

So strangely enough what was your most outward facing page may become your most inward facing page. The joy of the web!

Matthew TodLogan Tod & CoGarrick House26-27 Southampton St, Covent GardenLondon,  WC2E 7RSEmail:  Website: www.logantod.com

Create a landing page which does the following by default

Lists
1. One/Two Line summary of our company
2. List of Our brands
3. Details of shipping
4. Link to customer service contact details
5. Option to sign up for our newsletter

with a space that will feature a default image of a Product/brand we carry. Maybe just a default model image etc

When a user surfs in from Google/MSN etc (be it paid or Organic traffic) my script will do the following http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=jimmy+choo+crystal+wedge+sandals
1. Parse out the referrer parameters ie. jimmy+choo+crystal+wedge+sandals
 
2. check the database to see if we stock them/have them, if so I will
- replace the default image with specific product itself
- populate the page required product description for that product
- dynamically build the list of aforementioned brands to be brands close to Jimmy Choo (an expensive shoe brand) or popular with Jimmy Choo buyers (ie. “I know you want this brand but you might be also interested in these”)

If the user is only searching for the brand (option 2)
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=jimmy+choo

then i will build the page with 2 or 3 of our most popular Jimmy Choo products or products closest to the ones they want. If we don’t have JC in stock (unlikely) then we replace it with a generic ad. This is option 3.
See how I build the page results dynamically whilst having a default page that honours the brand search?Finally if you want to be really fancy, you can query the referrer domain for a country specific code (eg. Google.co.nz = New Zealand) and display conditional information. “Luxury Express delivery to New Zealand”