In this analysis you can see that some of the goals of InfoWorld's recent home page redesign have been successful already. We were trying to convey a more obvious editorial position on a quick glance of the page while simultaneously improving the entry points into deeper content. According to MarketingSherpa's landing page study, "about 50% of landing page visitors bail in 8 seconds or less." This study and the EyeTools studies are showing why simple is smarter, though I'm not sure we've fully achieved the balance between simplicity and depth yet.
Anyhow, you can see from this overlay that the visual impact of our top story is encouraging healthy traffic. Over 15% of the clicks here are coming from the focal point of the page. Strangely, this effect took a few days to mature. Right after launch, we noticed little behavioral change. But now the page seems to be working the way it was intended.
Another positive change is the increased number of clicks on "Top Stories". The 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th most-clicked links on the page are all coming from that section today. That same position in the old design often yielded merely 2, possibly 3, of the top 10 most-clicked links on the page at any given moment.
I was
hoping to see more clicks into our TechIndex sections (in the left
navigation). This position is clearly better than at the bottom
of the page where it previously existed. And since the overall
click total is increasing on the page, then these areas will start
getting better exposure. Again, balancing breadth and depth is
very tricky. A hopeful outcome here is that people will remember
InfoWorld's coverage expertise and connect the brand to these topics.
One annoying aspect of this report is that we're not comparing the
performance of the content that rotates on the page with the more
static stuff. So, for example, the links in the right column in
the Product Guide change constantly throughout the day. The click volume for
each of those links will be low because items don't stay there for
long. We should compare the number of clicks in that section of
the page to the other sections of the page, but we haven't set that up
yet.
We haven't fully studied the impact on ad performance just yet, but
on first glance, it looks like we're seeing about a 10% lift in
click-through rate on all the ad units on the page. As we see the
traffic continue to increase, the combination of better conversions and
increased volume is going to make the site much more efficient for
advertisers, too.
So far, the results are pretty good. Now it's time to apply these changes deeper into the site. More to come...
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