Ruslan Kogan: Improve your website

If I had $1 for each time someone asked me what I thought of their website, you would probably see me on the Forbes list of billionaires as well as the BRW Rich 200 .

I ran a website design business through high school, logging on to the internet during free periods (and sometimes during class) to help bring Australian businesses into the 21st century with a strong web presence. The most challenging part of the business was convincing businesses a website was a worthwhile investment. These days, the idea of a business starting without a website is unheard of.

When I am asked, “What do you think of my website?” I answer, “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the visitors think.” Your website is the single most important communication channel to potential customers, even if your business does not transact online.

You need to ascertain what your website visitors want. Don’t make this decision based on guesswork, gut feel or emotion. Base it on facts. Set up a tracking tool to analyse how your visitors look at your site. You can use a free one such as Google Analytics, which will give you data such as:

How many visitors you get.

How long they spend on your site.

What pages they look at and for how long.

Which links they click.

Which pages persuade visitors to stay on your site for longer.

Which pages make visitors leave your site.

Based on the information gleaned from tracking your website, you can improve your site and the experience for your customers. You will know which pages to keep, which to remove and what content needs to be improved.

A-B testing is a great way to improve your website because it is based on real information about what your visitors prefer. A-B testing is about creating two versions of the same page and then seeing which version has the best results with your customers. You serve half your visitors version A, half your visitors version B. You collect the data from the experiment and you will know which is more effective.

At kogan.com.au we’ve run A-B tests to determine everything from where we position our Facebook “like” buttons, to where customers want to see product information, to what type of products our customers are most interested in.

Sometimes the facts about what your visitors do on your website will shock you. For instance, to subscribe to the Kogan newsletter, we thought if we made people enter as little information as possible, they would be more likely to sign up. We tested this with A-B testing where one iteration of the site required visitors to enter only their email address, with another requiring a name along with the email address. We were surprised to find that people were 34 per cent more likely to subscribe when they had to give their name as well because they knew it would lead to more personalised service.

Another example of an A-B text we’ve run was deciding where to put the tabs (such as overview, specs, warranty) on our product pages. We thought they looked better on the side but the results showed customers were more accustomed to having these along the top of the page. This resulted in customers being able to find information quickly and easily. It also reduced the number of questions that were sent to our customer service team.

Ever wondered why sometimes you see a change to the Facebook interface but your friends don’t? That’s because Facebook is doing A-B testing to ensure any change it implements is an improvement for the user. This is also why you’ll never see Facebook react to groups set up such as “petition to change Facebook interface back to the old one”. Facebook doesn’t “think” its website changes are improvements, it “knows”.

Having a strong web presence means change. We make improvements to Kogan.com.au on a daily basis and live by the philosophy that “there is always a better way”.

This advice isn’t just for online businesses. The online GST debate showed us that shoppers look everywhere for the best deal. Whether you’re business to business or consumer facing, I can guarantee that your potential customers or clients are researching your business online. If your website is not up to scratch, your visitors will go elsewhere.

BRW

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