Three simple ways to optimize your nonprofit website home page

(This exercise is going to be super easy...so do it in "real time" while you are reading this.  If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet, you will need to sign up for a free one....which you can do here.  Once you have your Analytics account, you need to install the tracking code...and when that has collected data for several days, come back and give this blog a read.)

What kind of car owner are you...and if you don't have a car, think about what kind of car owner you would be if you had one. 

Are you the kind of person who is changing the oil every 5,000 km, rustproofing every year, ensuring the spark plugs are changed on schedule?  When there is a problem, do you take it in for diagnostics and repair?  Or...is your car rusting out, driving on balding tires, and waking up the neighbours when you turn the ignition?

Now...what kind of nonprofit website "owner" are you?  Are you protecting your online investment, ensuring it is running at peak performance?  Or...is your site promoting your upcoming food drive on November 3rd 2006? 

In this blog I'm going to show you three things to evaluate to help you get the most out of your current website...focusing on some simple tweaks you can do now to optimize your home page.

Login to your Google Analytics account while you are reading this

Once you have logged in to your account, you should be looking at the Standard Reporting tab.

Next you want to open up the Content menu along the left hand side and select Pages.  This will show you all the different content pages on your website.

When you are on the Pages view, choose to look at your home page...which may be designated by the path name "home", or may simply be a backslash like "/".  When you are looking at your home page data, you will want to choose the In-Page option above the graph.  This will show us how the users are presently clicking on the home page of your nonprofit website.

Making sense of what you are seeing

Once you have clicked on the In-Page view for your home page, you are getting an aggregated view of how users have been using your website during the time period selected (defaults to 1 month).  Here is a snapshot of my current home page (divided into two pieces), which I will use to present a brief analysis.

So what are we looking at here?  Well, I see the following points that stand out:

• 19% click on Services, while 15% click on About Us.
• 2.8% click on Blogs, 4.2% click on Videos.
• Nobody clicks on Site Map.
• Nobody is clicking on the social media icons in the top right corner.
• "Below the fold", only 2.8% of people are clicking on the video window.
• Off to the right, 8.3% are looking to download our website kit, while 1.4% are looking to subscribe to our newsletter.

Asking questions based on the data

Alright...great set of numbers.  Now what?  Here are three simple things you can do from this short exercise.

1.  Study how people are using your main menu

Well, I definitely have some concerns right away!  For example, I spend a lot of time writing blogs like this one, yet only 2.8% are clicking on that link in the main menu.  Why is that?  Is it because they aren't interested, or because they landed on this site via a blog so don't need to click on the menu link, or because the menu link is buried...or some other reason?

Next I would look at the fact that nobody is clicking on the Site Map...which means it is either poorly placed or unnecessary.

More people click on Services than on About Us.  Does this mean I should move Portfolio from under "About Us" to under "Services"?  Or...should that be on the main menu level and not a submenu item?

2.  Study how people are interacting with your "blocks"

Nobody is clicking on the social media icons in the upper right hand block I created.  Why not?  I know I don't like the color and need to change them to something brighter.  Would that do the trick and increase engagement?

Only 1.4% are looking to signup with the newsletter....and 8.3% for the website kit.  Why?  Are newsletters not of interest?  Or, is it because the button is lower?  Would a brighter colour or different message increase the newsletter subscribers?

3.  Study how people are interacting with your "content"

If the content on your home page changes often, like my blog listing and latest tweets do, then it is going to be harder to capture how people interact with your home page content.  But if your content stays on your home page long enough for Google to collect meaningful numbers, evaluate how people are choosing to view or not view your content.

In my particular case, my "Latest Video" has been up long enough for Google to collect data...and it is telling me that 2.8% of people are clicking to watch the video.  Am I okay with that, or do I want a higher clickthrough rate?  If I want improvements, should I move it into the left hand side block (because people tend to look across the top of the page, then down the left hand side)...or do I need to reposition it elsewhere, use bigger fonts, change the screensize of the video, or something else?

Commit to taking action...now!

Alright.  So clearly after looking at my home page I am thinking it is suboptimal!  Going back to the car analogy, I wouldn't say I've got a rusting Lada on my hands...but I hear a little ping in the engine and I think I want to get it looked at.

What can I (you) do about it right now?  Well, I'm using a website CMS (Content Management System) so it is going to be very easy for me to go into Drupal and reorganize my menus.  It's just drag and drop...and then I can let Google collect more data and tell me if things have improved.  This is simple A/B type testing...best guess...and I know that doing "something" has to be better than doing "nothing"!

I can also do a simple thing such as swapping the order of the website project kit and newsletter subscription blocks...takes 5 seconds in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor, and again I can reevaluate my analytics results to see if that had a positive effect.

And finally, in the case of content that isn't being clicked on...I may just decide that I am presenting the wrong type of content to visitors, and choose to replace the video content with something else, such as links to nonprofit tech tools we like to use.

Logging in to Google Analytics and taking 5 minutes to look at how people are using your nonprofit website home page can provide you with a load of very important, and very actionable data.  Go ahead and do it right now.  Why put off doing something that can so easily improve your online results?  Key thing to do:  once you have made those changes to your home page, schedule in your calendar another Google Analytics visit in a week or two to see if the changes are paying off.