What Areas of Your Site are Visitors using to Accomplish their Goals?

What Areas of Your Site are Visitors using to Accomplish their Goals?

Understanding the content areas site visitors use to accomplish their goals on your site will provide valuable insight to content, navigation, and design priorities. In two recent studies, we analyzed the navigation of site visitors based on their intent and discovered a great deal of ‘cross-over’ navigation between areas of the site designed for commercial (business) visitors and those designed for residential or consumer visitors.

What we learned was that when residential visitors were unable to locate sufficiently detailed product information in the ‘Residential’ area of the site approximately 40% navigated to the commercial area of the site to locate the desired information. Some of them found good value in the commercial information and others found it was too detailed but the important thing is that they cross-navigated to try and achieve their visit objective. We saw the same behavior with commercial visitors; while the content they located in the ‘Residential’ area of the site lacked details and technical information, it provided much better product images and other supporting sales material. Approximately 46% of both commercial and residential visitors who did cross navigate got good value from doing so.

The message here is clear: Don’t make the assumption that the commercial area of your website will only be visited by business visitors and that the residential or consumer area will only be visited by consumers. There will definitely be cross over – the amount of which is site dependent.

Here are some things to consider:

  1. First, determine if your site needs to support business-to-business and business-to-consumer audiences. If you haven’t already, consider developing behavior-based personas for your website.
  2. Ensure the content provided on your site satisfies the needs of both visitor types through usability research.
  3. Provide links in the commercial content to appropriate areas in the residential content and vice-versa; make it easy for your site visitors to get to additional content if they want to.
  4. Make the links as descriptive as possible. For example, don’t just say “Commercial information”, say “More detailed product specifications” to give the visitor some idea of the content they are about to see.