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A Data Driven Website: Our First 90 Days With Growth-Driven Design

The digital marketing world continues to evolve at an incredible rate as technology and information access grows. Earlier this year, CWS.net’s CHO Alan De Keyrel, published an article about an impactful and groundbreaking methodology called Growth Driven-Design. He explains why he feels that after 20 years of designing websites for clients, website redesigns are dead. Since that time, CWS has been focused on applying this methodology to our clients and the CWS.net website. After the first 90/180 days, we have learned a lot and have some great results to share.

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The Process

We set forth to treat this as a simulation of what a client would experience going through a  Growth-Driven Design process. Alan became the client, and an internal team of designers, developers, strategists, copywriters, and project mannagers were assembled to begin improvements on the CWS.net site.

Meeting frequency was set for every 3 weeks for review and strategy planning for the next cycle. Over the course of the Growth-Driven Design process Google Analytics reports, heatmaps, scrollmaps, and 1000s of visitor recordings were reviewed to identify key findings in user experience. From there, we determined the highest impact with the lowest effort areas for improvement.

A wish list was created where areas of improvement and new ideas were added regularly as they were found or discussed. Prioritization of the wish list would happen at each cycle review and, one by one, we completed items from that list.

The Experiments & Improvements

During the first 90 days of executing our Growth-Driven Design process we completed 18 improvements and ran 5 A/B testing experiments. Here are the pages we focused on the most during the first 90 days of improvements and testing:

The Homepage received the most traffic and website entrances, and yet the data showed visitor interactions were scattered and no real direction was provided to guide a visitor through our website. We decided on simplifying our background image and providing additional call to actions to direct visitors to quality website content.

After running A/B tests to determine if our assumptions were accurate, here is the transformation our Homepage made.

Before:

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After:

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The Blog received a majority of the Google organic search traffic and is one of the key lead generation pieces of the website. The data showed a low time on page and high bounce rate. We decided on improving the layout, navigation, and topic organization of the entire blog. Here’s the before and after we moved from Wordpress to HubSpot COS.

Before: 

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After:

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CWS.net has been building long lasting client relationships, so it was no suprise that the Client Portal was the 2nd most visited page. The data showed our clients using the client portal for only a few tasks. Time-on-page and session time were both something we thought could be improved on. We decided to add a call to action area where we could provide current and relevant content from our blog to our current clients. Here are the before and afters of the client portal page:

Before:

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After:

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The Results

After reaching the 90 day mark we were happy with what we were seeing both in our data reports but also in the frequency and number of leads we had generated.

Here are the results after the first 90 days of Growth-Driven Design.

First 90 days compared to same time period in 2015.

Site wide:

Bounce rate improvement of 24.87%,

Number of visitors up 29.75%

Pages / Session Up 25.33%

 

Homepage:

Bounce rate improvement of 57.48%

Exit percentage improvement of 39.5%

Pageviews increased 22.49%

 

Blog:

Bounce rate improvement of 42.01%

Exit percentage improvement 23.67

 

Client Portal:

Bounce rate improvement of 41.56%

Exit percentage improvement of 31.79%

Overall our data-driven website is paramount in helping us generate an increase in new leads and subscribers by 107%. The Growth-Driven Design process works and here is some additional proof to back it up.

Conclusion

After 90 days, we are seeing exciting results and are not slowing down with our continued improvement and growth of the CWS website. We look forward to improving the CWS website further and offering the same successful data driven website process to our clients. To learn more about the Growth-Driven Design process subscribe to our newsletter or download our latest eBook.

Download this Complete Checklist to Prepare for a Website Redesign

A cross between a worksheet and checklist, the Website Redesign Checklist:

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  • Helps you understand the redesign process.
  • Establishes vital information and plan your strategy.
  • Provides free resources and tools to optimize your website.
  • Allows you to achieve your website goals.

Your website is a powerful marketing tool. Be confident in its design and functionality. Download your free copy of the Website Redesign Checklist and get started.

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