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National Duck Dog Challenge

Part 2: Think like an ant

 
(If you need a little refresh on Part 1, you can read it here)
 
Don't be offended that I'm referring to website visitors as ants. It's not the insult you might think, especially if you consider the ingenuity and talent ants have for finding what they are looking for. Of course, we're making a major leap in logic here because while ants generally are not desired, a website's livelihood is completely dependent on its visitors. Get beyond that for a few minutes, and you might learn something about how to help guide a group of random, free-thinking anonymous individuals towards completion of your goals.
 
Here is our scenario: It's summer in Portland, and the ants are starting to show up. You've got a few special little crumbs that you're trying to help those ants find in your breadbox, in your pantry, and in your fruit bowl. Knowing that you can't physically control the ants, how do you go about getting them to the places you want them to go?
 
(note: First and foremost, lets assume you've got the quality content down. If your breadbox, pantry, and fruitbowl are empty, fill them with something tasty and then come back here for the next step!)
 
You could start by taking a look at an individual ant. Follow it from start to finish through your kitchen, keeping track of where it pauses, where it ends up, and every little step along the way. This is an unrealistic way to monitor behavior patterns, for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, it's time consuming considering the amount of information you're going to get out of it. One ant can get lost very easily. It could make it halfway to your breadbox, crawl under your countertop and emerge anywhere else in the house. It could walk in circles for half an hour. And beyond that, even if you could follow it to its end destination, it would take doing this hundreds of times over to get a representative sample of the behavior of all ants.
 
But take a step back and the bigger picture begins to reveal itself. If you watch where ants cluster, where they come from, where the "lost" ants are ending up, you can start to get a feel for how they operate. The individual experiences of these ants are as varied as the possibilities presented, but as a whole, there are some very important trends coming forth. Do you see where this is going?
 
You have a lot of information on your site, and all of it is good. But really, it is all designed around getting visitors to one of a small number of places (a contact form, a download page, a subscription, etc.) as fast and as cleanly as possible. As a webmaster, you have a certain amount of tools you can use to track what people are doing on your site. The information provided by these tools is vague, at best, and confusing and misleading at its worst. But knowing what to do with the information can help you make some really significant changes to the layout of your site in order to control the flow of visitors, and prevent those outliers from wandering around aimlessly on your figurative countertop.
 
Like with our comparison, lets say there are three main pieces of information you can get from looking at the big picture of your access logs:
  1. Where are they coming in? If most of the ants are coming in through the windowsill, and the breadbox is on the counter opposite, they will have a difficult time reaching it. What is the first page on your site that most visitors see? Are they all entering on the home page or have search results or outside links caused them to start somewhere else? And do these pages all have direct paths to lead them to where you want them to go?
  2. Where do most of them end up? If you leave a drop of honey in a place that isn't one of your three goals, the ants ultimately have less incentive to seek them out. What pages have the most views? Is this where you intend to take them or is there some alternate quality of this page that is drawing them away from your goal? Can you forge a connection between the most popular pages and your most lucrative? (note: Don't misinterpret this as a recommendation to downplay popular pages or attention getters. Just make sure you're providing people with an easy connection from the "hot" spot to the goal.)
  3. Where are they getting lost? Ignore the individual outlier, for the most part. Accidents happen, and the random ant will end up in places beyond your control. But if a pattern starts to emerge, take note. How are the outliers getting to dead end pages? Is there a specific search term that takes them there? Is there something you can provide to people who seem to be "bouncing" away from a specific page? (Refer to Tim's previous blog on "bounce rates")
 
Once you've controlled these three things, consider one more important piece of ant logic. Where is the colony? What is the connection between where these ants are coming from and where they enter your home?
 
Put simply, it's Google.
 
A more accurate description would be that Google is one of the colonies you want to take note of, but it is currently the biggest. The same logic will apply to all search engines, directories, and any outside links to your site. As pathways are forged between Google and your pages, they become stronger. The pages most people land on move up in the search rankings. Ants see their fellow colony members returning from your kitchen with a snack and are enticed to follow the same path. Give them something to eat, and they will keep returning (and they will bring more friends). Feed them from the places you want them to end up and your goals will be met. And conversely, if the content you are providing fails to satisfy or is too hard to find, the pathways start to disappear and the queen gets fed somewhere else.
 
Do you have a grasp on your site's analytics? Need a little help getting those ants from point A to point B? Trouble making sense of it all? Get in touch with our Ant Herding department and we'll make sense of it for you!