Growing up and now doing business on Florida’s Space Coast has many advantages. The Sun, beach and the occasional rocket launch are just some of the everyday occurrences we enjoy. At, SMA Marketing, we recently made a launch of our own. Our new “launch pad” site made it’s debut just about a month ago, and our growth driven design journey is now well underway. For those of you who aren’t familiar with growth driven design, let me give you a quick overview before we dive into the data. Growth driven design (GDD) is a process for website design that revolves around user experience and data. Instead of trying to guess what your users want, you test, track, adjust and grow your website around your users. This eliminates much of the risk involved with traditional website design and creates a website that produces much better results for the owner.
In order to fully embrace GDD, I decided to put it to test with my agency. We became a Hubspot partner in February of this year and have seen a ton of growth since then. But I was looking for something more. Something that would transform my agency and set us apart from the competition. I was blessed to be able to take part in one of Hubspot’s early growth driven design for agencies webinars. I was hooked after 15 minutes. This was going to be a game changer.
We took our launch pad site live about a month ago and the results have blown me away. We’ve broken every record we could in just one month and September has already started off strong as well. Without further adieu let’s get into the data.
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Heat Maps Are Essential to UX Testing
One of the biggest issues with our previous site was that the click through rate on the Home Page was terrible. My hypothesis was that the site was so element heavy, users were overwhelmed and instead of interacting, they left the site altogether. Thanks to the amazing tools available via Hotjar, I am able to get a real, clear picture of how my users are using my site.
As you can see, interaction was way up from the previous month. Not only that, the only 2 above the fold conversion elements received interaction. This was a good sign for the launch pad site.
User interaction with the site itself also improved. The image below shows that the new static element, a banner with text and buttons, that replaced the slider is getting engagement from the user. Clearly getting rid of the image slider was a good move.
One area I was surprised with was the scroll heat map. Looking at the image, you see that some of the visitors, approximately 5%, bounced before they saw the whole page. This was backed up in the analytics data as well. Notice though that the overall scrolling did improve.
To see our original data, read our post in this series here.
Turn Up The Visits
Since we partnered with Hubspot we have seen a nice, steady increase in traffic each month. Now, I am a pretty patient guy and the traffic I was getting has been great, but I have some lofty goals to close out the year. What I was hoping to see was a nice boost in traffic after taking the launch pad site live. The analytics data almost made me fall out of the chair.
We can go ahead and disregard the 35 PPC visits because we did no paid advertising with the previous site. But that still leaves August total visits at 788, an increase of 47.57%. Organic traffic jumped 28.07%. Now I can’t give the new design all the credit, we do Inbound pretty heavily, but that has been our largest jump in a single month ever.
Show Me The Conversions
Traffic is great, but converting traffic is what pays the bills. Our previous site was not converting at the rate I wanted to see. My goal with growth driven design is to create a website that not only looks great, but works great.
July is typically a slow month so let’s combine June and July’s contacts together. Even after combining the 2 months August still won out. Even when you take away the 3 PPC converted leads, August is up 1. For some reading this 14 contacts may seem small, but to see this increase in only one month of the new design is huge for our small agency looking to grow. The conversion percentage was slightly higher, but I’ll take more conversions any day. You can’t convert traffic you don’t have. <– Tweet This
Sticking to the Plan:
While we are only at the beginning, I am very excited about the progress we have had. For me the hardest thing was sticking to the plan. It’s so easy to get carried away in the design process and want to add this or that. Having a written out plan was essential to making sure that I only created and launched with the essentials. This allows me to make more intelligent decisions headed into the next phase, which is applying what I learned.
Based on the data there are a few new pages I am going to create and add as well as a resource center to give people a centralized place to get any of the offers we provide. I am hoping to see traffic and conversions increase. This month we are ahead 364% in traffic already. No that’s not a typo.
I hope this post has given you a little deeper insight into growth driven design and the impact it can have on an agency, business or organization. Building smarter websites that delight users will only create more opportunities to connect and convert. I am interested to hear your thoughts so post below to continue the conversation.
