I was looking for ways to drive a little more traffic to a new page we recently created for a client.
My first thought was, “Maybe we ought to make this the new lead item in the homepage carousel.”
My second thought was, “Well, what about the content that’s leading the carousel now? Can we afford to lose that traffic?”
So I opened up Google Analytics. And I was surprised.
The item currently leading the carousel was created to produce e-book downloads. And that e-book has been successful, so I assumed the homepage carousel played a large role in that success.
Well, no.
Of 168 visitors who downloaded that ebook in the past year, guess how many clicked the carousel to start their journey? Three.
Yes, three.
I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised. We’ve seen for years that fewer and fewer web visitors start at the homepage and click around to find what they want. “Sideways” visitors, who arrive on an interior page thanks to organic search, social or the paid versions of both, are much more common.
For this e-book, 132 – or 79 percent – of the visits that produced a download started on blog posts. The topics of those posts are related to the e-book’s topic, and each post has a call to action at the bottom, leading to the download page.
So I didn’t change the carousel.
So once I put down my pen, er, my blogging software, I’ll be working on blog ideas that will support this latest webpage. The data makes it clear that that will be a more productive use of time.
PS – A related point about carousels on the homepage, via my friend Ross from MetaLake and Bean Creative: Should I Use a Carousel?