Why prepare your website before an advertising campaign?

A company's website is a commercial tool. It must be optimised, more precisely, it must respect certain graphic and grammatical rules and must have a perfect customer path. The more these elements are optimised, the more effective your press, TV, audio or digital communication campaign will be.

Some figures* on Internet users:

• 60 million French people spend more than 2 hours a day on average on the internet
• 75% of consumers judge a company's credibility by its website design
• 56% of Internet users do not trust companies without a website
• 82.7% of French people buy online
• Companies with a blog have 55% more visitors to their site

*Source : grizzlead.com

Summary of how and why to optimize a website:

• How to optimise the customer journey on a website?
• Improving the performance of a website's pages
• What does an optimised website allow?

How to optimise the customer journey on a website?

The customer journey (user experience), or UX design, is an important factor in the development of a website. UX design covers all the technical aspects of a platform: ergonomics, ease of use, accessibility, graphics and interaction with users. The objective is to offer users a pleasant and efficient interface without obstacles.

Why optimise the customer journey before launching an advertising campaign?

User experience brings many benefits to a company's business. If users can't find what they are looking for in a few clicks, they may be driven away and not get any results.

In summary, optimising the customer journey enables:

• Enhance a company's brand image
• Give users easy access to your products
• Increase the conversion rate
• Get more results (more sales, more visits, etc.)

How does UX design work?

UX design brings together several criteria:

• Know your users and therefore your target
• Optimise navigation (in a few clicks, the user must have found what he came for)

Know your users

To get to know your target audience, you can go to social networks, blogs or trade shows. This allows you to understand who the potential customers of a brand are and therefore to create content and a user experience that corresponds to them. What are their interests? What are their influences? What are their strengths and weaknesses? All of these questions provide insight into your target audience.

Optimising navigation

Web pages do not need to have elaborate graphics for hours, users like things simple. What they are interested in is quick functionality. For example, for product pages, consumers need to access them quickly so that they don't leave the page (so-called: shopping cart abandonment).

Improving the performance of a website's pages to improve the effectiveness of an advertising campaign

Having live content on a website is more enjoyable for the user:

• Optimise page loading time
• Putting in calls to action
• Optimise your SEO (natural referencing)
• Avoiding error pages (404 pages, 301 pages)
• Have an efficient conversion tunnel
• Check that the site is secure (https format)

Optimising page load time

The loading time of a page should not exceed 3 seconds, otherwise the user is likely to leave the page and may go to another site with better performance.

A free tool given by Google allows to calculate the performance of a page and give some recommendations to improve it: PageSpeed Insight.

Call to action

They may have different objectives:

• Download a white paper
• Newsletter subscription
• Contact form
• Schedule an appointment
• Request a quote
• Go to a specific page

In each of these cases, a company obtains the contact details (email address, telephone number, etc.) of the user. This is an essential element to work on its website to ensure that a page converts and to keep in touch with its customers.

Optimising your SEO

There is no secret, a successful website is one that has an effective and optimised SEO. A strong SEO will help you to appear in the first results of the search engines. It is therefore important to optimise the SEO at least on your brand name. Why? Imagine that someone has seen your advertisement in a magazine and later searches for your company name. Chances are they will go through a search engine. It is then important to make sure that your brand name comes up in the first position.

Avoiding error pages

404 pages are non-existent pages. More precisely, it is an error code belonging to the "http" communication protocol on the Internet. These error pages should be avoided as they can impact the customer experience and the performance of a communication campaign.

Have an efficient conversion tunnel

What is a conversion tunnel? It is the marketing process that turns a prospect into a customer.

• The discovery phase: introducing your products and/or services to those who don't know your brand
• The consideration phase: encouraging people to visit your site and optimising the user experience
• The conversion phase: converting the purchase through clear and coherent messages
• The loyalty phase: encourage people to leave a review and encourage them to return

And how do you make it effective? By monitoring your marketing campaigns: you can observe the conversion rate of each stage of a tunnel and thus determine which ones are problematic and then improve them.

Check that the site is secure (https format)

https : Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure

The "s" in "https" means that the website is secure. This is a simple detail that is nevertheless very important. Indeed, Internet users could be suspicious and less convinced to buy on this type of site.

What does an optimised website allow?

Once all these improvements have been made, a company can launch its advertising campaign and observe the results. It was noted that a brand will see a greater increase in traffic and conversions after its advertising campaign if its site is well optimised. An optimised site will make it easier to monitor the performance of an advertising campaign. If you have a Drive to Web campaign objective (to bring traffic and conversions to your site), then it is important to provide a smooth user experience, a fast site and an optimised conversion tunnel.

In conclusion, optimising a website allows you to generate more traffic and therefore more potential customers, to sell online if it is an e-commerce site and to build trust between Internet users and the company.

To go further ...

A website must be responsive. What does that mean? A responsive website is a website that is adapted to mobile phones. Despite its smaller format, all the stated optimisations must be respected.

Do not neglect* responsive sites:

• 60% of Google searches come from mobile devices
• In 2020: 55.35% of global internet traffic generated on mobile
• By 2022: mobile is expected to reach 59% of global internet traffic

*Source : alioze.com