How Miller and Smith Used Crazy Egg to Create an Actionable Plan to Improve Website Usability

Challenges

Understanding website user behavior

When Erica Bell joined Miller and Smith as their new marketing manager in 2019, the company was in the process of redesigning their website. The new version was sleeker and much more visually-appealing, she found.

But when Erica wanted to learn more about on-site user behavior, she found that the Google Analytics in place didn’t give her enough information. She needed more detailed insights to see where users were coming from and how Miller and Smith’s marketing efforts were performing. She wanted to make sure the website was user-friendly, in addition to being visually appealing.

Solution

Fast, detailed feedback on user interactions with their website

Erica installed Crazy Egg to get visual insights into website user behavior. Within just a few weeks, she had lots of data to work with: the session recordings helped her understand how users were navigating the site, and the heatmaps feature allowed her to see where users were clicking—and what they were skipping.

Now that she could see how users were behaving, she realized that:

• Visitors were scrolling right past beautiful photos at the top of the community page and skipping down to the floor plan at the bottom

• Visitors kept returning to the menu, trying to find the layouts of the communities Miller and Smith was building

• Visitors were clicking on unlinked text throughout the site, looking for more information

• Some visitors spent most of their time on the site browsing through image galleries

• Visitors were interacting with one of the website’s SEO pages much more than she had anticipated

Seeing these patterns with her own eyes helped her understand where Miller and Smith could improve their website’s usability. Now, she just needed to create a plan to address it.

Results

Improvements to their website’s usability that lead to lower bounce rates and higher goal conversion

Erica used the insights that she got from Crazy Egg to create a plan to make Miller and Smith’s website more user-friendly.

The changes she proposed were:

• Removing the photos from the community page, so the information customers want is right at the top

• Adding a thumbnail of the community layout so visitors could find it more easily

• Adding links to relevant pages in places where visitors were trying to click

• Adding captions to the images in the galleries, so visitors would know which communities they are from

• Improving the content on the often-visited SEO page, and adding links to other parts of the website

Thanks to Crazy Egg’s detailed reports, convincing the whole Miller and Smith team to make the changes was easy, Erica says. She could show them exactly how visitors were using the website, and why these changes would improve their experience.

Once she had the green light, she made the changes with her team. The plan paid off, and she saw results within just a few weeks: the bounce rate improved by 7.5%, and goal conversion increased 8.5%, compared to a similar period the previous year.