How to Optimize Your Website For Better Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaign Performance
If you’re running any type of Facebook and Instagram ad campaign that links to a page on your website, you have to consider that your website is one of the main contributing factors to either the success or failure of your campaign. Too often, businesses don’t focus on optimizing their website and think Facebook will do all the work when bringing in the return on investment they hope for. But this is not the case. You could potentially be wasting valuable marketing budget and time on a fully optimized Facebook ad campaign strategy, only to send traffic to a website that is poorly designed, slow and unclear. Under performing websites leave the consumer confused, frustrated and with a lasting impression that is sub-standard at best. Before starting with your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, take the time to lay these foundations and reap the everlasting benefits of a fully functioning and well-designed website for both organic and more importantly, paid traffic.
Before you begin with the actual design of your website, user intent must be established. Identifying user intent involves identifying what information the user is after and what goals they are looking to achieve when landing on your website. This will encourage you to think about the full experience a user may have and how to convert them into customers. There are three main categories of user intent to identify when doing this exercise:
The informational users: these are users who are looking for more information about your company, products/services and contact details.
The educational users: these users are looking for more information on industry-specific topics. They have identified a problem or need and are on your site to potentially find the solution.
The transactional users: this type of user is ready to make a purchase, sign up for something or download a lead magnet. They already know what they need and have identified that your website has what they are looking for.
Keep these three types of user intent throughout the web design process. Your website must cater to each stage of user intent as best as possible.
Let’s dive into some design ideas and areas of focus when optimizing your website for the ultimate user experience:
Do your research. Apart from identifying the three main categories of your users' intent, other questions about your users should be asked and answered in as much detail as possible. Instead of jumping into the design and implementation of your website, consider who you are designing this website for. Create an ideal customer avatar and identify what your ideal customer likes, what is important to them and what you can do differently to your competitors. This ideal customer avatar should be as specific as possible and should answer questions such as: what age group does my ideal customer person fall into? Are they single or married? Do they have children? What work do they do? What does their typical day look like? What are their priorities? What are their interests? What products or services are they currently using? Answering these questions will help you to truly understand who you are creating a user experience for which will make the rest of the process so much easier and the result that much more relevant to the person you are trying to serve. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on market research – a simple Google search, survey, poll, or a bit of stalking on Instagram or Facebook will be more than good enough to get the information you need.
Keep your website layout and design simple. People have less and less time to sift through complicated websites to find the information they are looking for. If this appears to be a complex process that will take too much time and energy, your consumers will be over onto the next Google search result before your pop-up inviting them to sign up to your newsletter loads. Keep your consumers on your website by displaying the information in a simple, easy-to-read way. Get rid of the unnecessary components of your layout and stick to a clean design with two or three colors, white spaces, two fonts and relevant, clickable graphics that help navigate the person to where they want to go. Keep in mind that:
o Every page should stick to one main goal. If you are creating a contact page, only communicate the contact information your audience needs to get in touch with you. Nothing else. Don’t fill pages with unrelated information just to fill the page.
o The focus of each page should be clear and obvious to the user and each item or concept should be immediately understandable.
o Include additional information that may be of interest to the user at the bottom of the page, for example, a link to the ‘you might also like’ product/service suggestion.
Use visually distinctive elements. A visually distinctive layout allows the user to identify where they are on the website and allows for a more engaging user experience. Using distinctive elements that stand out will make it easier for the user to find what they are looking for and create recognition for your brand. Make sure that the most important details on your website stand out the most to reassure users that they are in the right place and you have the information they are looking for. Use navigational tools so that users always know where they are on your site and can easily move between pages. A navigation panel at the top of your page is highly important in this instance to ensure that your pages are easily accessible. Use call-to-action buttons throughout your website that communicates a clear intention. Call-to-action buttons should be easy to read and accessible so that your audience doesn’t have to go searching for them in and amongst your content. Have a search function that is distinct and clear to see. Add a magnifying glass icon to the front of the search bar, include ‘Search’ as the placeholder text and situate the bar in the top right-hand corner of your website. Choose the colors and font style of your website carefully as these two elements highly influence the readability of your website. Ensure that the colors of your text don’t clash with the color of the surrounding space. This is especially important for mobile as the screen is much smaller, making the need for easy-to-read text and eye-friendly design all the more important. Stick to the following general guidelines when it comes to colors:
o Keep background colors muted.
o Use blue for text links.
o Use red to indicate warnings, mistakes or to highlight something important.
o Ensure that your call-to-action buttons use highly contrasting colors that stand out from the rest of the content.
Focus on flow. Maintaining a logical and easy-to-follow flow throughout your website will allow the user to move effortlessly from one page to another to gather the information they are looking for. Think about your users' journey from when they land on your website and identify what their potential end goals are. Use this insight to map out the steps they may take navigating from your home page to fulfilling what they came onto your website to do. Bear in mind that there should be no dead pages on your website i.e. each page should lead the user somewhere else on your website. In addition, consider that the flow of your website should have an end target where the content you’re offering to the user and the end goal meet. If you provide information on your services or your fees, include a contact form or button on the page so that they can easily contact you.
Ask for feedback from your customers. Businesses must turn to one of their most valuable sources of insights – their actual customers. Asking your customers for their opinion creates a win-win situation for your business – your customer feels valued because your business is listening to them and cares about what they have to say while at the same time, you are gaining valuable insights into what is working and what is not as the 'face' of your business. By not asking your customers simple questions about their experience on your website, what they think is missing and what they really enjoy, creates a missed opportunity to better your product or service offering and to also know what you are actually doing right. An easy and cost-effective way to gain these insights is to create a survey on your website, asking customers to rate their experience out of 10 along with a few specific questions such as: Did you find what you were looking for on our website? If yes, was it easy to find? What would you like to see on our website in the future? These answers should constantly be monitored to identify patterns in responses and action should be taken.
Ensure that your website loads quickly. Page loading time is one of the most important aspects of ensuring a great user experience. If your website doesn’t load fast enough, you’re already off to a bad start. Your website should not take more than 3 seconds to load otherwise you could potentially be saying goodbye to 53% of your users. Conduct regular website speed tests to make sure that your load time is where it should be and fix any areas of your website that are slowing it down.
Focus on relevant content. Content is just as much a part of the user experience as the layout, colors, flow and fonts are on your website. Make sure to write content that is relevant to your audience, using language that your users are familiar with and remember to be clear and transparent. Well-written content with relevant and eye-catching, high-quality images or graphics all contribute to the perception and lasting impression you create. Use terms that are easy to understand, represent your brand and communicate the message as effectively as possible to ensure that the user leaves your website knowing exactly what you offer and with the information they came looking for.
Make sure your website is responsive. There can be nothing more frustrating than tapping or clicking on a button only for nothing to happen. Most people would rather leave the website altogether than try a second or third time to get to the page that they are trying to load.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices and this will only increase as time goes on, especially if you are running Facebook and Instagram ads which are, of course, on mobile based platforms. Your priority when designing your website should be on what it looks like and how it functions on mobile. Another reason to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly is to improve your ranking on search engines. Google combines your website performance on desktop and mobile in order to rank it. If your website is optimized for mobile, your website can help you to perform better in terms of SEO. Here are a few ways to make your website more mobile-friendly:
o Place buttons in the center of the screen where it is easier for most people to reach with their thumbs.
o Create buttons that are big enough for people to be able to tap them easily.
o Make sure that your content and images resize to fit mobile screens and therefore ensuring that no information or image is cut off or difficult to see on mobile.
Conduct a User-Experience Review or Audit. Once your website has been optimized and all of the user-experience upgrades are complete, conduct an audit on the work that you have done to reflect on the changes you have made. You may pick up issues or features that you thought would work before but now don’t seem to fit in. It’s important to look back on the full picture once the work has been done before closing the project off.
As you can see, there are many aspects to consider when upgrading the user experience of your website before running Facebook and Instagram ads. All the effort, research and budget behind creating the best user experience should not be seen as a once-off, short-term benefit but rather a long-term investment into your business that is going to help you build a profitable and long-lasting relationship with your users and of course, an investment that will make your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns more successful going forward.