Bookmarking behavior: What happens after they leave?
As frustrating as it can be to try to get inside the heads of website users, knowing what people do while they're at your site is only part of the battle. What happens, for example, when people leave? How do they find their way back, and once they do, how do they get where they're going, armed with the knowledge of their first visit?If you've got access to decent analytics, or at least a basic overview of your website logs, entry paths are a good place to start. For example, I was doing a routine look-through of a client's analytics the other day, and noticed a surprisingly large number of people going to a page fairly deep in the site and then getting bounced to an error. My client's site is a large database of events, and the page represented a step where the visitor has selected a date and city for a particular event. Unfortunately, given our data structure, once the date is passed, the event comes up as expired (even if other dates are available).
On the front-end, I've been designing the site to pull users back to the general events page (before they pick a date), but, of course, people often bookmark as late in the buying process as they can. Like it or not, the stark reality was that I had almost 6,000 visits/month going down this bad route. These were people who were interested enough the first time to come back to a specific page, and by losing them we may have been losing very qualified leads. Luckily, a technological change made it possible to bounce expired dates back to the event page (allowing visitors to choose a new date).
For this particular client, visitors often need to approve their purchase, and so it's very common for them to bookmark a page and return later to purchase. Even if you sell a more traditional product or market a service, keep in mind that it often takes people multiple visits to a website to make a purchase, and if you're losing them on the return visit (or are making their lives too difficult when they come back), you're losing buyers. Do some digging to find the pages people most often return to and see what they go through the second time around. No matter how friendly your site is, nobody wants to do the same work twice.
