When EDCUtah launched its new website last July, the organization had three specific goals:
- Lower the bounce rate
- Increase the unique page views
- Attract visitors to remain longer on the site
Since July, Nick Dall, EDCUtah’s manager of global strategy and outreach, has been collecting metrics for the new site to determine a baseline and says the results have been outstanding.
“We have surpassed our goals in every area,” he adds, “and we are receiving tremendously positive feedback from both the site selector community and our investors.”
Concerning the first goal, Dall explains, the bounce rate is a metric based upon whether a unique visitor opens more than one page on a site, or quickly leaves after the initial visit. The bounce rate was greater than 70 percent with the former site, either because visitors weren’t finding the information they were looking for or it wasn’t useful.
Over the six months since the new site was launched, the bounce rate has averaged less than 30 percent. “We’ve cut the bounce rate by more than half,” he continues.
Regarding goal number two, increasing the number of unique page views, Dall says the new site is averaging more than 1,750 unique page views per month, as compared to less than 300 per month with the old site. What’s more, each visitor is opening an average of five pages per visit – five times more than with the previous site. “That was an exciting jump for us,” he exclaims. “Best of all, the unique page views continue to increase as we build out content and data.”
Increasing the amount of time each visitor remains on the site, the third goal, is really a measure of content quality, says Dall. The old EDCUtah website, while content rich, obviously did not contain the information that visitors were looking for because the average visitor remained on the site for 38 seconds or less. In comparison, visitors to the new website stay for periods of two minutes or more.
Stephanie Frohman, EDCUtah’s interim vice president of business development, says it is clear the new website has become a resource for EDCUtah’s investors and clients. “We’ve developed a robust platform to deliver content, did it under budget and made it mobile-friendly,” she adds.
Frohman and Dall, led the new website’s development effort and spent a year reviewing hundreds of other sites, researching and benchmarking, storyboarding, receiving input from EDCUtah’s marketing committee and then engaging Utah development companies to write the code and tailor the design.
During a recent recruiting trip to New York, leaders from a tech company there commented that the EDCUtah website was the best economic development site they had seen. “And they told us they had seen quite a few,” says Dall.
Frohman says the site was designed for three specific audiences: EDCUtah investors, site selectors and corporate executives. The goal was to make it a welcoming, easy-to-use portal for all of the information people need regarding EDCUtah and Utah economic development. “We wanted to provide a single point of contact that makes it easy for people to find the exact information they need about doing business in Utah and the related EDCUtah contact information,” she adds.
The new website is the primary vehicle for a new communication strategy that the Global Strategy and Outreach team has launched and looks to be a solid platform for the delivery of a variety of communication efforts from EDCUtah. Now that a baseline has been established, Dall says he will continue to collect metrics for the site going forward to monitor trends, build campaigns and develop additional marketing efforts.
