Analytics point the way toward site redesign at DoozyCards.com

Intuition is one way to guide the building of a web presence - but it’s the job of web analytics to let site operators know when it's time to go in another direction, as ClickTracks analytic software did for animated e-cards site DoozyCards.com.

When the site relaunched on a new platform in January, it planned its new site navigation and design around a feature which had been popular on its earlier site: an automated reminder tool that subscribers could use to ask friends to sent reminders of birthdays and other key dates to the subscriber’s online reminder book. The new site’s navigation was designed around it in the belief that it would provide a key viral source of customer acquisition.

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However, “When we built the first site over a year earlier, this was novel. By the time we launched the new site, everyone was doing it and so it had become a nuisance, and people did not respond,” says Doozy Cards president Bob Cooke. ClickTracks page views revealed within days that while subscribers were using the automated tool to send out requests for reminders, reminders were not coming in.

So although it had taken the site operators a year to design and build the new site around the automated reminder feature, it immediately made a major design change. It refocused navigation around the offer of a trial subscription, a feature which had initially been deemed less important, but which analytics quickly showed was turning out to be the best feature on the new platform.

Downplaying the automated reminder feature, the site changed its navigation to lead more visitors past the trial subscription offer: it appears on the top right corner of the home page, on every other page of the site, and it pops up when visitors who aren’t yet subscribers attempt to send cards.

Cooke says conversions have increased by about 50% on the new site from the old site. While other features on the new site also contributed, he says that’s the most dramatic change, and it’s a change for which he credits insights from the analytics software. “If we hadn’t been watching those stats, if we had stuck to our guns with a bad decision, there may not even have been an increase,” he says.