Steph Gray @lesteph recently highlighted an article by Gerry McGovern on the The accidental website visitor. Gerry talks about how a website significantly improved its satisfaction levels once it was attracting the right, but smaller audience.
This made me think about who is the ‘right kind’ of website visitor? Are they one of us? Do they want to be? Should they wear ‘smart casual’? That’s a joke by the way.
So how would we define a ‘visitor of quality’?
Do we need to start by defining who are key audiences are? Perhaps:
- Parliament
- Journalists
- Think tanks
- Finance Directors
- Project managers etc?
Should these be ranked in an order of priority?
This sounds like stakeholder mapping to me unless I am mistaken?
How do we know if we are getting enough of these visitors?
Are they in the ‘right’ proportions to each other?
How do we change the proportions if we don’t like them?
Should we be deterring visitors we do not want, er – photocopy salesmen?
What will be the overall impact on visitor numbers – will they go down?
If they go down will ‘management’ be upset as there will not be ‘big numbers’ to talk about?
What if you are a government site and one of your key metrics is costs of running the site divided by the number of visitors?
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