Website visitor trails

A visitor trail is the path a visitor is expected to follow on your site. With your draft structure available several people should be asked how they would reach certain information on your site. If this procedure doesn’t produce changes to your draft structure, then it hasn’t been done properly.

Bear these in mind:

• You or your advisors will be spending much time and effort looking at actual visitor trails in Google Analytics and making adjustments based on the findings. It’s much easier to forecast accurately than to alter things that are in place
• The three-click rule: in the early days of the web this was a golden rule that designers broke at their peril. It has been largely discredited as two narrow – there are too many other considerations – but it is one that should be kept in mind as there must be a limit to the number of clicks even the most determined visitor will use. Test how difficult it is for your potential visitor
• One study has shown that once a visitor has added something to the shopping cart he is 20% likely to abandon his purchase at each stage through to final confirmation. Test that your buying process is as simple as you can possibly make it.