With the Millennial generation as their target audience, AAA recognized the need to reorganize its site to provide content most relevant to this younger audience.
Supporting survey research we conducted about audience demographics and their preferences, site analytics allowed us to identify the most common page views and page flows. From this, we were able to deduce the most valuable pages on the site. Raising these to more visible places and optimizing the content and page hierarchy, and filling in content gaps—while creating plans to retire stale content—became key.
Finding a place for this and new content to live on the site was the final needed step. We devised a strategy for revealing customized content to visitor segments based on analytics data. A part of providing the right content at the right time was re-architecting the navigation structure to improve findability.
Quant Page Flow Analytics
Leveraging Google Analytics, we were able to investigate where where visitors were going from the home page. We compared this data to survey data gathered on a pop-up questionnaire we put up on the site. Together, these gave us the what and the why behind what we were seeing.
Outside of member account-related page visits, the highest volume was revealed to be last-minute and short-term products: discounts/deals on events such as concerts and restaurants; travel packages, car rentals; and the membership benefits page.
In third place were blog articles on safe driving techniques.
According to the analytics, by far the least valuable was About Us-type information—strategically important to internal business people, but virtually invisible to the target audience personas. Yet these pages were high up on the existing hierarchy of information. High-ticket items, e.g. insurance products, were similarly rarely visited, despite being the business's strategic vision. Using the analytics data, we were able to convince the client leadership that, despite their desire to keep the About Us and high-ticket items, these pages were standing in the way of conversions.
The challenge was then to bridge the gap between user wants (short-term wins) and business goals (high-ticket products). To do this, we drove into the page flow analytics to discover more about the pages being visited.