Why Remodeling Websites Need a Gallery Page

Earlier this week I took you through the basics of the Google Analytics Visitors Flow report. Now that you’re an expert, we’re going to look at how the Visitors Flow report can point to one of the most valuable pages on your remodeling site: your gallery page.

Getting Started

First, a bit of a review. Remember, Visitors Flow is pretty scary at first. In my last post we cut the visitors down to just the United States, but here we’re looking at a client that only operates in a particular region—in this case, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

On the main Visitors Flow report page, we’ll click the Country/Territory drop-down and change this setting to Region. Then we’ll click the and click +Add region, then choose a match type of matches regexp. I know this sounds a bit wonky, but stay with me. Regexp is a regular expression, basically a formula. In this case our formula will say Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

In the Expression field we’ll enter maryland|district|^virginia. “maryland” and “district” are self-explanatory, but that little caret before the “virginia” might not be. That’s an anchor, and it tells Google to only match regions that start with Virginia. Basically it’s our way of leaving out West Virginia. Sorry, West Virginia.

We’ll click Apply and suddenly there’s just one box on the left—“maryl…ginia.” That’s our regular expression, and it includes all three of our regions.

(Note: We could enter Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia as three separate regions. But that would mean three separate boxes. We don’t care about which regions our visitors come from—we just want them all combined).

This report is much easier to look at! But we’re not just here to admire the scenery. We want to evaluate the importance of our gallery page. That’s the /projects.html box. Mouse over it to get information about the amount of visits and the proportion of “through traffic” (users who continue browsing the site after going to the Gallery page) and drop-offs (users who leave).

When I mouse over the /projects.html box, I can see that the proportion of through traffic rocks. It’s around 90%, which is way more than the pages below (which range from 50-80% through rates). That’s a great sign that our users find the Gallery page engaging and want to continue browsing the site.

We’ll click that box and select Explore traffic through here.

Now we’ve got a view of the ins and outs of the Gallery page—its biggest sources of traffic, and the pages users most often go to from there. We can also follow those grey and red waterfalls—the paths of users and the drop-off rate, respectively—to get an idea of how our visitors behave once they arrive at the Gallery page.

To understand that behavior, we should first look at the structure of the Gallery page.

It’s basically a jumping-off point for these more specific pages. There’s also a contact form on the right—more on that later.

One useful piece of information we can get from this page is the proportion of traffic going to each of our pages. We can see that the Transitional Kitchens page gets the majority of the traffic, with the Traditional Kitchens and Contemporary Kitchens also getting a decent amount.

We can click the + Step button to the right of the Step 1 column to add another step—and another, and another! I won’t go into the details, but the takeaway is that a good chunk of users return to the Gallery page after checking out one of the more specific pages, and from there, they check out yet another specific gallery page. These are ideal users—spending a ton of time on the page and learning about the products, all while being served a Contact Form on the right side of the page.

Ah, yes, the contact form! Your users can be as engaged as all get-out, but without leads, that engagement is worthless. To evaluate how successful our gallery pages are at generating leads, we have to look at a different report—in this case, Goal Flow.

I’ll leave the setup and analysis of this report for another post, but the main Gallery page and its sub-pages were responsible for a good 10% of contact form submissions. That’s great for a page that’s basically a bunch of pictures—no writing necessary!

Let Us Build Your Gallery Page

Building a great Gallery page is more than just pretty pictures. You need to analyze your site’s structure and design an optimized flow for your visitors. Blue Corona can help you build an amazing Gallery page that draws in traffic and converts visitors to leads. Contact us to learn more.