By enabling website traffic analysis, we were able to help our client gain more visitors to his site. Previously, the site was not maximizing its visitor traffic. Their site was solely running on flash. It took first time visitors about 2 to 3 minutes for the first page to load.
The statistics revealed that the average time spent by visitors on the page was less than 3 seconds! This meant that over 80% of the site’s visitors was leaving even BEFORE the page completely loaded!
The solution was to allow the site’s visitors an option to choose between a flash page and an html page. The result was a significant improvement in major website traffic metrics:
The number of visits increased dramatically as shown by the graph below:
The number of page views increased dramatically. More pages within the site are being explored as shown by the graph below:
Figure below shows the bounce rate which dropped to 58% from previous highs of 90%
Nice post. And you are right! I leave the sites which take a lot of time to load, especially when I am looking for information. You can go through one of my articles about Flash here, hope it helps:
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/articles/2007/0910c.html
Thanks for the comment Saikat!
I hope you dont mind my reproducing part of your article where you show people how to convert flash into html:
“…. swf2html application of Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK extracts content and links from Flash files. Using this you can get your Flash files translated in to HTML. …”
Your site is highly informative!
Thanks admin! Your blog also has a very unique voice. Good going and keep it up! Actually I met some people who are strongly against Flash, but I personally like Flash a lot. Small Flash elements often make a site attractive. I have to use lots of charting solutions for my clients and I prefer using Flash charts. Even I have used Flash charts in my blog also. And it really works well. You can see it here:
http://webwings.blogspot.com/2007/05/my-internet-usage.html
Dont get me wrong, Saikat. I’m not against Flash per se but i am recommending against using it all over the webpage. It’s the overuse that is hurting websites on a search engine perspective.
I agree totally, small flash components inside the webpage increase the attractiveness, and overall design elements does help keep user staying longer.
But if the ‘flash splash page’ takes over 1 minute to load, and you force people to ALWAYS look at it before they can enter the site, then the website will be losing some visitors who can not bear to wait for the whole flash to load
Hi, I am doing landing page optimization, and it is the first time to me to analyze a page that is totally flash.
When analyzing HTML landing page, we look at visits, page views, bounce rate and engagement….But when analyzing flash, any different metric should be looked at? Like click-through-rate of page elements?..
Any advise is appreciated!
Kristy,
More than the click through rate, look carefully at the AVERAGE TIME spent on the flash page. If the average time is less than the time it takes to load the flash page, then it means a lot of your users are not waiting for the flash to load.
Better offer a “skip” option
Another option is to look at the EXIT pages. Find out where your users are going to after they visit your flash page.
Hope others can jump in and share their experiences.