The Personal Perspective Bias

When judging your website you tend to be on one extreme or the other. Either everything seems a little better than it is or a little worse than it is. It’s important to make value judgments on your website from the metrics or user testing rather than personal opinions or experience.

A client called us recently and said that one of their calls to action landing pages was not easily located. The only way they could find it was by using the site search function. We were alarmed because this landing page was one of their primary calls to action.

Rather than going to the site first, we pulled the site metrics. Guess which page was #1 for the month’s ranking? Sure enough the “hidden” landing page was more popular even than the home page.

Clearly a lot of people weren’t having a problem finding it. But it was possible that all of the hits were direct links from social media or email links so we dug a bit deeper to see how many hits were referenced from within the website. It turned out that almost 60% of the hits were coming from within the website and about half from the homepage.

Upon seeing that, we reviewed a promo section on the homepage and sure enough, there was the offer in question. When we reported back on the metrics, the client admitted that they were in a rush when trying to find it and must have just overlooked it.

Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches tend to be very busy and not finding something quickly on the site can make them jump to false conclusions. Fair enough and we all make mistakes, but that’s why it’s important not to take action on personal perspective. It leads to bad decisions, mistakes, and poorer performing sites.