Websites are Intersections: Where is your traffic going?

We live about 14 hours away from my in-laws.

Last February, we decided we were going to take a road trip with our under-1-year-old baby back to see them.

Given our work schedules, we ended up leaving late (8 pm) one day and didn’t get to the hotel (our first stop) until well after 2 am.

On top of that, our little tot didn’t sleep very well.

And on the evening drive, we hit a massive snowstorm with temperatures hovering around 0 degrees F the whole first half.

Needless to say, the next day, we were exhausted.

We stopped in Omaha to grab some food and rest.

After about an hour of rest, we started back on the highway.

The weather had cleared up. It was sunny and 50 degrees.

We were making the most of the trip – exhaustion and all.

About an hour later my wife picks up my iPhone where Waze was giving us directions.

“Ummm….honey….the GPS is taking us back to our house”

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

I was livid. To this day I’m still not 100% sure what happened.

Our kid was playing with the phone for 10 minutes on the stop…so we’ll pretend he had something to do with it. 😉 Just kidding.

But we made a wrong turn and ended up adding about 2 hours to our trip.

Not awesome.

Websites are a lot like intersections. In fact, they are intersections.

In marketing, we talk about “traffic” from our ads or from Google.

When the traffic hits your site, it comes to an intersection.

And here’s an important truth in life when driving: You can only get lost at intersections.

When we work with small businesses, we tend to focus on funnels. Like a funnel, we try and push the traffic to one place (to make us money or do the activities that we want).

But for a lot of businesses, websites end up becoming less of a funnel and more of an intersection.

Perhaps you have multiple lines of business or stakeholders.

Maybe you have dozens of products you need to sell.

Regardless, your main website might not be a great funnel.

Instead, it needs to function like an intersection.

And the goal of any intersection should be to help people get where they want to go.

And to prevent them from crashing, making wrong turns, and otherwise messing up their journey to the destination.

How well does your site do that? Most sites don’t do it well.

Are you helping people get where they (and you) want them to go?

Until Next Time,

Tyler @ Analytive