You have less than X to capture their Y …
One of the first places I look at on new client projects or during a marketing audit is their website.
Almost everyone judges a website by how it looks. You often hear phrases like, "it's beautiful" or "the design is stunning!" That's all very nice and almost entirely irrelevant. Because regardless of how a website looks, only results matter. And your results are largely dictated by how long people are on your event website.
Back in the late 1990s, I discovered Jakob Nielsen. At the time and to this day, Nielsen is considered one of the foremost experts on web usability. Put in simple terms, how easy it is for humans to interact with a given website. One of Nielsen's areas of focus was determining online user attention spans.
Would you like to take a guess how long the average person spends on your event website?
Less than ten seconds. And that is a terrifying small amount of time to do anything online!
Here's a summary of Nielsen's findings regarding online user attention spans:
"Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer. To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds."
Nielsen, J. (2011, September 12). How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages? Retrieved May 5, 2019, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-web-pages/
You're welcome to delve in further and scare the heck out of yourself, by clicking the link above.
Please don't take my word for it. I encourage you to look at your own website engagement data. In Google Analytics, you can find user engagement data using the following tabs: Audience > Behavior > Engagement
On the Engagement page, hover over the blue bar in Google Analytics, under the 0-10 second "Sessions" column. And see how long people are spending on your website.
Ultimately all of the above leads to this question, "what are you doing with your event website visitor in 10 seconds or less?"
Let me know what you find and what you think.