AERPOWER Blog

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Is Your Aviation Website Performing?

We actually get this question a lot. Maybe not directly but it seems that when sales are down, the website is the first channel to get blamed. And honestly, your website should get a lot of attention as it is often times the main or first impression of your brand a customer may have. According to a Forbes study 65% of people see online search as the most trusted source of information and another study – over 85% of consumers conduct some sort of online research before making a purchasing decision. This rings even more true now as a global pandemic cancelled in-person meetings, trade shows and events – heavily traditional marketing for aerospace companies – leaving our marketing highly dependent on the digital world. 

Another reason why this is especially true for Aerospace & Defense, our industry faces very long and complex sales cycles with high price products and services. Purchasing decisions aren’t made on a whim but after procurement teams spend countless hours researching and comparing options. If you aren’t consistently educating the market on your brand and products/service offerings, you may be out of the competition and not even know it.

So, is your website performing? That totally depends on how you use your site and what you expect from it. What goals did you put into place when you first designed and developed your site? If you don’t know the answer to this question – then you may need to take a step back to first figure that out.

For the purpose of this blog, we are going to assume that the purpose of your website is lead generation and that your site was strategically developed to lead your prospects down a journey that asks them to convert.

Let’s dive in…

Developed with Purpose

Each page of your website should serve a specific purpose, whether to build credibility or ask a user to take a specific action. Your website should be thought out with purposeful interactions in mind. Let’s take a look at some page types/metrics.

First, let’s review entrance pages. An entrance page is any page a user enters your website on and starts a session. Usually these pages are keyword rich and appear in search engine results pages (SERP). For them to appear in SERP, the pages must rank well with search engines for specific content. Google says “landing pages must be well organized and have text that relates to a person’s search”. Entrance pages also give insight to what content your web users are most interested in as it was their initial search or need.

You can identify your entrance pages (also called landing pages) through Google Analytics under the Behavior tab. Take a look at what your top entrance pages are. What other actions do your users take after landing on that page? Do they flow through your site to a conversion page or is it a dead end? Do you have each page optimized to lead a user down a path?

At AERPOWER we continuously recommend clients to publish blogs on topics within their expertise. By doing so, our clients are gaining web traffic and visits as users are finding these expert content pieces through search and then continuing on to explore their websites. They also gain the added benefit that as users are on their website, we encourage ways for the users to read further by cross-linking content so the user continues to gain more education to help with their buying decisions. While blogging hasn’t always been a staple in our industry, it is now gaining popularity as the industry is realizing its benefits. 

Next, let’s turn to Bounce Rate and Exit Pages. Bounce rate is when a user enters your site and begins a session but leaves your site on the same entrance page they first visited without interacting with the page. This most often happens when a user clicks on your site but doesn’t immediately find the content they are looking for. If a page has a high bounce rate, then you should probably be taking another look at that page to see why people are leaving. Is the content slim? Maybe the page organization is confusing? 

Expert tip: In our industry we generally like to see bounce rates below 60% – any thing above should be further assessed.

Exit pages are the last page a user visits on your site before leaving. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, your exit pages can tell you a lot about your site flow. For instance if a user is exiting your site on the homepage or a product category page – then you should probably be taking a look at those pages to see why. However, if you have a product or service page, contact us page or any other page with a call to action to complete a form – those should be your Exit pages. Meaning your users followed a path on your website that lead them to a conversion. Your website completed its task – lead generation. You can find your Exit pages in Google Analytics under the Behavior tab.

Another thing we need to consider is conversion types. Are our conversions Macro or Micro? A Macro conversion is the primary conversion on your website – for instance completing a form that leads to a sales conversation. A Micro conversion relates to smaller engagements such as signing up for a newsletter or subscribing to a blog. Your website should contain both as micro conversions are highly correlated with reaching macro conversions, especially in our industry where purchase decisions are more complicated and have a longer sales cycle.

Real World Example..

How do we take this information and make it actionable? Well, let’s use the AERPOWER website as an example but keep in mind our website is much smaller and structured a bit different than most Aerospace websites… and purposefully so, it is developed based on our business goals. 

AERPOWER Homepage

  • Page Purpose: 
    • Quickly identify the purpose of our company and services we offer
    • Attract website visitors through keywords (main keyword Aviation Marketing)
    • Provide multiple website hooks that lead further into the website
      • Link to Contact us
      • Link to Our Services
      • Link to About
      • Micro Conversion to Subscribe
  • Metrics to track success
    • Website traffic (visitors per month)
    • Page entrance, exit and bounce rate
    • Behavior path (what pages they visit after)
    • Event tracking (what buttons are they clicking on)
    • SERP (how does our website rank with Search engines)

Services Page

  • Page Purpose: 
    • Conversions (based on service offerings)
    • Qualify our audience (we provide specific information including pricing so that our conversions are farther along in our sales process when we engage with them)
  • Metrics to track success
    • Event Tracking (what buttons are they clicking – what are our most popular services) 
    • Conversions (are they completing the forms)
    • Bounce & Exit Rates

About Page

  • Page Purpose: 
    • Build credibility (very important in Aerospace)
  • Metrics to track success
    • Pageviews 
    • Behavior flow – what are users doing after viewing the page
    • Exit rate

Blog Page

  • Page Purpose: 
    • Attract users to our website (entrance pages)
    • Build credibility (very important in Aerospace)
    • Micro conversion to subscribe
  • Metrics to track success
    • Entrance page stats 
    • Pageviews & Time on Page (are users engaged in our content)
    • Behavior flow – what users are doing after viewing the page
    • How many users are subscribing 

Contact Us 

  • Page Purpose: 
    • Conversions
  • Metrics to track success
    • Form Fills 
    • Exit rate

So is your website performing?

That really depends on your goals and expectations. But there are a ton of tools and resources to help you gather the intelligence you need. Some of our favorites include:

Need help? Reach out to us and we would be more than happy to discuss your website. Let’s chat!