High bounce rate? I don’t know her.

Idk about you, but I love coffee.

So much so, the staff at my local café doesn’t even need to ask me for my order —

they go “coffee with milk?”

and I go “uh-huh”,

and there it is, a few minutes later, with a glass of water on the side.

What a pity we can’t do this on the web, right? If only we could customise each user’s experience to fit their needs …

Except we can.

I’m not even talking about complicated and non-GDPR-compliant tracking (like for example website personalisation depending on your organisation’s IP address, which, by the way, is a real and very creepy thing).

I’m talking about simply understanding who it is that you’re talking to.

The idea behind the Kajiščeš.si website is to inform people about HIV and other STIs and to promote the already quite popular STI testing services for males who have sex with males (MSM) at Legebitra.

The previous website attracted a good number of visitors through Google—in fact, it attracted too many.

Yes, too many. Let me explain.

Some of the people coming to the website weren’t MSM at all—therefore they didn’t qualify for the free STI testing. Offering them this service didn’t fulfill their needs at all.

It was like if I went to my café and was given mulled wine. I hate mulled wine, so if you’re only going to offer me mulled wine, I'm just going to leave.

And leave they did, judging by the statistics of the top-visited pages on the website.

Notice how the bounce rate for the non-target group is much higher than the rest.

Discussing these data and their goals with the team at Legebitra, we defined three main audiences that the website was addressing and the primary goal for each:

One thing to note here is a common myth about how people use websites. Most of us would naturally assume that people come to the homepage of a website and then browse from there, visiting several sub-pages.

In reality, for most websites, the majority of visitors enter the website through a sub-page (for example a blog post), reads it and never visits another page. Of those who do, most navigate to the home page next, trying to learn more about the website.

One thing to note here is a common myth about how people use websites. Most of us would naturally assume that people come to the homepage of a website and then browse from there, visiting several sub-pages.

In reality, for most websites, the majority of visitors enter the website through a sub-page (for example a blog post), reads it and never visits another page. Of those who do, most navigate to the home page next, trying to learn more about the website.

Were we successful? Well, let’s look at the data!

Within the first month after launch:

“When we started talking about redesigning the Kajisces.si website, we knew that a lot of our visitors were not our target group and that the design and the information there was suited to our needs and did not take our visitors behaviour into account. We just did not know how to change that,” says Lana Gobec, the president of Legebitra. The data shows that the new content organisation now makes a lot more sense for this site’s very different audiences.