Everydaycelebrations.ca is a program created by General Mills for families, catering to every day family needs such as what to eat for dinner and what activities to undertake with the kids. By providing recipes and ideas for family outings, the site helps position General Mills as a trusted brand for families in Canada.
On the site, this program is described as follows:
Whether it’s advice on teaching your kids everyday life skills, ideas for keeping them occupied on a road trip, or a delicious dish that will treat their taste buds, General Mills Everyday Celebrations can be your resource to stir up family fun.
What makes this site effective?
As a branding initiative, the site works well. There are calls to action peppered throughout the site and between useful content for the target audience. The navigation is clean and simple and lends itself to surfing and exploring.
Everydaycelebrations does an admirable job in subtly reminding visitors that General Mills is behind the site. By offering various product promotions and including branded products in the recipes, visitors are gently guided towards these products in a way that builds trust rather than coming across as an advertisement.
The copy is written in the active voice, helping to entice visitors to click deeper into the site. It is clear that the titles such as “Love Your Thanksgiving Leftovers” were written for people and not search engine spiders!
How can the site be improved?
The sign up page has some optimization potential. The contrast between text and background makes reading the text a bit strenuous. There is no footnote for the “opportunity to save up to $5 on great General Mills products!**”, leaving the visitor wondering what terms apply. The form itself is quite long with mostly required fields. This could scare off some visitors. Finally, the large spacing between the form descriptions and the form fields makes it difficult to follow the form.
From a design perspective, there are a couple of minor elements that could be considered for optimization. For example, the search bar contains the text “Enter keyword”. A clearer instruction would be “Enter search term” or better yet, “Search”. This would eliminate any potential confusion. Also, the information about the program is buried in the footer and could feature more prominently on the site, since some visitors might need this information to make an informed decision to sign up on the site.
Web Analytics
Obviously, only General Mills can know how much uplift they are getting from this initiative. Web Analytics data could certainly shed some light onto the effectiveness of the site. For example:
Web Analytics Tip: As a marketing/content site, visitors should be staying on the site as long as possible. So, check the average time on site and look what content visitors are consuming the most and the least. Optimize or remove the low-performing content and add to or enhance the best content!
Web Analytics Tip: Track the number of sign ups as a conversion rate – number of sign ups / total visitors. This metric will show how the site is performing on one of the site’s main goals.
Web Analytics Tip: Track the number of times a recipe is viewed and printed. This will give a good indication of popular dishes and possibly even insights into which products to promote on the site or even offline.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this is an excellent site that effectively guides visitors towards specific goals. As is usually the case with well-designed websites, the site is in a good position to profit from more web analytics and site optimization measures such as A/B testing and form optimization. This is when the fun starts!
