Field Notes: 

The Blind Spot

By the time we got to Lens, the panic was over. The website was finally moving the way we'd wanted it to for years. Visibility climbing, organic traffic and revenue both on the up, and we were putting real distance between us and our competitors on every search term that mattered. Conversion rates were holding steady through all of it. For the first time in ages, we were winning organic web search the way we'd wanted.

Which is exactly when the next question turned up. We could prove we were pulling people in. Beyond the front door, though, what they actually did was a mystery. Where were they dropping off? Were our CTAs pulling their weight, or just sitting there? 

It's obviously much more complex, but essentially owning a website is a two-pronged thing: discoverability and navigation. If you're not getting the traffic, you're not being discovered. If you're getting the traffic but sales aren't where you want them to be, it's a navigation problem.

We'd massively improved the discoverability, so we moved a step along the journey and began to look at what our customers found when they got to us. 

So, the next job was guiding them once they were here, herding them towards what they came for, or at least clearing the path so they could find it themselves, depending on the search that brought them. And honestly, this one was as much curiosity as necessity. We were deep in a "what else can we do?" phase by then, high on building. I'd worked with visitor behaviour tools before, so it felt like the natural next branch to grow.

As with everything we do, we went for build-not-buy, again. So we grew Lens - a session recording, heatmap, click tracking tool that helps us to analyse individual visits.

For the price of a bit of server space, and with strict cookie and privacy rules built in from the start, we could finally see how people actually moved through a page. Where they hesitated, where they left, and whether the CTAs were earning their place or just sitting there. 

And because it sits in the same ecosystem as everything else, the moment Lens showed us a page or a journey that wasn't working, we could fix it there and then in Pages. 

See the problem, change the page, same afternoon. That's how we roll.

- The Gardener. 2026-06-22.