Foursquare recently raised another round of funding, with the announcement coming just a few days after it released its latest iOS app redesign.
Today, the company has launched redesigned venue pages, to fit in with what they did last year on the web with its homepage, focusing on explore and discover functionality. The changes are to capitalize on the traffic that Foursquare gets from its now #1 referrer on the web, Google, which traffic has doubled from over the past year. This is an important play for Foursquare, as its competing with Google’s own Local product, Yelp….and it seems like Facebook too, after its redesign today for local business pages.
Foursquare’s lead engineer for the web, Mike Singleton, told me that the site now gets over 50M unique visitors on the web, which is 17M more than actually use its app. That means that Foursquare is quietly breaking through as a place for information about venues, its most prized asset:
People are coming from Google for different reasons, we needed to give them the information they needed at a glance, which was difficult.
Since focusing on its Explore functionality, Singleton says that its usage has doubled, especially on the website. The new venue page has all of the information that people need in a quick glance, the pages are more visually appealing and owners of the venues should be proud to show them off, perhaps by linking to them on their website over competitors like Yelp.
Here’s a look at what a venue page looked like before today’s launch:
You’ll notice that some of the more attractive content, such as photos, are pushed way down, giving more focus to the map. Additionally, information like when the venue is open was shoved to the right-hand side, requiring a scroll, as well as the someone’s eyes actually finding them. This redesign solves that:
The new design is cleaner, and brings all of the information that Google searchers would want to see immediately, such as photos of the venue and a way more attractive map. Since some of the people visiting from the web might not be app users, Foursquare wants to give them a better first impression of the service, by populating the page with the info that’s needed to make quick decisions, like whether to actually go to a place for dinner or not. By being able to search through tips, you could find information about a particular meal, rather than click continual “next” buttons to scan all tips.
Naturally, Foursquare wants this page to attract new users, so logging in gives you information like which of your friends have visited the venue that you’re looking at, therefore that part of the page has been given a special treatment as well. As well as seeing who has been to a venue, Foursquare is now recommending places to go to after you’ve visited, such as a nearby park or a place to have a nightcap. This is another example of the company leveraging every bit of information that it has captured since its launch.
By freshening up its looks on the web, Foursquare is hoping to grab more traffic, become a true destination for information about places close to you, whether you ever actually download the app and check in or not. If Foursquare can turn that current 50M monthly visitors to the site into more app users, then the cycle of generating more useful data will continue. That’s an if, but these pages are a huge upgrade and beg to be interacted with.
Are web-based ads on the horizon? Foursquare certainly has enough data to start serving them on their own, and others’, site.
