Why Almost All IR Websites are Flawed

More than ever, life is digital, whether we are shopping, dating, exercising or investing. And for better or worse, a normal part of online life is being recognized by websites and devices. This makes information easier to find, and more relevant to choices like buying and selling. Recognition (really, tracking, measurement and algorithms) builds relationships (or behavior loops) between online audiences and businesses. Unless, of course, you visit an IR website.

The Enigmatic, Typical IR Site

Every public company, by regulation, must have an IR site. In theory, IR web pages provide investors, as well as stakeholders like employees and reporters, with information about a business, how it runs and how it performs.

Amazingly, the majority of IR sites barely perform this function - especially relative to how most businesses in 2024 use customer-facing web pages.

For the average public company, the average IR site is a bit like someone having a smartphone - and only ever using it to make audio calls.

Hold On, Now

To many Boards, management teams and IROs, that seems like an extreme claim. 

After all, the US has over 4,000 listed companies. Each has an IR site regulated by some of the most evolved securities laws in the world. As of March, 2024, these sites backstop ~$54 TRILLION worth of market capitalization. How could these web pages be flawed to any serious degree?

A detailed explanation could constitute a blog post in itself. The shorter answer is that financial-disclosure regulation long predated the web, and that financial functions inside the average company remain highly siloed from marketing, web functionality and UX design. Also, the typical IR site starts as a free perk from a stock exchange when a business lists its shares.

Proof of Lack of Concept

At times, a picture is worth a thousand words. E.g., take the image in Figure 1, below, and  consider the virtually identical screens shown on each laptop.

Figure 1

Now consider that these are actual images of actual company IR sites, screenshotted in 2024 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

• These businesses have nothing to do with one another - their markets are different; they have different types of customers; they sell unrelated products and have different unit economics. 

• Their business structures and segment reporting bear no relationship to one another. 

• Their business models aren’t similar - and some of them produce profits while others do not.

• Their stock trades differently, and in many cases is owned by radically different types of investors, with radically different investment objectives.

Yet these sites - and thousands of others just like them - are highly undifferentiated. Their full functionality is also barely enabled (see below). Meanwhile, the customer-facing portions of such sites don’t have the same limitations.

Because…no successful company would go to market in the 21st century with a generic site that looked and functioned exactly like those of competitors; that captured limited-to-no information about visitors; that only features information that’s also available many other places; and that offers virtually no basis for a “sticky” recurring relationship with its users.

However, this is precisely the curious state of affairs for the typical IR site.

Note: to be clear, the similarity of the IR sites isn’t purely a visual problem, that could be addressed by amping up the visibility of each company’s brand identity and wordmarks. The lack of utility of these pages extends into interaction design, information architecture, analytics and lack of user insight. 

How IR Sites Could Do Far More For Any Public Company

The average IR site could work a lot harder for every company, its investors and other stakeholders. How? 

They could provide intelligence and insights. Many IR sites aren’t set up to track user traffic and engagement. Those that are, rarely get used in our experience by CFOs, IROs or companies to better understand the behaviors and decisions of investors and trading algorithms that visit them.

They could feature markets and business models. That is, they could highlight the only consistent threads that run through each quarter’s results, vs. just those results.  Many companies complain that markets and investors focus only on the short term. Yet most of these businesses’ IR sites emphasize only short-term information. They might archive years’ worth of data, sure. But most of what’s easiest to discover is - you guessed it - performance info on the most recent quarter.

They could be destinations, instead of museums for old data. In themselves IR sites should actively engage and educate investors and other stakeholders with fresh, real-time content. When they do not, they don’t actively support the stock. Most IR sites today are just link archives focused on performance and governance. If you want to really learn how a company competes, systematically and over time, to generate revenue in tightly defined markets? Or you want to read something really interesting about the company? Don't go to an IR site. You’ll just have to click through to somewhere else.

They could support systematic social media amplification and direct email campaigns. Right now, most IR pages aren’t great anchors for social media amplification of business models, markets or even results. It’s the rare company that actually systematically promotes even just results on social media. When that does happen, traffic that flows from the social post to the IR site usually has a high bounce rate - because there’s nothing else beyond the specific earnings release to keep visitors in the IR area. In plain terms, most companies aren’t set up to perform one of the most basic functions on the web: create a funnel using social and digital content that helps audiences act in ways that support a business.

What Any Company Can Do Better

IR sites’ lack of utility represents a lost opportunity, especially for small- and mid-cap public companies that often struggle with visibility and valuation.

Going back to the start of this post, what’s normal for web traffic on other parts of a site should, at the very least, be normal for investor traffic to IR pages. Investor web presences should be built and used as destinations, that address and adapt to visitors needs.

In the next post, we go into more detail about how any company can make its IR site work harder and actually build shareholder value - for relatively little cost, with no disruption to the rest of the site or the brand.

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