Archive for February, 2007
Have Lots of Domains You Monitor?
A convenient service courtesy of XBlog: Domain Log Book is a place for you to track all of your domains. All you do is add them to your log book and it shows you their Google page rank and Alexa traffic rank all on one page, as well as a link to WhoIs information. Supposedly there are more stats coming in the next few weeks.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Cow Patties and Conversion
I guess everyone must be worried about improving conversion rates nowadays. I couldn’t stop laughing when I received the following in my inbox [I’ve removed their url and phone # to protect the guilty]:
I am trying to contact Bryan Eisenberg.
Anyway I specialize in converting traffic into sales
and getting traffic to your site. Since you already
do some type of advertising in Google,
I know I can help you out. I was wondering
if you could get back with me as soon as possible.
I look forward to working with grokdotcom.com.In today’s Internet Economy everything is about
performance. I know I can help drive traffic to
grokdotcom.com and lots of it.After the first month, it is only .25 a click
with a $300 min. That’s all there is to it.
I hope that sounds good to you.
I look forward to hearing some kind of response.
They must specialize in creating cow paths. Do you need this kind of help?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Does Ziff Davis’s Spam Damage its Brand?
Don’t you hate it when businesses don’t take the word “unsubscribe” seriously? I’ve unsubscribed from Ziff Davis’s Web Buyer’s Guide numerous times over the past few years. Yet they still send me emails, promising the latest in brand awareness-related white papers, case studies, and so forth. Every day–every single day–they send me one these:
But what about Ziff’s “brand awareness”?
For me, it’s simple: Ziff Davis = spam. (That’s unfair, actually. I have a far better relationship with Spam. Hormel Foods never tried to force-feed me the stuff.) According to Entourage, it’s spam. My Postini filter considers it spam. But what’s worse is that I feel that it’s spam, and since I know I’ve unsubscribed, then it is spam.
If Ziff Davis is spamming you, please comment below and we’ll find the right person and let them know they should cut it out. Who knows? Maybe this could turn into their next white paper.
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Color Me Bad? or ‘How Not to Waste Your Time’
Over at MarketingSherpa, my good friend Anne Holland expresses the challenges she’s facing choosing colors for her redesign. I can empathize for sure. It’s one of the reasons I suggest to first design and show design in gray scale; color is an emotionally laden language most of us don’t speak well, yet we understand it at gut level. Anne says:
If you’ve ever had to choose site colors, you’ll understand completely. The three biggest problems:
(1) Everything’s really subjective. What a color “means” can be personal or cultural, but it’s not the same for everyone…
(2) Everything looks slightly different on differing computers. Non-dithering hues notwithstanding, most people’s screens look a little different…
(3) There’s virtually no data on marketing and color.
I know because I checked our site’s new Research Database, which has more than 1,800 records, for stats on color. Very little came up.
Turns out, you can find loads of articles on the Web about color choices. However, most are based on hearsay instead of lab tests, cultural associations and/or broad generalizations that don’t help much when you’ve got a palate of hundreds of hues to choose from.
My next step was to check out our Case Study Library with nearly 750 Case Studies. Did anyone test color choices?
Well, yes, they did. However, results were disheartening to a marketer stuck in a design meeting. Aside from the twin factors of legibility and good taste (based on target demographic), color tests were *never* a big factor in improving conversion rates.
What does matter in a website designed to sell? Here are some of the basics we’ve discovered throughout our research and conversion optimization tests:
- Professional appearance that takes the best principles for design and adapts them to the online environment
- Relatively uncluttered, streamlined design
- They load pretty fast
- Color blocks rather than patterns
- Good use of white space
- More text than graphic images (for the most part)
- Visual groupings of similar information
- Scannable and skimmable presentation of information
- Functions and elements located where visitors generally expect to find them (or made otherwise prominent)
- Qualification schemes that quickly help the visitor identify what she’s looking for supported with links that take her directly there
Websites designed to sell are conversion-oriented and task or process-conscious and don’t hide behind unnecessary visual drama. Sure, deeper in the process, some sites throw in a glitzy feature (like a rotating view of a product), but you shouldn’t rely on glitz to reach the goal. Color still matters. Color is an emotional tie to your branding and, of course, you want to avoid colors that have no contrast and be careful how you use red/green buttons because of color blindness issues.Oh, and you should consider changing your colors if your site looks like this.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Viagra, Salesforce, and the Power of Consumers
Last week, I had bad luck getting my emails returned. The switch from PC to Mac hasn’t exactly been as seamless as advertised (to be fair, though, most issues still revolve around, of course, Microsoft). Entourage is branding all my outgoing emails as coming from “An Office for Mac Test Drive User” while I wait for the new licenses to arrive. Thanks, Bill.
As if this weren’t bad enough, now I’m having trouble getting internal messages answered! My account is linked within Salesforce.com for new web-to-lead forms, and my co-workers are down right sick of “my” offers to get them cheap business class flights, “performance” enhancing drugs (think not of the Barry Bonds nature), and replica Rolexes.
I’m not alone in this plight. Rick Klau from Feedburner, and Brad Feld from Mobius VC (should know a thing or two, as an early investor in Postini) both recently weighed in as well–and their comments point to a whole slew of Salesforce.com customers having these kind of issues. Like Rick, we brought this to Salesforce support, and were basically laughed off the internet. Thankfully, it appears they may just be waking up. Yup, after what I’d guess would be a year of customers hounding them, they acknowledge their own culpability. Amazing.
Isn’t it great to be a consumer today? Now, if only MLBAM would wake up to customer centricity, I could go back to watching Sox* games in peace. Relative peace, anyway; I’m still a Sox fan living in the heart of Yankees country 
[*Editor’s note: Like most Boston fans, Howard assumes you know he’s talking about his very own Red Sox.]
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Written by:Howard Kaplan
Do We Need More Female Web Designers?
I was reading an article about the lack of women speakers at web conferences. Does gender diversity really matter? Isn’t a good speaker a good speaker? Why should it matter whether a speaker is male or female?
In web design, does gender really matter? Isn’t a good designer a good designer?
I specialize in marketing to women online. One questions I often get is, “If I’m targeting women, should I get a woman to design my website?”
My answer is always, “Hire the best web designer money can buy.” Really good web designers understand and design for their audience. Less skilled designers may default to what they know, or worse, what they like. That’s where you enter the danger zone. The further the designer is from your target audience, the harder they’ll have to work to put aside their own likes and biases.
I’ve read several studies on gender preference on the web. The University of Glamorgam got a lot of press on their study. While I think a lot of their findings may be overgeneralized, I do believe there is a real difference in what women and men prefer online.
At Future Now, our holistic process, Persuasion Architecture [click for whitepaper download], uses personas to plan online and multi-channel experiences from the customer’s perspective(s). But I still pull in male colleagues to “litmus test” my personas. For instance, we were working on a dating website and I found some of our client’s research on their male customers really hard to believe. But sure enough, my male colleagues said it was true. So, I went totally against my gut and put it in. Alas, I’m not a guy, and there are some things about guys I’ll just never understand.
But what I do understand are my own empathy limitations. Do you? I just have to laugh when I write about marketing messages targeting women and a guy comes up to me and says something like, “Women don’t think that. That’s not what they want, this is what they want.” Believe it or not, it happens all the time. These are “marketing experts,” ergo they know all. I spend a lot of time listening to 30-something guys tell me they understand what I want more than I do.
I have to wonder what might happen if I walked up to young male marketer targeting 18 year-old guys and said to him, “18 year-old guys don’t want that. That’s not how they think. This is what they really want.” He’d probably laugh me out of the room!
“This middle-aged woman thinks she knows more about 18 year-old guys than I do? Give me a break.” (Note: “middle-aged woman” would be his words, not mine.)
We all have biases based on our own experiences. One of the most important insights from the University of Glamorgam study is that each of the sexes preferred websites designed by their own sex. (Check out the discussion at molly.com for a great debate on the subject.)
Hire the best speaker, hire the best web designer, but broadening gender diversity can only help ensure all viewpoints and natural biases are represented. If you’re designing a website targeting women, make sure women are involved in the process. If you’re designing a website aimed at men, make sure men are in involved in the process. Check in with each other. Dialog is everything, and I bet you’ll all be better marketers and designers because of it.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Will You Grok At the Emetrics Summit?
May 7-9th in San Francisco, CA, I’ll be presenting alongside many of my good friends from the web analytics industry. If your business depends on metrics (and all of them should by now), then use coupon code “grok” to save 10% on your registration for the Emetrics Summit. Rumor has it, if you register early enough could be eligible to win a seat at the “Breakfast with Gurus”. I hope to see you there.
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Who Comes First - Your Customers or Your Advertisers?
CRACK!
The whip snaps starkly, missing your ear by centimeters, setting the hair on your neck to full attention.
“Create a positive customer experience!” commands your task master. “You must ensure our site visitors can meet their goals and have a positive interaction with our company!”
You mumble something to the effect of, “Yes, oh great one,” and hunker down to create a seamless experience to make customers happy. You’re putting the finishing touches on a carefully planned scenario when…
CRACK!
Neck hairs once again do a full salute. It’s your second task master.
“Create something engaging for our advertisers! They want something edgy, creative and, for God’s sake, interactive! You know, that Web 2.0 stuff. I need eyeballs and click-throughs–and I need it by Thursday!”
You mumble something to the effect of, “Yes, Master of the Universe,” and ask yourself again why you didn’t take that job as the chum thrower on a Florida fishing boat.
Have you ever found yourself in this position?
Who takes priority? The customer or the advertiser?
Here’s a case in point. A co-worker sent me a file through YouSendIt. I went to the site and was all set to download my file. And then I saw this:
Now, I was in a rush, and simply clicked on the strongest, clearest Call to Action in the active window: the big blue “Download” button. But, to my surprise, instead of downloading the file, my computer was attempting to install some sort of software. I was most disturbed. What was YouSendIt trying to do to me? Why did I have to download software just to open a file?
I retraced my steps only to find that it was not the YouSendIt download button I had clicked, but the advertiser’s download button.
In fairness, if I had taken more time, and really looked at the screen, I would have clicked the correct button. But I am quite sure I am not the only person who was in a rush–and doesn’t see that well to begin with–and clicked the wrong button. I bet the advertiser probably got a high number of clicks on their Call to Action, but I bet they saw an even higher drop-off at the first stage of the download process as people realized their mistake.
Was that a win for the advertiser? Maybe. Even if people didn’t actually download the software, the advertiser probably felt they got a lot of “brand awareness” and “interaction” with their ad. Was it truly a success for them? I don’t know.
But here’s what concerns me. I was unhappy with YouSendIt, not the advertiser. This was NOT a positive customer experience. I felt stupid. I don’t like feeling stupid. Call me stupid to my face and I will kick your a**. Why did they have to place that ad smack dab in the middle of what I was trying to do AND have the same Call to Action verbiage in the ad (”Download”) be the exact action I was trying to take?
Okay, so the service is free for “customers” like me but, still, what is this doing for YouSendIt or their advertisers? I suppose resentment is a valid form of attention, but it seems a bit odd that SmartShopper chose to begin our relationship by making me feel dumb. But, hey, at least now SmartShopper knows why they had the better Call to Action.
Was the money YouSendIt got from that ad buy worth running a de facto A/B test of their “Download” button on the same page as an advertiser’s? Does that make for good long-term strategy or customers thinking you’re desperate for either cash or attention? Would you have designed the page that way? Who gets priority on your website, customers or advertisers?
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Do You Write Ads?
Pay Per Click ads? Banner ads? Print Ads? Radio ads? TV ads? Etc. If you do, I am sure you could find some hearty ideas to improve your ad writing from my buddy Tim Miles (a very good ad writer). Grab a mug and head on over to The Ad-Writer’s 12-Pack at American Small Business.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Do Customer Reviews and Ratings Impact Conversion Rate?
Let me give you two examples…
Ok, example two is clearly the superior page for several reasons. But here is my question:
What if example one did nothing else but add the high quality customer reviews (yes even the negative ones) found on example two?
Do you think they would sell more shoes?
Not sure? Our friends at Bazaarvoice have more insight.
And now the most important question: Do you think I would look cute in those shoes?
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
