Example: A new visitor enters the site through a Google CPC ad. GA
counts this visit under the Google CPC source. The same visitor has
now bookmarked the site and comes back 2 weeks later. Is this second
visit now considered “Direct” or is it still considered Google CPC?

Sorry for not directly answering your question. I suppose I was just trying to be careful, since some people — and this seems to happen each time we share a client success — thought I was insisting that “the use of personas will ALWAYS increase your conversion rate by 400%.” Um… I didn’t say that.

But here are a couple of other case studies involving personas:

-Volvo Construction used personas to boost its conversion rate by 700% (you can download the case study as a PDF).

-Universal Orlando improved online ticket sales 80% over the previous year in just the first few months after launching a site we helped them restructure with personas. (You can read the case study from Harris Interactive on ClickZ.)

Hope those help!

Well, examples of the sites that have upped sales by 400% with personas might help, indeed.

I, for one, remember their case of http://www.theleodiamond.com. It is a really well made website. I heard they worked with CafePress, too.

“Persona”ology is a cute theory but it doesn’t amount to much if you don’t have a zipper on your pants.

Shed some skin and drop me a line. I can guarantee that what I add to the convo will split a few atoms… and I’m “going first” because giving is the best way to get… isn’t that what they say?

Alright, that’s enough… back to Sam Freedomville and my internet marketing controversy blog…

Cheers people.. keep spreading the word,
Sam

Thanks for this article. Can you show me some examples of sites that uses personas well?

Thanks.
Wajihah
Brooklyn, NY

Great questions. The best reason people hire us to create personas with them — not just for them — is to avoid the Curse of Knowledge. Without getting an outside perspective, it’s easy to revert to piling new assumptions on top of existing assumptions, and that can distort things even more.

Howard wrote a series of posts called “2 Ways to Get Started with Personas” (here’s Part 1 & Part 2), which explains how to go about it on your own if you must. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark goes much deeper on the subject.

To answer your question, though, before diving into persona creation, we start with an “uncovery” phase to gain insights into the business’s key metrics. We find out what people are asking the sales staff, customer service reps or anyone else customer/client-facing. Analytics and log files often give us pieces of the puzzle. But once we all have that information out in the open, we start to ask the bigger questions. In Steve’s case, for instance, there are a few different products to choose from. He’s been a nutritionist and health supplements expert for many, many years, so there’s no way we could pretend to swoop in and be more of an expert than he is in his business; rather, we sought the best way to leverage his expertise to help create personas on a limited budget.

Once we roughly group the customers you already have into certain types, we then give the personas not just a name and basic demographic and psychographic info, but define the specific problem or set of problems they’re hoping to solve. So, for each persona, there’s the question of “What problem(s) are they looking to solve?” as well as “What buying mode will they be in at various stages of the buying process?” (e.g., are they early-stage, not ready to buy, and Spontaneous; late-stage, ready to buy, and Humanistic?”).

Different personality types buy in different ways, so we write narratives for each persona to give them a back-story, and to help us get under their skin once we develop buying scenarios [define] for each of them. Scenarios either result in an end action (a conversion) or give us a sense of where the persona has abandoned the buying process so we know how to communicate with them when they come back, ready to pounce.

If the personas, and their respective scenarios, aren’t seen as different enough by that point… Well, that just wouldn’t happen. People who know their business know when a customer sounds made-up, and if that were the case, we would discard the persona altogether. It’s important to stay clear of stereotypes.

Ultimately, the personas tie into existing business GOALS — not problems. It’s the customer’s problems we’re hoping to solve, and personas help to identify those roadblocks before they’re an issue. The process of matching business goals to human goals is what’s so powerful.

As you can see, though, it’s not simple stuff. The concepts are easy, but it takes commitment to planning, execution, and optimization. Most companies don’t want to do the work. They want consultants to feed them clear answers; to be a black box. We warn people against investing in personas done by any firm that makes a practice of trading your assumptions about customers for their own — it just won’t work.

Our process for bringing personas to life is called Persuasion Architecture™. Without a way to tie the personas to business goals and account for their differences, there may be no way to tell whether drop-offs in a certain area of the site mean that we need to fix one of the scenarios, or that the entire persona is wrong.

Hope that answered your question without giving you too much of a headache.

Reach out and ask us anything and everything about personas.

Since you ask:
- How do you define where to make the personas different?
- Do you just force yourself to create absolutely different people or you base your preference on existing problems, your own experience or something?
- Any more efficient ways of differentiating the personas?

Thanks.