FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog » Website Optimization

Shopping Cart Optimization: Canned vs. Custom

Brendan Regan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:01:57 +0000

If you’re selling online, and you’re interested in Optimization, it simply makes sense to spend some time focusing on your shopping cart. It’s a key area of focus for a few reasons:

It’s often where “low-hanging fruit” grows. Conversion obstacles can often be removed quickly, leading to large gains in a short period of time.
It’s an area where you’ve already succeeded in persuading the prospect. They are in the Late Stage of their buying process, so a relatively low investment can give you a relatively high return. In other words, you don’t have to produce pages and pages of persuasive content to move the visitor forward in her buying process.
Customer expectations regarding their online shopping experiences are rising every day. If your competitor has a more optimized checkout, they may be taking market share from you.

There’s a very wide spectrum of online selling solutions, from a PayPal button on a single sales page to a highly-customized checkout with a floating/sliding/shining interface and behaviorally-targeted cross-selling. Still, FutureNow’s clients tend to fall into 1 of 2 camps: those with a 3rd-party cart and those with a custom-built cart.

There are pros and cons to each, which I’ll touch on briefly, but please don’t consider this brief post the authoritative work on the subject–there’s lots of research and reviews out there on the various shopping cart investment options.

3rd Party Shopping Carts, also known as “canned”: Some of the pros are lower cost, quicker time to market, and the efficiencies/convenience gained when you buy a package that handles payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption, etc. Some of the cons are lack of control over look and feel, lack of control over the user experience, and more difficulties encountered with testing and optimization. The tradeoffs seem pretty straightforward, but a lot depends on the IT resources you have at your disposal.

Custom Shopping Carts: Some of the pros are a user experience that’s more tightly integrated with the rest of your site, better tracking for better analytics, easier to make changes and add features, and easier integration with testing tools like Google Website Optimizer. The obvious cons are higher cost, more operational overhead, and slower time to market. Again, the tradeoffs are the same, and a lot depends on your company’s resources, budget, and business goals.

Those prospects we speak with who are interested in optimizing for a higher return on their eCommerce investments often ask questions like: Can I optimize my 3rd party shopping cart? The answer is a definitive “Yes!” even on the most restrictive 3rd party carts. One of our clients enjoyed a 38% increase month-over-month in their “funnel conversion rate” just by adding some reassuring copy and links only in the areas of their cart they had access to: the header and the footer!

That’s an extreme example, but with our guidance, clients can make the best of their current platform, whatever it happens to be. And many clients, after getting a few “wins,” decide they want to upgrade from a 3rd party cart to a partially or fully custom cart. In that situation, we often work to optimize their checkout before it goes live, saving them time and money, and then continue to refine the customer experience and persuasiveness of the live cart through more formal testing. We also work with several implementation partners who grok Persuasion Architecture and can build custom carts based on OnTarget recommendations.

The point of all of this is that you shouldn’t defer or avoid Optimization based on what type of checkout platform you have. Persuasion Architecture is “platform-agnostic,” and the best time for Optimization is always “Now.”

----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

A Clicks-to-Bricks Site Optimization Checklist

Melissa Burdon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:30:06 +0000

Because I live in the optimization world, I sometimes assume that certain web site strategies are common sense and obvious. I sometimes forget that the only reason why they are common sense and obvious to me: Because I analyze and optimize web sites all day, every day. That’s a bit of an unfair advantage!

At FutureNow, we work with clients in a variety of industries and business models: e-commerce, lead generation and catalog. Lately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some clients who are driving traffic from their web sites to physical store locations. These clients share some basic challenges, so I’ve decided to cover things you should be focusing on if you’re an online business trying to drive traffic to a physical location.

First, decide what action you want your visitors to take. We know that you want your visitors to come off your web site and visit your physical location, but what actions do you want them to take ON your web site that demonstrate their interest in coming to your physical location? These are what we call micro conversion points. “Micro” because they are stepping stones on the way to some sort of purchase, which we call a macro conversion.

Here are some examples of actions a site might want the visitor to take to show their interest in moving forward. The following points should be tracked as micro conversion points, and you should optimize to increase these individual conversion rates.

A “locations” page where you feature your address and map with directions. If visitors get to this page, they are interested in where you are located, which shows strong motivation and intent.

Some sites feature a “Find the nearest location” tool.

Booking an appointment for a service or holding/reserving a product.

Contact us page, phone calls and emails are demonstrating that visitors are looking for answers to questions.

Tracking these micro conversion points is important, but it’s also important to follow through and track whether visitors who take these micro conversion actions are resulting in physical store purchases. Many companies track one or the other, but they seem to have a hard time tracking micro conversion rates on their web sites or they have a hard time connecting actions on a web site to actual sales in the physical store.

Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself in order to get the right tracking in place to start seeing how your online efforts are resulting in ‘brick and mortar’ sales.

Tracking whether a store purchaser was originally a web site visitor:

Are you tracking all in-store purchases, asking each purchaser whether they went to your web site before they came to your physical store? This will help you find out general stats on how many visited your web site prior to purchasing.

Are you collecting email addresses and sending out surveys to in-store purchasers to find out how they came to your store?

For those who identify that they came to your web site before coming to your physical store, are you asking them if they already knew about your store and were just coming to your site to find the address/location or to call the store?

Are you asking them whether they were actually searching for something online, and found your web site as a solution to a problem (and didn’t yet know about your store) and they only found out that you had a physical store from your web site?

Tracking phone calls from listed phone numbers on your web site:

Is the phone number listed on your web site unique from other marketing efforts so that you can track it separately?

Is the phone number you list on various pages unique from the other pages on your site? In other words, if you feature a phone number on the about us page, is it a different number than the one on your contact us page? This would help you identify what pages visitors are making a decision to call from, and will also help you identify what types of things they are asking after visiting specific pages on your site.

Are you collecting enough information from the caller on the phone, so that you can match this up if the visitor turns into a sale in the physical store location?

Purely “clicks and mortar” E-commerce sites see the importance of optimization before the Holiday Season because it directly impacts their sales online. “Bricks and mortar” companies that use their web site to drive traffic to their physical store don’t see the direct impact as strongly, but this could be because they aren’t tracking the impact effectively. If you’re in this situation, use some of the tips above to begin tracking and optimizing. You still have time to optimize for the holiday season and beyond!
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

All Aces: Overlapping your Marketing Efforts for Better Results

Melissa Burdon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:00:46 +0000

Generating targeted traffic and conducting website optimization are critical to increasing online sales. Ok, yeah, you already know that

But did you know that traffic generation and website optimization aren’t mutually exclusive? There are tactics that will help you accomplish both goals at the same time, and one FutureNow Partner recently spoke to me about a tactic that’s working well.

Our Partner is a software development firm that specializes in web-based applications and good old web development and design. They are currently gaining leads and sales by being very active with their marketing mix: radio, billboards, PPC, SEO, etc. They identified that there is a clear separation between their leads based on the lead’s motivations and, more importantly, their budgets. Some leads are looking for a small and simple web site with a custom design, with an approximate $500 budget. Other leads are looking for very complex web sites with a lot of tools and capabilities with a much higher budget in the $5000+ range.

The marketing team recognizes the difficulty in trying to effectively speak to these very different segments on a single site. Even using landing pages, there is the possibility that one type of visitor may be turned off by content they read that was written for another type. (FutureNow has a whole methodology for writing copy and mapping out buying paths for different types of visitors on a single site, but this takes a focused expertise and experience.) On top of trying to speak to all types on their main web site, this company creates completely different buying experiences on separate micro-sites for each segment. This drives more targeted and qualified traffic to these micro-sites. The micro-sites speak more directly to the segment and therefore move them through their buying process more effectively, without possible distractions from content that doesn’t speak to their motivations and needs.

They generate the smaller budget leads via radio ads. These radio listeners are driven to a micro-site in order to follow through on the messaging from the radio ad.

They also generate leads who are primarily interested in finding a web design/development firm in Utah via PPC ads with keywords such as “cheap web sites utah.” They send these visitors to a different micro-site and speak to their interests of a local company that can meet their web design needs.

As you can see, they send these very different prospects down customized buying persuasion paths based on the buyer’s motivation and need. By doing this, they are driving more targeted traffic to sites that have been more effectively optimized for a particular segment.

You can segment your traffic by the different products or services that they are searching for. Or, you can segment your traffic by the different problems they are experiencing, or solutions they are looking for. Are you driving all traffic to specific landing pages, or simply a single homepage on a single web site? Are you optimizing your site based on different motivations? These are good questions to ask yourself in order to get started optimizing your primary web site.

On top of optimizing your primary website, you should consider the micro-site tactic in order to drive more targeted traffic to your company and quickly turn this traffic into leads or sales. This tactic is applicable to multiple online business models; whether you’re e-commerce, lead generation, or a brochure site.

Note: Micro-sites are entities that can become part of your overall marketing strategy and shouldn’t be created and then forgotten about. Along with your other marketing efforts, micro-sites need to be continuously optimized and improved.

Are you ready for the challenge?
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Myths About Site Traffic and Optimization

Brendan Regan — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:00:12 +0000

Lots of folks have been asking us lately about the connection between site traffic levels and online optimization strategies. There are definitely some correlations, but there also seem to be some myths or mis-perceptions about those connections.

We often get asked:

How much traffic do I need before I start optimization?

Do I get enough traffic to my site to even consider optimization?

Will my tests take forever to run if I don’t have a lot of traffic?

How fast can I expect to see the results of optimization if my traffic is low?

These are natural questions from folks who haven’t dipped their toes into the optimization waters, but these questions indicate a few myths that I’ll attempt to dispel.

Myth #1: Traffic is the ‘magic metric’ when it comes to optimization

The fact is that the number of conversions is at least as important as traffic levels. We’ve always said that a minimum threshold to do formal online testing is 5-10 conversions per week, and that this amount of conversions (regardless of traffic) can at least get you results in a matter of weeks instead of months. A simple tool that illustrates the relationships between site traffic, conversion rate, and test durations is the Google Website Optimizer Duration Calculator. This free tool lets you play around with data points and estimate test durations before you start your experiment. I can personally say it has saved me a bunch of grief by warning me away from certain client experiments due to the duration estimates being way too long! Try changing the page views metric, and see the impact on duration. Now, try changing the conversion rate metric, and you’ll see it, too, can have a drastic impact on the duration.

Myth #2: Low-traffic sites won’t see results from optimization

The fact is that low-traffic sites can still see improvements from optimization. Remember that “optimization” doesn’t just mean formal testing using a tool like those provided by Omniture or Google. Optimization is about getting your company on a program of continuous improvement through hypothesis, change (via formal testing or not), and monitoring of the results of those changes. Once you have “results,” you feed those learnings right back into the program and keep going. Lower traffic sites may or may not be good candidates for formal testing methods like split testing or full factorial multivariate testing, but they may be great candidates for optimization! We often try formal testing on low-traffic sites, and if it’s not productive, we switch our focus to “serial testing,” which means benchmarking the performance of something (an ad, a landing page, etc.), making a change, and then monitoring the impact of that change. Either way, we tend to get results.

Myth #3: Testing and optimization doesn’t really work for low-traffic sites

The fact is that optimization can definitely work, and even formal testing can work if you do it right. One way to do formal testing on low-traffic sites is to focus on higher-trafficked pages. Another is to test micro-conversions (e.g. reading product reviews as opposed to buying the product). Still another is to make a B2C “view cart” page the conversion point instead of the purchase confirmation page. There are plenty of methods to shortening the duration of a test, but we’ll keep a few of those to ourselves for now

Myth #4: It’s better to defer optimization until site traffic grows

The fact is that the time to optimize is always “now.” There’s an opportunity cost associated with not doing anything, when you could at least be doing something less-than-optimal. Your traffic may be less than optimal, but you can still optimize, and when your traffic becomes optimal, you’ll reap the rewards of earlier optimization work. We’ve always used the metaphor of the “leaky bucket”: If your conversion funnel is a bucket with a bunch of holes in it, why would you spend marketing money to pour more water (a.k.a. traffic) into that bucket? Wouldn’t it make more sense to fix the holes, then start pouring more water?

We’re definitely invested in dispelling any other myths about testing and optimization, so feel free to ask questions or contact us if you think you have a unique case and aren’t sure if optimization is right for you.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Let Them Build Before They Buy

Brendan Regan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:00:54 +0000

Us Grokkers are continuing to focus on what types of things eRetailers can work on to make Holiday Shopping more enjoyable (and persuasive) for their prospects.

Enter the “Product Configurator.” While it sounds a bit like an evil robot out of control, what we’re talking about today is simply an online application to allow prospects to customize a product on their way to buying it. This can be a lot of fun for online shoppers if done well, and lead to increased conversions or it can be a huge waste of money if the user experience isn’t really well thought out. If it’s planned out poorly, it may frustrate visitors and lead to a decrease in performance.

One of the main reasons survey takers give for NOT buying retail items online is the inability to touch/hold/feel the product before buying. This is a challenge that almost all eRetailers have to work to overcome, and letting them see their customizations in real time as they play around with different configurations and features can be a good tactic to make sure people make it all the way through checkout. It can also be a way to make gift shopping more fun–seeing the product “come alive” as you customize it for someone special on your shopping list can be very persuasive and exciting. Finally, product configurators can be a great way to convert Early and Middle Stage buyers; those who aren’t quite ready to pull out their credit card yet. The ability to save what they’ve configured can be a “hook” to get them back into the buying process, or at least allow you to market to them as time goes on.

When I think of being able to customize a product and buy it, I tend to think of sites like CafePress.com and Zazzle.com who specialize in small items like hats, t-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc. But I wanted to grab some more interesting examples for you, so let’s look at a couple West Coast companies who let bike riders have a little fun as they create unique products to purchase.

Example #1: Mission Bicycle Company

In the mood to build a custom fixed-gear bicycle? Probably not, but use your imagination! This site’s product configurator takes you step-by-step through the process, using clear copy explanations, a progress indicator, and friendly assurances. They manage to do this using plenty of white space in a clean layout and flow.

In the end, you can see a mockup of your bike’s design, which components you’ve chosen, and an itemized price. My favorite part is that it doesn’t get too heavy into jargon, which would make the n00b feel intimidated.

Example #2: Timbuk2

Once you’ve designed your fancy bicycle to ride around on the streets of San Francisco, you’ll need a cool bag to haul your laptop and other sundries, right? This brings us to another West Coast company’s “build your own bag” product app.

Timbuk2’s site does a nice job of using actual photographic images as opposed to illustrative graphics. It’s impressive that they cover the many permutations (bag types, colors, patterns, add-ons, etc.) with high-quality photos. The flow through the options is very intuitive, and in the end you definitely feel like you’ve made something that reflects your tastes. This makes NOT buying it very difficult!

So those are two examples in a very narrow niche. I ask all Grok readers: Who else is doing a good job with this type of online app? Who does it well in clothing? Shoes? (other than Nike, please!) Laptops? Leave a comment about whose product configurator you like, why, and what product category it’s in. Also chime in if you’re building something like this in time for Holidays 2009!
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

How Much Pre-Holiday Optimization is Enough?

Brendan Regan — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:00:39 +0000

Lots of our clients and prospects are asking questions along the lines of: I want to optimize before the Holiday rush, but I don’t want to introduce too much change at such a critical time.

A valid question/concern, to be sure. Our answer is, of course, “It depends.” However, here are a few approaches that we’ve seen work:

Extreme Effort Until a Certain Date

Look at your previous year’s analytics and the upward trend of conversions closer to the holidays. When did it start to trend up in a consistent manner? Mid-October? November? Late-November? Based on last year’s trend line, pick a date after which you’ll stop optimizing and stabilize your site for the Holiday rush. Then, free up all the budget and resources you can to work on an optimization to-do list from today until your stop date. After the Holidays, you can finish everything that didn’t get finished before your stop date.

Optimize the Checkout Process

Another approach is to focus solely on the checkout process from now until the end of the Holidays. This means leaving the homepage, landing pages, content pages, etc. alone until 2010, and just test and optimize the cart pages to squeeze every last conversion out of those folks you’ve persuaded.

Merchandise for the Holidays (a.k.a. Deck the Halls)

Some clients want a site-wide approach that ties in with Holiday shopping and gift-giving. This is less about optimization and more about seasonal relevance, but it’s still a valid approach that could lift your Holiday conversions. Many sites simply throw a Holiday-themed graphic on their homepage and call it “done,” but the world-class sites have little touches throughout the site to put their prospects in a shopping mood. eBay has done some nice, subtle things to dress their site up around the Holidays, and I’m sure they have something up their sleeve this year. One of our clients last year used empty real estate throughout the site, including the shopping cart, to display some Holiday messaging and graphics. They also updated their checkout through the last week of the Rush to indicate how many days were left to have gifts reach recipients by 12/24, creating a nice sense of urgency as well as being informative.

Split Your To-Do List

A fourth approach is to simply brainstorm every optimization you think could impact your conversion rate. Then, use various criteria to split the list into “pre-Holidays” and “post-Holidays.” Commit the resources and intensity to get the “pre” list done, then leave the “post” list until everyone is back in the office and the 2010 budget is approved . This is probably the easiest approach, but carries with it the risk that you’ll implement some low-impact optimizations, when you could have implemented the high-impact items. In this case, we recommend outside help to prioritize that list!

We hope these ideas help everyone find an approach they’re comfortable with, execute well, and reap the rewards!
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Keep Them In the Cart this Christmas

Brendan Regan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:20:29 +0000

OK, Grok faithful, we all know that the Holiday Season is coming fast. Last year was “make or break” for a lot of eTailers, and this season will be critical for many more.

The ones who make it through will be those who are passionate about the customer experience, AND who are able to prioritize their work between now and the “Holiday Crunch” so that the hours expended actually impact the number of sales they make.

Where do you start if you want your site to be a stellar performer this Holiday Season? A great place for most to start is on Shopping Cart Abandonment. That’s low in your sales funnel, where you’re losing customers who were already acquired via marketing and persuaded to buy from you!

Let’s examine a prioritized list of reasons shoppers listed that caused them to abandon shopping carts. Then, we’ll offer actionable suggestions corresponding to each concern. The data comes from the 8th Annual Merchant Survey, conducted by PayPal and comScore in April of this year.

#1 High shipping charges

We’re all aware of this challenge, and it’s somewhat out of your hands, but there are things you can do. One is to thing is to test different shipping offers in the cart. Another, if you have a certain order value that qualifies for free shipping, is to display how much more the customer needs to qualify. For example, “You are $xx.xx away from free shipping! Continue shopping »”

#2 Wanted to comparison shop

Make sure you’re saving customer carts for at least 30 days, maybe more for the Holidays. A recent study sponsored by McAfee showed that the average time span between visiting a site and checking out was 34 hours! Acknowledge that this behavior is occurring and plan for it. If you’re sending “cart recovery” emails inside of 24 hours, you may be really annoying your prospective customers!

#3 Leaving to Google a coupon code

If you have a coupon code capture field on your “View Shopping Cart” page, you may consider moving that capture later in the checkout process, when prospects are more ‘invested’ in the process and less likely to bail and go “coupon Googling.” Some of our clients offer coupons right on their site as a way to combat this behavior, and it works.

#4 Couldn’t find preferred payment option

Most eStore owners offer a proper assortment of payment options, BUT are your customers seeing them at the point of concern? We call these Point of Action Assurances. When the prospect is in your cart, and wondering about their payment options, are you reassuring them at the point of action that you offer BillMeLater, PayPal, etc.? Test different placements of those assurances.

#5 Item unavailable at checkout

Yikes! This issue simply needs to be dealt with on your product pages, before the cart. If an item is out of stock, why not capture an email so you can notify when the item is back in stock? Zappos.com does a good job of this when a certain size of shoe is out of stock.

#6 Couldn’t find customer support

Similar to #4, most online stores do offer good customer service options, but sometimes your prospects aren’t seeing them at the appropriate point in the cart. Test those placements. Also, if you use live chat support, and the chat service is “offline,” what is the customer experience like?

#7 Security concerns

Similar to #1, this is somewhat out of your hands…the Web isn’t 100% safe for shoppers, and they know it. But, Point of Action Assurances, 3rd party security seals, and credibility of design are key. Another great opportunity for testing different placements and different seals in the checkout.

Blogger’s Note: Apologies for excluding other winter holidays in the title of this post; I was just going for alliteration
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!

Jeff Sexton — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:24:22 +0000

Seth’s blog post on “Things to ask before you redo your website” is a must read for everyone involved in online marketing.   Seriously. If you haven’t seen it yet, go read it now.

What I love most about this list is the way it segregates into sub-components or elaborations on Future Now’s three questions that are the basis of Persuasion Architecture:

1) Who is coming to the site?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

3) What action do we want them to take, and how do we ensure this matches up with what they are trying to accomplish? In other words, what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

Separating out Seth’s List

Here’s how I see Seth’s list falling into those categories:

1) Who is coming to the site?

Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?

Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?

What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?

Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?

Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

“If it’s the boss [that we are trying to please], what does she want?”

“Are they looking to answer a specific question?

Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?

3) What action do we want them to take…what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

What is the goal of the site?

In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?

Are we trying to close sales?

Are we telling a story?

Are we earning permission to follow up?

Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?

Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?

Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?

Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?

Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?

Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?

Do we want people to call us?

How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?

Operational [and larger] Questions

Yet, while Seth’s persuasive questions are covered within these three categories, there’s a pile of operational questions left over:

How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?

Who needs to update this site? How often?

How often can we afford to overhaul this site?

How much money do we have to spend? How much time?

In other words, what will this cost us? A question that opens the door for much larger debate of, do we really need to incur this cost in the first place? What makes us think we need a redesign?

And that gets us to the question that our own Jeffrey Eisenberg tackled within his free report 7 Big Questions of Highly Effective Online Marketing. For starters he suggests that people interested in redoing their site should ask the big questions first:

Do we need a redesign, or can we work with what we have?

Exactly how would a redesigned site better serve our visitors?

If the best-converting sites are often boring in their design, are we willing to design our site with that in mind? [in other words, do we have the intellectual integrity to separate out an notional "want" for a prettier/slicker website from a real business need]

Will we incorporate a scientific testing methodology into our redesign so we can optimize user interactions based on predictions of how our different audience segments will engage with the site? [in other words, are we really serious about redesigning to improve performance? Serious enough to bake accountability into the very fabric of the redesigned site?]

And if you’re not sure if you need a redesign, perhaps it’s best to take a cold hard look at your current Website in order to:

Isolate what isn’t working and what is

Determine whether you need to re-conceive your site because too many elements bog down the original design

On Target as a Precursor and Follow-up to a Website Redo

While Future Now has been involved in hundreds of successful Website redesigns and renovations, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg clearly saw that there were far more sites out there in need of optimization and improvement than full scale redesigns.

And far more Website owners who couldn’t answer the majority of the questions posed in Seth’s post and Jeffrey’s report.

That’s how OnTarget was born.

OnTarget allows Website owners to gain insight into what is and isn’t working with their current site, and provides them with prioritized recommendations to optimize the site, fix the leaks, etc. Think of it as an incremental redesign based on measurable results.

With OnTarget it is only when major persuasive and usability obstacles can’t be surmounted without major retooling, re-skinning, etc. that a site redesign is contemplated. And in those cases, the business owners are able to answer those critical questions posed by Seth and Jeffrey.

This often means walking away from big redesign projects. But it always means providing the client with the wisest and best use of his online resources.

[Editors Note: The author of this article is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

What Is Your True Conversion Rate?

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:11:31 +0000

Increasingly more people are joining the optimization crowd. Savvy marketers need to do more with less budget. Others just want to beat their competitors. No matter the motivation, optimizing your conversion rate is a no-brainer.

What seems more difficult is deciding where and what to optimize. All of us have our plates full already. Adding optimization to the heap seems uncomfortable, even painful.

It doesn’t have to be.

It may not be easy, but very little that is worthwhile ever is.

When no clear starting line exists, most marketers will optimize in an ad hoc manner with no clear plan. Often companies will:

Start with their newest campaign

Start with their pet campaign

Optimize their least favorite campaigns

Optimize the easiest campaigns

Optimize everything they can just a little, but never develop a method to get maximum results

Start with the boss’ favorite campaign, least favorite campaign, and so forth

None of these are bad places to start. A little bit of optimization even in a less optimal place is better than no optimization. Still, if you’re looking for a more effective means to get rolling toward results sooner rather than later, here are a few tips.

Preface: Understand Your True Conversion Rate

While your average conversion rate is the total number of unique visitors divided by the number of unique visitors that take a conversion action, your true conversion rate is the number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have taken that action. Your true conversion rate takes into account how qualified the visitor is and gives you a better indication of how well your site is performing.

Look at Your Marketing Efforts

How are you bringing these people who take action to your Web site? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser’s address bar? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do others come from organic search? Paid search? E-mails? Affiliates? Do these people come from different Web sites: Google? Bing? Yahoo? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Define Your Prospects

You are likely targeting different audiences based on personas or demographics. You might have different efforts for each segment, maybe several efforts per segment. Each segment that was brought in by an individual marketing effort has different, sometimes intersecting, occasionally opposing scenarios (persuasion paths) based on needs, motivation, knowledge, purchase preferences, or some combination thereof.

For example, you sell Web conferencing and buy the keyword “online web conferencing.” You’ve identified three prospect segments: small office/home office, education, and marketing/sales. They all share a keyword and a landing page that gives them the content each segment needs. You might also buy more targeted keywords that send them to more segment-specific content, but they all share the same sign-up process.

Each one of these is an effort that may need to be optimized. A don’t forget your banner ads and offline media efforts, either.

Create Goals and Micro-Funnels

You cannot succeed online unless you plan for it. Specifically, you need to plan conversion goals for each effort. What actions do they want to take based on where they are in the purchase cycle? How are you going to measure them?

Again, if you sold Web conferencing, your early-buying stage goals may be to have visitors sign up for a trial or download a case study. Late-stage buyers would have paid sign up as a goal. Often, optimization means starting by adding efforts for early or middle stage. There are clearly too many businesses that expect to convert you all the way on the first visit. This may be unreasonable, depending on the audience segment and the complexity of the sale.

Each segment brought in by an individual marketing effort that navigates through their scenarios (persuasion paths) is a micro-funnel that needs to be optimized. Prioritize them!

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto Principle is a good place to start thinking about prioritizing your optimization. It is highly likely that if you have 1,000 different efforts, about 20 percent are pulling their weight. Those 200 efforts need persistent and vigilant optimization.

Here are a few more places to start:

Optimize your top-performing efforts, figuring out how to make them better.

Optimize your most expensive but low-converting keywords (each one or several related terms in a group in individual marketing efforts).

Sort out your top 200 campaigns and optimize those that are within a few percentage points of performing like a top-200 effort, then move on to your next 200.

If you have very few efforts that perform respectably (over 10 percent true conversion rate), you may need to look at the potential market and create persuasion paths by paying attention to your market segments’ needs or your prospects’ needs at different buying stages.

Optimize your top 20 exit pages.

Optimize the bottom of your registration or checkout funnel and work your way up the funnel.

Your conversion rate is nothing more than the sum of the thousands of efforts and paths that prospects take through your site. Beware of averages. There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments that come to your Web site. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or marketing effort.

Are you optimizing by effort or by average? Tell me which and I’ll tell you what kind of success you’re having.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Make Your Images Load Faster

Bryan Eisenberg — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:39:55 +0000

True “interaction” happens when request and response of pages happen in sub-second speed. So just because people have cable and dsl connections doesn’t mean you should fill your pages with bloated code and heavy images.

In fact, the natural advantage of fast loading pages is one reason Google patented the sparse design of their home page. They know that simplicity, speed and relevance rule the web experience, and that every millisecond counts.

Think about that time you had to connect to a website on your cellular phone or use the wireless network at a busy conference. Slow sites suck!

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do you speed up your pages?

1. Run a speed test on your page.

There are several great tools that will tell you if your pages are loading slow. Here are the main ones we use here at FutureNow:

1. Web Page Analyzer

2. Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug

3. Page Speed by Google – They have also compiled a list of some other great resources and tools to speed up your website.

These tools will identify if your code, javascript, css and or images are overweight. This post will only focus on how to optimize your images once you realize they are too fat.

There are several simple tools online that you can use to optimize your image if you are not familiar with Photoshop or the equivalent to squeeze those image file sizes down.

1. Smush.it

2. Dynamic Drive

3. Web-Resizer

Here is an example of how to do it with Smush.it:

1. Copy and paste the image urls of the images you want to optimize into Smush.it.

2. Click Smush.it

3. See the results of how much your images were smushed.

4. Right click the name of the file you requested to be optimized and save it to your computer.

5. Upload those files to your server to replace the bloated ones.

People expect fast-loading pages and quick response times from websites; it’s part of their internal clock. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with visitor expectations for:

expected content/scent,

answers to buying concerns and questions,

the look and feel of the site and photos,

or, for response times

Matching or exceeding those expectations always leads to higher conversion rate. That’s why the Persuasion Architecture framework is so consistently successful at Website Optimization.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

The 120 Second Visitor

Bryan Eisenberg — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:46:42 +0000

The seconds pass by in your visitor’s mind as they arrive to your website. If they don’t bounce immediately because of poorly targeted marketing efforts and sucky landing pages, you’ll still be lucky if they’ll stick around for the next 2 minutes. It’s like every visitor to your website has a timer in her head and if she can’t complete her task in the allotted time, she is out of there.

How are you wasting your visitors time?

Does it take a while for your pages to load?

Do your database lookups take so long your visitors can go and get a snack before the results are returned?

Do you have important content that is hidden away?

Does it take your visitors too long to find the product they are looking for?

Do you force visitors to pogo-stick between a category page and product pages because your category page fails to provide enough information to confidently select among the choices.

Is it difficult to sort among choices by the factors or qualities that your visitor feels important? Or do you only allow sorting by price?

Does your registration or check out process have too many steps and take to long to complete?

Does it take several steps for your visitor to figure out their total cost including shipping?

Here is another classic way of wasting your visitors time that could easily be avoided.

Do a search on Diapers.com for “exersaucers“. You’ll notice 4 listings. 3 of them are out of stock. But the initial search listings don’t tell you that. The visitor has to click through to each product page, only to find out she can’t buy the item – a triple loss, as the site has simultaneously wasted the visitor’s time, frustrated the visitor, and come off as an unreliable/unprofessional business.

Placing your out of stock messaging on the category pages will prevent your visitors from repeatedly finding that the product they clicked on and started to desire is – upon their arrival on the product page – suddenly unavailable for purchase.

So while I’ve given you a valuable list and a good examples to get you started, every site has its own unique challenges, and it’s worth asking your team: how many different ways can you find to shave valuable seconds during your visitors journey to become a lead or sale? How can you help your vistors beat their own internal clocks in order to win more business?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Social Media Is Not the Message

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:18:07 +0000

Social marketing is a shiny new toy and almost everyone is wising up and getting involved, as they should. In fact, a rumor is spreading that the new Mac OS, Snow Leopard, is integrating Facebook addresses directly into its own address book app. There’s no question that social applications are becoming central to our online lives, and soon social apps will be a central part of the very operating systems we use. People are tweeting, flickring, and facebooking like mad, with no signs of slowing.

Still, at the heart of it all for marketers is the message. Never forget that these new social technologies are just new ways to communicate. And technology by itself is not persuasive. Beware not to get the media mixed up with the message.

Every status update, tweet, and inbox message is nothing more than a communication between a sender and a reader. What you say and how you say it matters. Be relevant.

E-Mail: The Original Social Media App

Plain old vanilla e-mail still rules. By the numbers, people still interact and communicate using e-mail more than any other social media app, and most companies still earn more from their e-mail campaigns than from their social media efforts.

Yet I wonder how many have put their e-mail programs on autopilot and have starting chasing shiny new objects. I recently received a disappointing e-mail from Nikon. Like most people, I typically just delete promotional e-mails, but I decided to hold on to this one, considering the headline said “My Picturetown — 20GB for just a few cents a day!”

I clicked on the call to action: “Store my photos and videos” and landed on a page offering, “Sign Up For Free” in the headline, with a form and a graphic proclaiming, “2GB FREE!” (Pictured below.) Notice how the landing page scent, or messaging connection, to the e-mail is missing.

As you can see, there’s no mention of the 20 GB at all (I wonder if it was a typo), let alone information about the e-mail’s offer of 20 GB of storage for just a few cents a day. I was wondering how few cents it actually was: 2 cents, 10 cents, or 99 cents?

Nikon clearly did not maintain scent from the e-mail to the landing page. It got my attention but didn’t maintain it on the landing page (among other things). Message matters. Nikon started with the right message but lost consistency. Someone is asleep at the wheel.

Here’s an example of an e-mail campaign from Wyndham Rewards that offers 1,000 free reward points for booking a trip:

On the landing page, I see the message about 1,000 reward points, but there’s no clear call to action. The landing page features mostly a map and some links. I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do. The call to action is weak. A simple statement of “Click Your Destination to Get Started” would have done just fine to move me through to the next step.

Bottom Line

Don’t get caught up in the flash of Web 2.0 technologies; work to understand how each works so you can use it to deliver a relevant message to your prospect. When you tear away the technology, you’re left with words and the actions they inspire — or fail to inspire. Don’t mistake the medium for the message.

A good message in any medium can be effective, and a bad message isn’t cured by Web 2.0 technologies. Remember, just because e-mail isn’t social media doesn’t mean it isn’t important and worth optimizing. Watch your message and make sure you maintain scent and clear calls to action, or even an effective message will twist in the wind.

If you have something to say, say it well and give readers clear calls to action. Give them a persuasion scenario to follow and you’ll get better results from your efforts.

Otherwise, you’ll just blend in with the noise and no one will hear you at all.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Increase Your Search Rankings by Shrinking Your Offering

Bryan Eisenberg — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:26:23 +0000

Anyone can sell nutritional supplements, and many do. However, what would you think would happen to a company that stripped everything away to focus on selling magnesium supplements?

Magnesium — not something you hear about everyday, huh? It’s not really the product with the most “sex appeal.” As Patrick Sullivan, co-founder of Jigsaw Health which focuses on selling these wonderful magnesium supplements, explains:

“Magnesium is involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body. It works in tandem with calcium — calcium flexes muscles, and magnesium relaxes them. Thus, muscle relaxation is one of the many benefits of magnesium. But you just don’t hear about magnesium as much as you hear about calcium. And no surprise, up to 80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium. We recognized a large void in the marketplace to make an uncool mineral, cool.”

Roy Williams consistently shares this piece of advice with business owners: those companies that try to appeal to everyone tend not to appeal to anyone. It pays to have a “sword in the stone.” Says Roy:

Advertisers rarely abandon campaigns that revolve around their Swords in the Stone. And sword campaigns tend to perform much better than those built merely upon clever ideas. A company’s Sword in the Stone embodies its core values and defines its essence, and from these flow their non-negotiable standards and their customers’ positive experiences.

Patrick Sullivan explains on his blog the 5 step process he went through to increase his search rankings for the main index page on Jigsaw Health for the term magnesium supplements. He shares his results too:

In about 4 days, Lord Google bumped us from outer-space to 27th for “magnesium supplements”. About 10 days later, we were the second listing on page 2 (position 12)!!

Today he is #11. Obviously, something is working.

Being this focused is not only good for Google but for your visitors as well. Sites that work to clarify their sword in the stone wind up with much lower bounce rates and, more importantly, increased sales and conversions. Just ask Patrick at Jigsaw, who finally put the magnesium pieces together.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:30:04 +0000

I love Nikon. My dad had a Nikon. I bought my first Nikon SLR (an F3) when I was in college and a couple of years ago my wife brought me into the digital DSLR world by buying me a Nikon D60 for Father’s day. So it pains me to see a company I love make such critical mistakes.

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry. Like most people, I typically just delete promotional emails, but I decided to hold on to this one, considering the headline said “My Picturetown – 20GB for just a few cents a day!”

You can see the full email by clicking the picture below.

Broken Scent Renders Landing Page All But Useless

I clicked on their call to action “Store my photos and videos” and after the jump was offered “Sign Up For Free,” by the headline, followed by a form and a graphic proclaiming: “2GB FREE!” Notice how all “scent” or messaging connection to the email is lost on this landing page (pictured below)?

As you can see, there’s no mention of the 20GB at all (I wonder if it was a typo), let alone information about the e-mail’s offer of 20GB storage for just a few cents a day. I was wondering how few cents it actually is: 2 cents, 10 cents or 99 cents?

Also I couldn’t help wondering what was up with the big empty box before the sign-up form’s confirm button. What is that for? I tried it in multiple browsers on my Mac and even tried it on a PC, but it remained empty. Keep in mind that I only put in that extra effort because I planned on critiquing the form. Most potential customers won’t bother checking to see if the form renders correctly in alternate browsers/platforms – that’s why it’s the marketing team’s job!

What Nikon Should Have Done

1. I hope Nikon are testing their email marketing offers before send them to their whole list. Otherwise that’s like being there for that perfect picture moment, the once in a life-time shot, snapping the photo, and realizing you left your lens cover on. Send out your email to a small portion of your list 5-10% and watch the metrics and website analytics to see how people behave. Then tweak accordingly.

2. Nikon’s e-mail could have directed visitors to sign-up for the free service AND THEN upgrade to the paid 20GB account (they event offer a 200GB plan). It would also have been a good idea to repeat this information both on the landing page and in a follow-up e-mail after customers signed up for their free account.

Or Nikon could have offered their e-mail subscribers the choice of services directly from within their e-mail, with two separate calls to action, maybe with the second CTA looking like: “…or upgrade to a Gold 20GB account for only $2.99 a month.” By the way, if you’re wondering where I got that price from, I had to Google “MyPicturetown,” and then really dig into Nikon’s website to – finally! – find the pricing info in their tour pages.

3. They should make sure their form works on all platforms and browsers. I can only imagine that that box has to be the terms and conditions. Sorry but my Mac with Firefox and Safari didn’t see a thing. Everything should be tested to make sure it works.

4. Their landing page design should have better visual impact. Currently, it has all of the design sensibilities of a 3 year old taking their first picture: no focus, no impact, no clear subject and leaves you wanting. Nikon has a great brand, known for their great visuals, but what happened to this product team?

Nikon needs to work much harder than this if they want to acquire customers. I already have a Flickr Pro account and a Picasa account. Others like me (very much in their target market) need plenty of reasons to change what we are currently doing. Maybe next time they’ll capture me at the right moment.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

When Landing Page Optimization Isn’t Enough

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:00:15 +0000

As I was preparing for my SES Extreme Makeover session, analyzing the lucky businesses that were chosen for a free makeover, I became fascinated with a particular e-commerce site.

There was no question that the pages on this site performed exceptionally well. Bounces were under 20 percent and the exit rates were very low. I also knew this company had been testing using Google Website Optimizer.

Clearly, this company was dedicated to continual improvement and working hard to improve its conversion rate. The analytics shouted proof that someone was minding the store.

So why was its overall conversion rate painfully low?

I dug deeper into the analytics, going back and forth between the numbers and the site. Then I knew exactly what was wrong. I was curious if my staff would be able to see exactly what I saw.

As much as I’d like to brag about my staff for being brilliant (they indeed are), I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they’re trained to look where others don’t. Without hesitation, they saw exactly what I saw.

All Is Well…on the Surface

The marketing was good and relevant, the site was well designed, the landing pages and product pages were sticky, and traffic seemed to move through the site with ease. Even the checkout process was good. Instead, the site suffered from a severe persuasion scenario problem.

The site attracted interested prospects and gave them enough big call-to-action buttons and shiny products to browse, but made it difficult, even impossible, for prospects to gain any resolve to buy the right product for them. This is a site with a slow drip. Prospects are falling off one by one in hundreds of different places. It’s proof that landing page optimization isn’t enough.

Moving Beyond Best Practices, Usability, and Testing

Joel Spolsky best summed up this site’s dilemma in “User Interface Design for Programmers“:

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a night club it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with plenty of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

The site is nice, well lit, well run, but not selling. So how do you begin fixing the problem? First, you have to understand it a bit.

We created a simple, one-dimensional persona who was early in her buying process. She knew she needed a certain product but didn’t know where to start. The site sells sporting recreational goods with the average price point in the hundreds of dollars. This isn’t an impulse-buy type of site.

We clicked through the site as this persona and, no matter where we started, we ended up hitting a virtual brick wall, confused and frustrated. The site seems to have good prices but little guidance on what products are best for the beginner. The site even offers packages to make it easier for the customer.

Yet it didn’t help the persona answer the question: which is the right package for me? Even when we were a persona further along in the buying process, we still had a heck of time sorting and finding the right products for our need.

Simple persuasion issues not addressed on product pages and category landing pages are the Lilliputians sucking the lifeblood out of the site’s conversion rate. Proof again that too many sites spend way too much time and money on best practices and page performance to the detriment of site performance.

The Good News

This site will get a makeover that will undoubtedly stop many of the drips. Some solutions are as simple as adding a little copy to category pages, creating several pages specifically addressing the needs of different buyers, and leveraging some great content already on the site.

The site can serve as a lesson to those of you who have come up short on your optimization expectations. It can remind you to optimize not just for better page performance but also for the actual visitor using those pages.

Here are a few steps you can take if you’re suffering from a slow-drip persuasion scenario problem:

Start with a simple persona, putting her in a typical buying process for your product or service.

Click through the site as that persona, doing your best to pretend that you don’t know where the content she needs is. Is it easy for her to find? Did she get distracted by something else? Does the content do what you intended it to do: does it move users forward through the site and give them greater resolve that they have found or will find the right product for them?

Run a usability test. Sometimes it’s hard to see your site with fresh eyes; you may need to bring in some help.

Remember that site engagement metrics, like bounce and exit rates, click-throughs, and time spent on site, are important key performance indicators. If your site’s engagement metrics look healthy and your conversion rate remains low or unchanged, you must now focus on selling and persuading the customer, not designing the right button or searching for a better hero image on a landing page or even finding better qualified traffic. You will likely need to create some content that will help visitors find the product they need and want. That’s a persuasion issue, not a usability or best practices issue.

Are you spinning your wheels, looking at your site analytics and running out of things to optimize or test? If you’re willing to share your situation with my ClickZ readers, tell me your story. My staff and I will select one or two sites to look under the hood of and share findings in a future column.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

I’m not an idiot, but I play one online – and so should you!

Jeff Sexton — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:42:39 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sorry about the headline – the 80s flashbacks are getting to me. Still, I really do “play stupid” as a Website optimizer and online copywriter. Or at least I play ignorant.

Why? Because all those terms and concepts you think everyone understands about your business and what you’re selling – well, you’re wrong about them! Wrong about both the terms themselves and your potential audience. If you think I’m mistaken, go back and watch the video again.

Or keep reading to see some real website examples. Either way, let me reassure you that way more of your website visitors just fundamentally don’t “get it” than you’d ever suspect. Either those visitors:

have no idea what the industry standard terms you are using mean,

don’t really understand the finer distinctions the terms are supposed to represent, or

fail to draw the all-important conclusions and emotional implications that you may be basing your persuasive messaging upon.

Any one of those might be enough to kill your chances for a conversion.

And while there are some good reasons to only mention or allude to the “features” in order to hone in on the benefits, there’s also very few excuses* not to provide links, mouse-overs, and early stage content that can guide the perplexed to a better understanding of your industry and your messaging.

How an “idiot” could improve the Black Diamond Home Page

For those of you who haven’t heard of this company before, Black Diamond Equipment makes cutting edge climbing and skiing equipment. And before we even look at one of their product pages, I suggest you just go to their website and get a feel for how user-friendly (or not) the overall design seems. Seriously, go there right now. I’ll wait.

Ok, now ask yourself this:

Doesn’t it feel as if the company ONLY produces carabiners? If you didn’t know the company produced headlamps, skis, tents, etc, would you ever think to look for those?

Did it take you a while to figure out that the pictured carabiners could be clicked on and rotated towards you? Or was that just intuitively obvious? What do you think the designers felt about the “obviousness” of this design.

If you weren’t interested in carabiners and never clicked on the “see all carabiners” link, would you ever have gotten to the pages dealing with other equipment?

What do you think is keeping them from simply using a persistent top navigation scheme?

Do you think “playing an idiot” for a day would help these guys out?

Idiot-Proofing Product Pages 101

Now let’s compare a product page on the Black Diamond site with one for the same product taken from backcountry.com. We’ll start with a product page for a LED headlamp taken from the Black Diamond site:

What the heck is a “TriplePower LED”?

Is it 3-times more powerful than a 5mm Nichia LED?

Is it a 3-watt LED?

Is it an LED with 3 power settings?

By using this terminology, Black Diamond has achieved the worst of both worlds, not only is the description not enough for a non-light geek to really understand, but neither is it technical enough for a light geek to feel confident in what he is buying.

How about underlining these terms and providing a mouse-over that would show comparisons of the LEDS, their real technical specs, and usage shots, so that an average user could get a sense of the light output and a techie could see the real specs?

And what about the “NRG Rechargable battery”?

Is it a Lithium-Ion battery?

Is it Metal Hydride?

How much does it cost?

Does it improve or hurt the battery life of the light?

Can I buy the light already bundled with the battery and it’s charger, etc?

Finally, there’s the “single position switch.” I’m guessing it’s some sort of rubberized button-looking thing and that you just have to keep clicking it to rotate through all 7 of the modes until you get the one you want. But wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure:

That a single position switch = clicky switch, like on a Mag-Light

What exactly those 7 lighting modes are, and why I’d need that many modes

Where the button is located?

From the pictures it looks like the “single position switch” might be on the bottom of the light, but assuming that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better to link the term “single position switch” to a mousover of that picture along with an explanation of how the switch functions and what the 7 modes are?

As for backcountry.com’s product page for this same headlamp, the page is too long for me to snap an encompasing screenshot and place it here, but I suggest you go to that page and take a look at all of the content rich resources that are provided, including:

customer photos of the product in-use,

user reviews, Q&A’s, and

some actual, non-bullet-pointed, real copy.

But since we’re focusing on the copy, I’ve cut and pasted it below. Read it and see how many questions this copy answers that Black Diamond’s bullet points leave unclear:

“The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp uses two different types of LED bulbs to give you ultra-bright lighting when you need it and to save battery power when you don’t. The 3-watt center bulb has three settings for light up to 80 meters. Switch to the four SuperBright LED bulbs to get a 200-hour burn time when a lot of light isn’t necessary. This combination of long-distance lighting and long burn time makes the Black Diamond Icon Headlamp a stand-out choice for everything from backpacking to climbing to night skiing. In fact, it impressed Rock and Ice so much that they gave it their Best In Gear Award.

Bottom Line: The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp provides both bright lighting and long-lasting battery life for days on the trail, the rock, and the snow.”

Even if it’s not perfect, that copy is still much clearer, isn’t it? And understand this: the majority of what isn’t covered in this copy is covered in the user reviews, Q&A’s, etc. In fact, I’m convinced that the persuasive power of user reviews has as much to do with previous buyers unintentionally answering other customers’ questions within the reviews as it has to do with the increased credibility of user reviews.

Also, understand that this unexplained-term phenomenon isn’t exclusive to technical products, either; it happens in product descriptions for almost everything. I could have just as easily used tents and asked what the hell a double-wall tent is and why it should matter to me, and so on.

Reverse “The Curse” with Idiot Exercises

While “The Curse of Knowledge” can be hard to overcome, here are a few** sure-fire techniques to get you started on your journey to idiot-optimized copy:

Do usability testing. Get someone outside your industry (go ahead and specify minimum industry knowledge in your user request) and watch them move through your site while recording their questions, thoughts, etc.

Highlight every industry term, phrase, or concept on your site, write them down on a piece of paper, and start interviewing random people on the street about them, just like the guy did in the video.

Willfully play the part of a 5 year old and ask repeated why questions regarding your industry terms and concepts. It’s best to team up with a partner/colleague on this one. Force each other to come up with answers a 10-year old would understand.

After having done any one, or all, of the 3 strategies, go back and re-evaluate your copy.

P.S. Hat tip to Seth Godin for finding the video and creating a great blog post around it

* Actually, there’s only one excuse: you’re purposely excluding a general audience in order to tightly focus on a hard-core group. In that case, go ahead amd talk the lingo without apologies, letting anyone and everyone else catch up if they can. Just realize that you WILL be alienating visitors and potential customers in order to appeal to that smaller, hard-core group.

** Of course, the best sure-fire method of escaping the curse of knowledge is simply to hire an outside copywriter/consultant/optimization specialist

[Editor’s note: the author of this blog is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

“C’mon, Man, Do Some of that Optimization Sh*t”

Jeff Sexton — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:34:11 +0000

With apologies to Anthony Edwards, Tom Cruise and Paramount Pictures, that’s what it feels like (some) clients say after looking at a set of more challenging Website improvement recommendations.

These clients want their conversion rates to improve, but they don’t want to have to change much. After hearing tales of magical conversion rate lifts from simple tweaks, they look past the hard recommendations and ask that I “do some of that optimization stuff“.

And to be fair, sometimes easy website changes do yield disproportionate conversion rate increases. Sometimes a limiting factor, persuasive gap, or usability flaw can be fixed with something as simple as a new headline, a different color button, a new link, or an added point of action assurance. One or two small changes and – boom! – you get a huge lift.

Unfortunately, analyzing a Web site will just as likely reveal problems and limiting factors that aren’t so easily changed or tested:

Going from offering only one crappy, manufacturer-supplied product photo to offering multiple hi-res photos may not sound that hard, but on a Website with, say, more than 40 SKUS, it can be a bear of a job.

Same thing with installing customer review functionality and then going back to your old customers to incentivize their participation by writing reviews for previously purchased items.

And same again with the improvement of product description copy.

Or replacing an outdated, clunky, shopping cart and checkout with a more user friendly system.

And so on.

All of those improvements represent a lot of work for the client’s web team, but they are some of the more powerful improvements any online retailer could make. Looking past them to tweak easier-to-change elements of the website would be a mistake. There is no web optimization magic FutureNow (or anyone else) can pull that would create an endless supply of easy changes yielding ever larger results. Sometimes the big wins require big changes.

And that’s exactly what Bryan Eisenberg meant when he said that it’s already time to start preparing for the Christmas shopping season. If it will take you several months to implement, test, and tweak the larger more-important changes to your site, that puts you finishing around September – which beats the heck out of tearing your hair out because it’s mid-November and you haven’t gone live with whatever big improvement or change you’re hoping will save Christmas for you.

So c’mon, guys, start implementing that web optimization sh*t now, and you won’t have to explain why your Christmas season went down in flames.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

For Every Optimization, There’s a Pyramid, So Get Started

Brendan Regan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:18:50 +0000

We at FutureNow sometimes wonder why more companies aren’t busy optimizing their websites and online marketing, or why those who are “on board” with the concept don’t always commit the right amount of resources towards the effort.

I’m not a mind-reader, but I think it’s due in part to an all-or-nothing mentality where nothing short of a full optimization ‘project’ is worth putting effort into. Most companies are more interested in redesigning their websites all at once instead of incrementally, even though incremental optimization is far less expensive, less risky, and more accountable!

Maybe you heard the expression – how do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time!

Sometimes, we tell our clients to redesign and optimize a small design element of their site; their call to action buttons, for example. And they seem tentative and slow to implement the recommendation. Why? Maybe because they think it has to be 100% optimized right away, or that it has to be perfect to be worth taking action on.

A useful model to get past this mode of thinking is to use the Hierarchy of Optimization which we’ve talked about on this blog in the past. It’s a great mental model to show clients the roadmap of how they should be optimizing, and in what order.

Take a quick look at the hierarchy diagram, and then I’ll apply the model to real-life design elements that most sites should be taking a look at. Note that the Hierarchy has 5 levels: the Functional, the Accessible, the Usable, the Intuitive, and the Persuasive. While you can apply the 5 levels at a “macro” level on your entire site, you can also apply them at the “micro” level on a single landing page or even small design elements.

Example 1 – Call to Action Buttons

Persuasive – Do all the layers of the pyramid work together as a cohesive whole? Are you actively testing your buttons? Do all your calls to action pair an imperative verb with an implied benefit? Do they answer WIIFM?

Intuitive – Do your buttons look like buttons? Do they look “clickable”? Do they feature 3-d effects, shading, or rich surfaces?

Usable – Are your calls to action always located in a consistent position on pages? Do they follow the prospect’s eye path as it travels down the page? On your forms, do the buttons line up with the “scan line“?

Accessible – Is there alt text behind your calls to action? If you use graphics, do they load and render in all your supported OS/Browser combinations?

Functional – Do all your pages even have a primary call to action button? Are any of them broken? Is anyone responsible for occasionally testing them?

Example 2 – Testimonials

Persuasive – Are your testimonials architected to answer questions and overcome objections through out the prospect’s buying process? Are your testimonials as ‘real’ as possible, using pictures of the customer? How about video testimonials? Are you constantly testing to find the right formula for your business?

Intuitive – Do your testimonials follow common design patterns for displaying quotes? Are relevant testimonials placed on key pages to answer your prospects’ unanswered questions? Do you attribute quotes with name, location, and other relevant information?

Usable – Are your testimonials readable? Are they an appropriate font size and contrast? Do prospects have to go hunting for them, or are they spread throughout the site?

Accessible – In this case, Accessible and Usable can be thought of as essentially the same layer of the pyramid. See Usable.

Functional – Do you have testimonials? Are they legitimate? Do you have permission to attribute the author with at least a first name and last initial?

Besides what I hope are useful questions to ask yourself, the point of all this is to encourage everyone to start today on optimization, take baby steps, and work your way up the Hierarchy. As the old saying goes: You can’t eat an elephant in just one bite!
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Dear Confused By Personas

John Quarto-vonTivadar — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:28:32 +0000

A student at the University of British Columbia Web Analytics course reached out to us via Twitter to ask some questions about creating personas, specifically Persuasion Architecture® Personas and the information is important enough that we thought we’d share our response:

“Are you saying that we shouldn’t bother with creating multiple personas with granular details but rather focus on creating only a few (4 if we use the logical-emotional, quick-deliberate quadrant)? But if we add the stages of the buying cycle in there, we could end up with [too many] personas. This is still unclear to us.”

First off, thanks for reiterating these common issues. You probably won’t be surprised to hear us suggest what we’ve said on numerous occasions before: start with what you can handle. If you are unsure of how to proceed, that in itself tells you to shoot for the simpler solution by focusing on the *actual* goal, which is to improve conversion, sell more widgets, get more leads, etc. If you do nothing, you obviously will just continue to have the same results you already have. But if you over-reach for “perfection” to the point at which your eyes glaze over and you become catatonic then you’ll also have the same results you already have. So start small. A subtle and deep Persona development that doesn’t get implemented correctly is hardly better than using the quadrant approach, and both approaches will definitely work on the important stuff that ought to be improved first. In fact, if that wasn’t the case, then you’d have to worry, right? Navy blue is still blue, right? An Anjou pear is still a pear, right? And meerkats are still…oops, ditch that last.

And just to let you know: there’s no particular reason that smaller companies should find this harder than larger companies…just the opposite, in fact. We had a recent client, a *huge* technology company, who’s marketing pros convinced themselves they “got personas” and then wondered why their recently-developed PA personas were different than their expectations. So they missed the real point, which is not to reinforce a company’s self-centric approach, but instead to re-think their marketing to be customer-centric. Smaller companies tend to be more likely to implement change, often because fewer sacred cows need be put out to pasture before improvement can begin.

In short, go with the quadrant approach (or even one-dimensional, if need be!) and move on from there. Add in buying cycle, but don’t add a dimension just to keep the count “evened out” — add in distinct differences that result in a required change in persuasion, not a change in demographics. A Spontaneous persona, for example, will often breeze through her Early and Middle stage buying process faster than you can model for, so there’s nothing to be gained by inferring a difference that cannot be measured. Think of buying a candy bar — the buying process is fast for pretty much everyone, except outlier demographic specialties (a diabetic, a seed nuts allergy, a strict bodybuilder, etc). I often refer to this as “the demography seasons the modality.”

Now think of buying a house — surely the Spontaneous is going to go through a completely different process buying a home than buying a candy bar. There will be a Early buying process, and a Middle as well before the house is chosen, inspected the deed is signed and the lawyers paid. The nature of the underlying goal influences how the customer goes about achieving that goal, even when she has a pre-disposition to act in one preferred mode or another. Got it? I like to refer to this as, “The topology mediates the modality.” How much of your content strategy today answers the Methodical’s early stage buying needs?

“We also began questioning the practicality of designing at the page level for all of our personas. Some of us feel that it is possible to use personas for creating a scent trail at the individual page level if personas are very clearly defined but we also believe very large international sites would become extremely cluttered if multiple personas were used in the persuasion architecture of each page. Could you explain your
position on this?”

Another great question, probably because we hear this one a lot as a “freeze” point for larger companies. The answer is almost *never* to be creating multiple page versions, one variation for each persona. That’s not working for personas; that’s working for personalization in an aggregated populance. And if that worked, you’d've seen that emerge a decade ago as a solution that everyone would have jumped on. The reason it doesn’t work is that Persuasion Architecture(TM) Personas aren’t designed to be stereotypes of demographic groups; instead, they are representative models for the buying process and there’s a limited number of ways that the Human Operating System works. Each of us is a little mix of each of the modalities, and even that varies in time, place and context. The Personas are models; the Customers are not. So each of us, as individuals, exhibit varying relative balances of the PA Personas at each step in our own buying process.

So when you design for persuasive scenarios you’re optimizing how the various personas *could* move through the site *persuasively*. Not all possible paths; just those paths along which effective persuasion occurs (that distinction will drive your IT folks crazy. Sorry! ). And to answer the final part of your question, the question of internationalization is a good one, but again is answered by the persuasive process. If someone from Japan buys a camera the same way as someone from Poland, then your issue is one of language. If those processes are culturally different, then the persuasion is different, and has to be analyzed to really lead to optimization (and you’ll have to also determine for yourself, if, say, one quadrant type is different from one culture to another while another quadrant might remain the same), and then you layer the internationalization on top of that. Usually, though, when one mode changes due to culture, all modes change and the relative mix of modes changes as a whole.

Again, keep the goal in mind: more conversion, more sales, more leads. You’re looking to optimize your sales system by optimizing all parts of the process. You correctly comment that this can get complex and, in your words, “extremely cluttered”. The “clutter” claim often comes when a company attempts to graft persuasion architecture on top of information architecture — without having understood the persuasion first, an information system was designed and implemented un-prepared to persuade — of *course* it’s going to turn out complex and cluttered. Our experience has been that when you plan the persuasion first, you’ll actually be amazed at how un-cluttered your very talented information architect’s work will be since she’ll be working to a plan for persuasive paths.

I hope that helps! Let us know if you need any further clarification.

This post is intended to respond to the questions we were asked. If you want to know more about personas I’d recommend you read our books or if not download two documents: our Persuasion Architecture (PDF) & Getting Started with Building Persona (PDF) whitepapers.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Brendan Regan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:04:53 +0000

The ecommerce shopping cart is a great place to run tests, as simple changes (layout, copy, color, etc.) often yield fantastic results. There are unanswered questions in the minds of our customers that we think are obviously answered on the page, but they’re not. If you’re not sure about what those unanswered questions are, you can back up a few steps and use personas or user testing to uncover them.

Here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart:

Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?

Are you safe and secure?

Why are you asking for this information?

Do I have to set up an account to buy?

Do I get to review my order before we transact?

I recently bought a Father’s Day present online from a gift retailer, and their overall shopping cart process was “OK.” I would give it a “B-” grade; it was good enough to get me through the purchase without bailing, but not nearly good enough to earn brand loyalty. But, they did a good job of clearly answering the 5 Questions, and it was enough to help them “Get The Cash.”

I captured some elements of their billing page so you could see how their design answers the 5 unanswered customer questions. When you click on the screenshots, can you pick which design element answers which question?

Are you adequately answering the 5 unanswered questions? Whether your confidence level is low, high, or somewhere in between, we know you could run some interesting tests to validate your assumptions about how well you’re doing, and you might increase your funnel conversion rate in the process! Want help? Let us know.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Web Analytics and Yellow Lobsters

Bryan Eisenberg — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:51:16 +0000

I’ve been curious about what kind of effect the economy is having on how companies use Web analytics. Econsultancy just released its “Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2009.” This is its second annual report, and the results are fascinating.

First, the pleasantries:

“Companies are focusing on analytics which help them improve their customer acquisition and customer retention. The recession has helped to bring into sharper focus the importance of understanding return on investment and how individual elements of digital marketing impact the bigger picture.”

“There is a prioritization of information requirements which relate directly to business efficiency. The biggest focus is information relating to the cost of acquiring a customer or lead which is regarded as a ‘high priority’ by 59% of responding organizations.”

Overall, the interest in Web analytics and using it to improve continues to creep upward. The report also clearly shows that as the interest grows, so does confusion:

“There has been a slight improvement since last year but only one in five companies (22%) have an internal strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives. More than half (60%) of responding organizations said they are ‘working on this’, while 18% say that they don’t have such a strategy.”

“There are still only a quarter of company respondents (27%) who say that their Web analytics ‘definitely’ provide actionable insights, with a further 55% saying that this is only sometimes the case.”

Another trend is that more companies are using Google Analytics: 23 percent use it exclusively, compared to 14 percent last year. For Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal, this is why the following is also a key finding in the report:

There has been a marked shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, with companies now spending more on human resources than on software and licenses. The proportion of spending on internal staff has increased from 36% to 42% of total Web analytics spend while spending on technology has decreased from 45% to 38%.

Obviously some companies are hiring analysts rather than paying for analytics or some other technology. A welcome bit for those trying to make a career as Web analysts.

Still, I wonder how these analysts are faring. We all know the challenge in finding qualified candidates. When asked if companies were getting a return on investment from their analytics, a whopping 65 percent of respondents didn’t know or said they weren’t getting a return.

Andrew Hood, managing director at Web analytics consultancy Lynchpin (which cosponsored the report), said: “While the technology gets more and more sophisticated (and arguably more accessible from a cost perspective), the challenges in interpreting and actioning the data only get bigger…Resources [are] still a massive issue, and while companies are looking to increase spend on people, there looks to be an underlying skills shortage operating against this.”

It seems like good Web analysts are like yellow lobsters: they’re very rare.

What’s a Company to Do?

Before you do anything else, define your business goals. What do you need visitors to do to make your company more profitable? How will you measure success? You must tie your business goals with online efforts, or this is all for nothing. When you invest in improvement, you must at least know where the goal posts are.

Next, don’t let budget be a barrier to improving your Web site. What you don’t have in the budget you can pay for with a little more time and effort. Take the time to learn.

I’ve said it before and I say it enough: commit to a culture of continuous improvement, not a culture of set it and forget it. If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there, you’ll never reach your highest potential number of conversions.

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. Sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors’ needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to get your goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

What is your company doing with your analytics these days? How do you turn your analytics into actions that improve on your goals? Let me know below.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Conversion Rate Exercise: Why Should I Do Business With You?

Bryan Eisenberg — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:41:54 +0000

Today I’d like to give you 2 exercises that will help your visitors get a better sense of why they should be doing business with you.

1. TweetVP – In 140 characters or less, tell me the value of doing business with you. What makes you different than your competitor? This is like writing your Unique Value Proposition or Unique Campaign Proposition, but you are limited to the number of characters, as if you were going to post it on Twitter. If you do a good job of this you could lower your bounce rates by putting this on every landing page.

2. 25 Interesting things about you – You may have seen this pass along on Facebook as people started to list the 25 interesting things about themselves. Do the same thing for your business and have several people involved in your business do the same. Then find the most interesting ones and use them on your About Us page. This will enhance your credibility by adding transparency into your company.

Good Luck! Feel free to share your results with us.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Are Your Analytics Causing You to Lose 30% of Your Sales?

Jeff Sexton — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:14:17 +0000

Most companies measure keyword performance – and especially PPC keyword performance – based on one factor: did that word or phrase bring converting visitors to the site on the visit in which they converted.

So the natural thing to do is trim non-performing words and phrases in order to increase the efficiency of your PPC spend. And that’s exactly what one client did, except rather than increasing his efficiency, he dropped his sales by 30%.

Why?

Because, depending on what you sell, lots of people buy on their second, third, or umpteenth visit to your site, rather than the first visit. Those visitors are building confidence in you as they move through their buying process. But most systems don’t (or can’t) track user behavior over multiple visits.   So when those early and middle buying-stage keywords shown up as non-converters, they get cut.

The shame is that not everyone is able to track the following sales drop off, which may not occur for days, weeks, or months, back to the act of cutting those keywords.

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

Would you trade Dennis Rodman for non-performance? Of course not, right? Rodman’s defensive stats alone tell the tale. At his prime, Dennis was pulling down a truly astonishing 18.7 rebounds per game. For reference, the previous year’s league leader in rebounds (David Robinson) averaged 13 per game.

But if the only stats you looked at involved scoring, you’d get a different picture. Comparing Rodman’s 8-9 points per game against other star players’ 20 or more points per game, you’d likely have been misled into trading Rodman, only to find yourself wondering why you started losing games and everyone else’s scoring stats went up against your team.

Think of your assisting keywords terms as the Dennis Rodman’s of your PPC campaign, except you’ll get all the assists and none of the off-court shenanigan’s.

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

A recent eConsultancy post discusses how Google’s default window for tracking cookies can distort traffic data. Left in its default cookie window setting, Google Analytics (GA) will classify visitors as “search”-driven traffic for six months following a single search based click through to your site – regardless of how they got to your site previous to that search or how they might arrive at your site following that search. Here’s an example of how this might skew your results:

Let’s say you’re driving traffic to your site via radio ads and that a listener, after hearing your ad, types your url directly into his browser. Later, he comes back but this time, he types your business name into Google and clicks through on a displayed search result. Following that, he visits your site three more times via bookmark or directly typing your URL into his site. That’s a total of 5 visits.

Question: How many of those visits would GA classify as search-driven?

Answer: 4 out of 5.

GA would count the first search-based visit and then all of the remaining 3 visits, despite the fact that the following three visits didn’t use search and may have taken place several months after the initial search. Multiply that by all your visitors/visits, and you can see how your understanding of what drives traffic to your website might be distorted in favor of search. And under the impression that your traffic was mostly generated by search and not, say, your radio ads, you might be tempted to cut them from your ad spend.   Obviously, the same thing could apply with e-mail campaigns, magazine ads, etc.

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

Any experienced Web Analyst or Website Optimizer could extend this list of “gotchas” and “classic mistakes” almost indefinitely. It’s just not that uncommon for an uncareful analysis of data to lead online marketers either to analysis paralysis or sub-optimal optimization strategies. Is it any wonder that 70% of businesses collecting wed data fail to act on their analytics data?

Obviously this issue has been central to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Web careers since the beginning. It’s why they helped found the Web Analytics Association; why they published The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to eMetrics, Call to Action and Always Be Testing; why they created Persuasion Architecture; and ultimately why they’ve built the OnTarget program.

The central theme amongst all of these issues is bringing clarity and actionable insight to Web improvement and online marketing efforts. They are all answers to the business owner who feels confused or disoriented by the data he’s given and want’s a clear direction toward more sales/conversions and improved website performance.

So, if you find yourself struggling to make sense of your online marketing data, or frustrated by non- or counter-productive optimization efforts, ask yourself: are you giving credit where it’s deserved? Or do you need help achieving greater clarity and actionable insight from your optimization efforts?
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate(s)

Bryan Eisenberg — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:07:24 +0000

Conversion rate = The number of people who take the action you want them to take divided by the total number of potential people who could have taken that action.

When you break that sentence down, you start to understand how to optimize your conversion rate.

Step 1 – Let’s understand “number of people“

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before?

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do some of those people come from organic search? paid search? emails? affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? Yahoo!? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occuring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of fireworks; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers: etc.?) all of which may induce a “spike” in traffic that is different than usual.

There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments who come to your website. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or because they came in through very different marketing efforts. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these segments/marketing efforts and you should.

Step 2 – Let’s understand “the action you want them to take”:

If you are in retail, you want them to purchase a product.

If you are in lead generation, you want them to become a lead.

Are there no other actions that are valuable?

In retail, even in they don’t convert now would it at least be more valuable to know if they added an item to your wish list, or subscribed to your newsletter, or looked up your retail store hours, or added items to their cart versus, just bouncing off the site right away? What are you doing to turn that one-time customer into a repeat customer? Do they only need one product you sell or might they need different ones over the course of time?

In lead generation, if they don’t give you all their information and request to be contacted by sales, is it valuable to have them sign up for a whitepaper, or a demo, or your newsletter? Is it better to download specification sheets, engage in calculators, or print or forward pages rather than just bouncing off the website? These are all steps that move people through their buying process.

These are just some of your macro-actions. What happens when someone comes from one of your ads and gets to a landing page? Sometimes the action is one of those listed above, but what if that page is only meant to help your visitors to choose the right product or service and they still need to actually click on the right one for them? What do you do to help them take that action and not bounce away? These are the micro-actions that need to happen from step to step in the potential customer’s visit.

All of these are actions we need to optimize. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these macro- and micro-actions, and you should.

Step 3 – Let’s understand “total number of potential people who could have taken that action”

What happened to the majority of visitors who did not convert? Why didn’t they convert?

Did they land on your site incorrectly? For example, they typed in “shingles” into a search engine and they were looking for roof repair and not a skin condition. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase from your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems accessing the information? Could they not figure out how to take action on your website? Did they not trust you? Did they leave with questions that were not answered? Did you answer their questions for today, but they aren’t ready to buy now? Did you not instill a sense of urgency or desire in them? Did you not make them a great offer?

You need to optimize your website experience for these potential buyers through the hierarchy of optimization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are thousands of potential improvements to choose from. You need to prioritize these based on the level of impact that improvement can have and the resources available to execute them. If you don’t have a copywriter available at the moment, you shouldn’t focus on copy changes even if it would be the most impactful. That’s may sound like just common sense, but it catches many companiyes like a deer in headlights.

Your average conversion rate is the aggregated conversion rate of how well your website performs for each of your customer segments, and each of your marketing efforts for each of the actions you want them to take. You optimize your conversion rate by first focusing in on the elements that impact as many of these as you can, and then you have to work on these “micro-funnels.”

While you work on conversions, market conditions, competitive forces, ad copy, and even your customers’ needs change. This is why you need to continuously optimize your marketing efforts. You can’t afford to have a “set it and forget it” mentality to your marketing.

Those of you who have been reading our blog and books for a while might recognize these steps as the fundamental steps of Persuasion Architecture®.

1. Who do we want to take action? This is the “number of people” from step 1.

2. What action do we want them to take? This is “the action you want them to take” from step 2. Have you defined all of these clearly? Are you measuring them properly?

3. What do they need in order to take that action? This is where we analyze what content/effort went into understanding why the “total number of potential people who could have taken that action” didn’t. This is where experience helps a ton.

If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there you will never reach your highest potential conversion rate!

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. I guarantee that sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to start getting your conversion goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Improvement Starts With (Bad) Habits

John Quarto-vonTivadar — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:15:30 +0000

Occasionally we hear from clients after they’ve implemented some recommendation for improvement (from our OnTarget service), that they see a temporary dip in conversion. This seemingly goes against logic — after all, if you fix a problem, things should get better, right? — but Mammals aren’t entirely logical nor rational, at least not as often as we’d like to think, and particularly when it comes to learned and patterned behavior. Sometimes it takes your customers a while to “get used to” the changes you made (think of how long your customers’ buying cycle is), especially when they are surprised to wake up one morning and discover such changes implemented. You knew the changes were coming; the customers are generally taken off guard. A short video illustrates:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not only will the dog not go out the door, despite evidence it’s not there (she sticks her head thru, for goodness sake…sounds like logical, rational, tested evidence of no door, right?), but instead is cued to the behavior of the door handle. And it’s not immediately clear that she believes the evidence since she then waits outside for the door handle to be involved in re-entering the house. What she really needs is the repetition of the new activity several times before modifying her own behavior. So there’s a delay between the implementation of the change and its measured improvement.

What’s interesting is that you see this behavior in humans too. How many diet solutions focus on giving one a sense of “feeling full”, not because one needs to eat so much, but simply one has gotten used to eating a certain relative volume of food and therefore reinterprets a smaller volume as “I’m not done yet”. Or, your City fixes some streets and roads and months later drivers still need “Warning: New Traffic Pattern” signs to remind them that something different, even something improved, has come along.

Of course over time, we all become used to the new way of doing things and that’s when the actual benefits of optimization will start to yield your company the long-tail, long-term results.

This is why we so often talk about a “cycle of improvement” and a “culture of testing”, because optimization gets its biggest bang from operating continuously. So the next time you make some improvements to your site, consider the idea that it’s completely normal for a dip in conversion to occur at that point in the persuasive process; use the time to plan your next round of improvements, so that when you come out of the dip you’re ready for the next cycle. Get realistic about your expectations and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
----------------------------------------------------
Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog » Website Optimization

Shopping Cart Optimization: Canned vs. Custom

A Clicks-to-Bricks Site Optimization Checklist

All Aces: Overlapping your Marketing Efforts for Better Results

Myths About Site Traffic and Optimization

Let Them Build Before They Buy

How Much Pre-Holiday Optimization is Enough?

Keep Them In the Cart this Christmas

Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!

Separating out Seth’s List

Operational [and larger] Questions

On Target as a Precursor and Follow-up to a Website Redo

What Is Your True Conversion Rate?

Make Your Images Load Faster

How do you speed up your pages?

The 120 Second Visitor

Social Media Is Not the Message

Increase Your Search Rankings by Shrinking Your Offering

Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus

Broken Scent Renders Landing Page All But Useless

When Landing Page Optimization Isn’t Enough

I’m not an idiot, but I play one online – and so should you!

How an “idiot” could improve the Black Diamond Home Page

Idiot-Proofing Product Pages 101

Reverse “The Curse” with Idiot Exercises

“C’mon, Man, Do Some of that Optimization Sh*t”

For Every Optimization, There’s a Pyramid, So Get Started

Dear Confused By Personas

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Web Analytics and Yellow Lobsters

What’s a Company to Do?

Conversion Rate Exercise: Why Should I Do Business With You?

Are Your Analytics Causing You to Lose 30% of Your Sales?

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

How to Optimize Your Conversion Rate(s)

Step 1 – Let’s understand “number of people“

Step 2 – Let’s understand “the action you want them to take”:

Step 3 – Let’s understand “total number of potential people who could have taken that action”

Improvement Starts With (Bad) Habits