Now I’ll be the first to admit: normally this sort of humor is right up my alley — I’m the one in the FutureNow office who sees “giggle-value” every time a new iPhone flatulence app comes along — but seeing this as an advertisement was funny the first time, and each time I re-watched I became less and less enthusiastic and more and more offended. What’s next? Shall we be subjected to Dunkin’ Donuts Butt Munchkins?

I’m guessing most people would be offended by this ad. But leave personal sense of what qualifies as funny aside for a moment, and consider: At the end of the day, the purpose of the ad is to sell more product. Perhaps in this case one might argue the real focus is on creating product awareness, so that at some point in the future I *might* try the product. Either way, I’m dubious as to whether the ad does anything more than make me aware of Hardee’s new product but lacking the inducement to act.

Did you watch the video? What’s the actual product name? As I wrote this post,  I had viewed the video 8 times, but actually cannot recall the product name since my mind wants to refer to it as “Hardee’s B-holes”. Now there’s an anti-inducer.

What do you think? Offensive, or just puerile humor (not that there’s anything wrong with that, fellow South Park fans!). And what does it say when the more times the audience is exposed to the marketing, the less likely the viewer is to choose the product, or even remember its name?

August 10th-14th, I will be at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. On top of my advisory board responsibilities, I will be doing a few sessions including an Extreme Makeover Session with my buddy Ethan Giffin from GrooveCommerce. You should enter to win a free makeover if you are planning on attending.

September 14th, I will be keynoting the Capterra Conference. I will be joined by some great friends and amazing speakers. Capterra, a website that connects buyers and sellers of business software, is presenting a two-day event that will bring marketing strategists and experts to Washington, DC to show you how to get the most out of your marketing efforts. You will have access to specialized presentations tailored to help software marketers attract more prospects to their websites and convert them to leads once they get there. The conference is September 13-15, 2009 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. Check out www.capterraconference.com for more information.

October 8th, join me in New York for free at Econsultancy’s Peer Summit. This is Econsultancy’s first major event in New York. I have spoken at their shows in London and they are just fabulous.

We are also planning on hosting several webinars in the late summer and fall. Stay tuned and I hope to see you soon.

Have a wonderful and safe 4th of July for those of you in the United States.

On June 18th, I posted a conversion rate exercise on this blog. Two simple exercises to help others understand why they should do business with you. Several people emailed me examples of what they did. However, I did want to point out two companies that took this “free” advice seriously and implemented it.

The first are my buddies from the segmentation, targeting and personalization platform extraordinaire, Monetate. They were at the Internet Retailer Trade show when they saw this exercise and realized how powerful the TwitterVP is in explaining to attendees what they do.

Empowers segmenting of traffic, targeting offers and messages to personalize the site experience, increasing conversion and AOV with zero I.T.

This is pretty solid! But more impressive was the second exercise about the “25 interesting things about you” which they turned into “25 Online Marketing Challenges You Can Meet and Beat with Monetate.” What do you think of this?

It makes me proud to be an advisor to Monetate because they took an idea and just executed it. I did not help them with this exercise at all.

A second example comes from renown photographer and educator Jim Miotke from BetterPhoto.com. He came up with several TwitterVPs and instead of just settling on one, he decided to ask his customers and followers to vote on it. Think that could generate some good word of mouth for his business of teaching photography?

Here are his choices: (if you care to vote, visit his BetterPhoto Jim Twitter profile).

Even if what they tried isn’t perfect, they now have a basis for continued experimenting and refining. But they got it done… have you?

If they are your competitors I’d watch out.

1. ProFlowers 38.6
2. Office Depot 28.0
3. Online Retail Total 25.6
4. Vitacost.com 25.0
5. Quixtar 23.4
6. ;Blair 23.4
7. Roamans22.6
8. 1800Flowers 20.5
9. Woman Within19.6
10. Spiegel 18.20

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index

Why were shoppers abandoning their carts?

46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges were a “very important reason” for emptying carts. Is free shipping a must in this economy? Have you tested personalized shipping offers based on location?

Other reasons for abandonment included:

• Wanted to comparison shop: 37% – Are you saving their cart for at least 30 days, so they can return to it?
• Lack of money: 36% - Can you make them an offer they can’t refuse?
• Wanted to look for a coupon: 27% – Are you prompting them to look for coupons? It could be costing you a huge percentage of sales.
• Wanted to shop offline: 26% - Are you offering them options to pick up items in store?
• Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24% - Find a way to GTC. Get The Cash!!!
• Item unavailable at checkout: 23% – Ooooops! This has to be dealt with on the product page or it will erode your brand trust.
• Couldn’t find customer support: 22% – This could be dealt with by using POA – point of action assurances (see the video below).
• Security concerns: 21% – This is also handled with point of action assurances and establishing more trust in your website.

Do you think you may need a cart whisperer? How many of these have you tried to deal with recently? Are you testing and optimizing you shopping cart? If not, why?

A pitch-man whose fame and success made him the target of more pitches than he ever gave.  Pitches made by desperate inventors looking for him to save them after they’d already mortgaged the house, spent the kids’ college fund, and invested all their life savings trying to bring some gadget to market.  People who showed up saying, “If only you, Billy Mays, would represent me on TV, I know we’d be able to sell my ________”

So what was the one product quality Billy INSISTED on? The one thing a product absolutely had to have if he was going to take on that kind of responsibility?

Demonstrability.

And Billy talks about the importance of demonstrability within the first 23 seconds of this video – the last interview he ever gave.  Watch:

What Billy knew that so many of us forget, is that a conclusion that the audience comes to on their own is a conclusion they’ll believe and act on. No normal advertising claim can achieve that, no matter how much evidence you throw behind it.

SHOW someone an “I can’t freakin’ believe it” demonstration, and they’ll walk away convinced. Try to persuade them with a stack of studies, facts, and figures, and they’ll likely assume you rigged the tests, got your testimonials from all your friends, and “interpreted” the facts with all the abandon of Jim Cramer telling people to hold onto their Bear Stearns stocks 6 days before the bankruptcy filing.

In Web terms, put your Social Security Number on the front page of your website and I’ll be a lot more likely to believe you can also keep me safe from identity theft.  Forgo the demonstration in favor of detailing your 14-step process to keep me safe, and I may not even read it, let alone believe your claim(s).

And, yes, dramatizing the benefit has long been the specialty of the infomercial, whether it was the ginsu knife cutting through the tin can, the sham-wow pulling up spilt coke from a carpet, or, yes, the incredible stain removing feats of oxy-clean.

So the question for you Web copywriters out there is, how can you inject demonstrability into your copy?

And if you can’t fully create demonstrability with copy and static pictures alone, how can you use a little video to bring that info-mercial magic to your sales pages?

And as a warning, this Zappos video is a clear case on how NOT to do it.

Do these guys show the product in action?  No.  Do they show you any parts of the shoe a visitor can’t see from the multiple images Zappos’ site already provides.  No.  So what the hell is the video for again?

How about showing me the guy’s foot in the flip flop, with a close up on the arch support?  How about showing me how flexible (or not) the flip flop is – how much it bends with the foot vs. how hard it slaps up against the heal with each step.  How it fits a narrow/medium/wide foot.  Etc.  Going a few thousand steps further, how about showing me how well the shoe looks after a few months of use?

C’mon, Zappos, why use video if you’re not going to actually SHOW the product in action?  Why use the video if you’re not going to actually help answer more questions than could have been answered with just text and pictures?

Anyway, Billy Mays’s family has my deepest condolences.  And you readers have my sincere wish that you take one of Billy’s last marketing lessons to heart.

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!

Here are a couple of my favorites:

This one is from Harry and David:

Here is one that shows an ordinary product like paper, that is hard to distinguish, in an extraordinary way:

Do you have a product image that tells a story? One that invites visitors to imagine owning your product? Please share it with us by adding a link below. The best ones I’ll add to this post and link to as well.

Some pet peeves around bad product images include:

• Not showing enough detail
• Not being able to enlarge or zoom
• Only showing one side of a product (especially in clothes)
• Showing color swatches of variations but not showing the actual products with those choices
• Linda Bustos from the GetElastic blog said it yesterday, show off your clothing on the right size model.

Better product images can boost sales. However, fixing your product images is not something you can do overnight, so plan now.

For added fun, which is the worst product image you have seen?

This is not the Emergency Christmas described by John Stewart from the Daily Show. However, with the pressure of the economy people will probably be spending more time planning, considering, saving and looking for amazing deals sooner rather than later in the year. What are you going to DO NOW to make sure you get their limited attention and dollars? Will your business and website be optimized for this interesting holiday season?

The Words ‘Marketing Automation’ are Like Music To Our Ears

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient, and makes some new processes possible.

In plain English, marketing automation uses data (like your web analytics) to do some of your marketing tasks for you. Herein lies the problem I keep running into: Your decisions and those of your marketing automation platform are only as sound as your data.

I’ve seen marketing automation software that helps your email marketing, your ppc bid management, segmentation and personalization, and others. As Jeff Sexton recently pointed out, if you have the wrong analytics it could cost you 30% of your sales. Can you afford that today?

A few weeks ago we were helping a client optimize her website and we wanted access to her historical data. All she had was the analytics from her marketing automation vendor. Now the fact that you could only access these analytics using Internet Explorer (we are mostly on Macs) was one failure, but the main failure was that it looks like the analytics was an after-thought by the vendor. Anyone can throw up some reports on a screen — but the issue is, do they tell you anything meaningful? There was virtually nothing to make you smarter as a marketer. Today’s smart marketers understand the value of data-driven decisions. Unfortunately, this vendor’s reports provided in an abstract way what happened but did not provide the vital statistics to diagnosis and prescribe any sort of optimization to the company’s efforts.

Marketing Automation Must Make You Smarter Not Lazier

I was talking to friend who is a superstar B2B marketer. He was telling me about this new enterprise PPC bid management software he was evaluating. He deals with thousands and thousands of terms so automating the bidding would be a huge help. He told me about the slick interface and the bidding rules, etc. Then I asked him the question that made him stop like a deer in the headlights.

“Have you checked out the data reporting behind the algorithm? What actionable insights does your ppc automation vendor provide you?”

Of course, vendors will shout “proprietary formula” and we marketers fall for this marketing B.S. We don’t need the complex details behind it but we do need to get a sense of what and how they look at data, keyword attribution, etc. What metrics do they value most? If you fall for the “black box” how do you and the system continue to learn? How do remove it if you are unhappy with the vendor? How do you create your internal best practices unless you have a clear picture into what is happening?

Without good data at the core, you may just end up with a mechanical turk. You need data to share in your organization and data that tells you details of what you’re doing and how to improve it. Also, beware of bad software that takes what you need done and tries to completely automate it. Just because it is automated won’t guarantee it is optimal for the way a good marketer works.

Don’t Forget Your Job Is to Make More Money, Not to Make Your Job Easier

The point of marketing automation is to free you up to do more of what you are really good at by letting the glorified calculator do what it is really good at. Good marketing automation lets you use your insights about your customers in ways you couldn’t before; bad software takes those decisions away and prays that the computer will do it for you. Keep in mind we have created a computer that has barely beaten a great human chess player, despite its intricate and complex algorithm –  and we’re still far off from a computer to beat the best human poker players. Do you really believe that some algorithm is going to be better than you at creative marketing insights?

Without solid data, scientific method and reporting, how does your marketing automation software show you it is making money? Whether or not you are using marketing automation, you still need access to great metrics. In the case of marketing personalization, how do you know if the efforts are working if there aren’t control groups to measure against? How do you control for other external factors?

The Marketing Automation Future, Now

Don’t get me wrong — I am an advocate for marketing automation. But only if there is a core focus on the insight derived from data, not the automation, first. Analytics must be at the foundation and not an afterthought. You can identify first generation automation tools by their focus in on automation first and reports second. Today’s next-generation state-of-the-art tools have to have great metrics and analysis at their core and are focused on helping you optimize your business; that is, making you more money and proving their value to you.

Please feel free to tell me more about your marketing automation love fest or worries.

P.S. Full disclosure: like my good friend and analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik, I work for and sit on several advisory boards of companies that use data as their foundation for marketing optimization and automation.

“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.

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

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 of course 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.

Are you giving credit where it’s deserved?

Don’t do Search Engine Optimization!

At SMX last week Google’s Matt Cutts, basically explained that “Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Matt’s comments are a pre-cursor of Google cleaning up their index and rankings. Will this be the next Google Florida type update coming?

Lisa starts her post asking if we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting; might that just be one of Google’s SEO profiling techniques?

Google publishes a set of suggested Webmaster guidelines to help Google find, index, and rank your site. No where on there do you see any talk of “nofollow” attributes or PageRank scultping. Has this been a trojan horse that many SEO’s have tried to leverage?

Google views Search Engine Optimization as dangerous, because in many cases it is used to manipulate relevancy of their results. Does that mean there aren’t some things you can and should do to make your content easier to find and index – absolutely you should. Should they be the things that Google specifies in their guidelines – maybe. Should you be very conscious of all your SEO tactics – without a doubt!

We know Google is considering new signals to make search relevant.

I’ve always said SEO shouldn’t be an acronym for Search Engine Optimization (because now if you optimize for search engines you may be profiled as dangerous), but for Searcher Experience Optimization. I recommend that you do great marketing primarily. Then focus on making sure you publish the best content for the person doing a search. When that person has a list of options to choose from in their search engine results page, your content provides them with the best experience.

Is Google likely to find you and your Search Engine Optimization activities criminal? We’ll find out if you are exiled from their listings soon.

2. Search drives more sales, but shoppers are thinking longer before buying.

3. Does Google Analytics overstate the value of search? Econsultancy research shows that it might.  Make sure to at least set your cookies for 30 days.

4. our friend, Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic blog asks “Is Free Shipping More Attractive Than A Dollar Discount?”

5. A great example of why Amazon is one of the smartest online retailers. They get Social Media, Too.

6.Catch my interview with my buddy Tim Ash Interview on his Landing Page Optimization show on WebmasterRadio.fm. We discuss Brain types and personas and how they influence landing pages.

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.

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.

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.

The difference of course, is that material in the active window is being actively and consciously engaged and evaluated by the Web visitor, who can then slow down and read material that has proven itself relevant, which is obviously not the case for billboards.  This is where the analogy breaks down, and why most  copywriters will slap anyone clueless enough to vomit up the old “People don’t read online” mantra.

But as useful as the analogy is for web pages, it’s far more so for online ads:

• Both are on the periphery of your vision/attention, and therefore both have to present a reason to shift your attention from the task at hand to their message.
• Both want to leave you hungering for more information or more contact with the brand.

So when my recent post on Apple’s Banner Ad Innovation provoked some Ogilvy-inspired comments that compared banner ads to magazine ads, I thought It would be worthwhile to revisit that advertising giant’s advice on billboards (or what he refers to generally as posters).  So here it is:

• It Pays to make your poster a ‘visual scandal’”
• Your poster should deliver you selling promise not only in words, but also pictorially.
• Use the largest possible type
• Make your brand name visible at a long distance
• Use strong, pure colors
• Never use more than three elements in your design

Now, strong colors might be a toss-up, because while they can draw the eye, they also scream “I’m an ad, ignore me.”  And you can take or leave the other bottom four bullets, but the top two are pure gold for banner ads and are exactly what Apple was doing in it’s New York Times banner/skyscraper ad.

1.  A ‘Visual Scandal’ surprises and delights viewers

This surprise and delight factor causes a peripheral eye sweep to become a studied look, gaining you the web visitor’s/driver’s active attention and consideration.  And it does it while leaving those people with a positive emotional response to your brand (as apposed to gaining attention through an annoying, dancing stick figure).  Here’s an example of visual scandal that Ogilvy provided in Ogilvy on Advertising:

And here are some of my personal favorite examples:

Of course, the razor blade, kill bill, and Nike ads are probably better than the Makers Mark and Frozen Mars Bar ad because in those billboards the selling promise is implicit in the visual scandal, thereby following Ogilvy’s second point as well as the first.

Achieving Visual Scandal by Coloring Outside the Lines

Notice how often this idea of visual scandal requires the use of 3-D or “outside the lines” effects.  So how did Apple do this with a banner ad?  They had multiple space ads interacting with each other, extending the ad outside the lines/boundaries of what we are used to.  Take a look:

Achieving Visual Scandal by Visual Pun

Another technique for creating visual scandal is to make creative and unusual use of a boundary, line, or element that is already a part of the environment, creating a visual pun, as these examples do:

This techniques works for a lot more than posters, too:

Story Appeal

Humans use stories to explain deviations from the ordinary.  As Jerome Bruner writes in, Acts of Meaning:

“Stories seem to be designed to give the exceptional behavior meaning in a manner that implicates both an intentional state in the protagonist (a belief or desire) and some canonical element in the culture . . . The function of the story is to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern.”

So viewers create stories by speculating on the motives of the actors depicted (within a scene or picture); they use their imaginations to fill in the back-story.  Needless to say, you can’t have a story element to your picture/billboard/banner ad unless it contains people, or more precisely, characters.

Just look at the ad Ogilvy used as an example of “story element”:

And here’s what Ogilvy wrote about Story Appeal (and this ad):

“The kind of photographs which work hardest are those which arouse the reader’s curiousity.  He glances at the photograph and says to himself, ‘What goes on heres?’  Then he reads your copy to find out.  Harold Rudolph called this magic element ‘Story Appeal,’ and demonstrated that the more of it you inject into your photographs, the more people look at your advertisements.”

“The eyepatch [in the Hathaway ad] injects the magic element of ’story appeal.‘”

Do you see how the odd characteristic of the Baron Wrangell character made readers curious.  They speculated about his background, purpose in the ad, etc.  And so they read the ad.  In online terms, they’d click through to get the full story on your home page.

For most people this same story appeal now occurs whenever we see the Mac and PC characters – especially when we see them outside the confines of a TV ad.  Viewers know there’s a story to the ad somewhere, and so look closer to find out what it is.

So all you Internet Marketers yearning for a creative renaissance in online advertising, follow Apple’s lead and employ these techniques to their maximum.  Just try to remember that after you’ve surprised and delighted your audience, it will be relevance and scent that will determine whether your ad actually makes the client any money.

While cleaning the last remnants of unsolicited and undesirable e-mail from my inbox a few days ago, I had two interesting thoughts. First, spam can actually be good for something. And second, inspiration does indeed strike in uncanny places.

The thoughts started while deleting spam e-mail number 12,874. It was targeting the otherwise happy man who only needs a little help in the sack, offering him the solution in a little blue pill.

Are there really that many men who need that kind of help? Enough to deserve 90 percent of Internet traffic?

Doesn’t seem like spammers are taking any chances. To help men, spammers will find every single one of those guys. And gosh darn it, they will help them by offering an even lower price on these meds.

Sure, a few guys (maybe even a gal or two) will take them up on the offer. But compared to the number of e-mail messages they send out? What do you think the return might be? One in 100,000? One in a million?

Sounds a little impotent to me. It got me thinking about how impotent all our campaigns can be. Just because we aren’t promoting porn, credit report scores, or ED in e-mail blasts doesn’t mean we aren’t engaging in some of the same obnoxious behavior.

Consider your marketing campaign.

It’s like going into a bar (actually more like thousands of bars) and walking up to each girl sight unseen asking for a kiss until you find one willing to give you one.

Spamming is at an all-time high. While the conversion rate is horrible, spammers must be getting some sort of payoff or they wouldn’t bother. Businesses can’t afford to use these tactics and lose the trust and credibility needed to grow in a transparent market.

Elevate your campaign’s quality by avoiding some of the cheapo, spamalicious tactics spammers engage in. Many spammers focus on the perfect pickup line (e-mail subject line or even the top of the message content) that will get them past the bouncers (spam filters) and in the door.

Pickup lines are tired.

Some of the better marketers are focusing their efforts on the first date (the landing page), but like so many first dates, these marketers are only talking about one person the entire time, and it isn’t their date. These marketers are just “wewe-ing” all over themselves. It’s a bit of turn off.

Next, still not willing to take the blame for being bad conversationalists, these chumps resort to trying different designs, colors, and hero images. But the only thing that changes is the outfit; inside it’s still the same selfish page, with copy that drones on and on about the company, never stopping once to ask or acknowledge the visitor’s needs. These marketers feel justified because every once in awhile some bored date will give in and pull out a wallet. But there’s no love, no spark. Just another night in shopping purgatory.

Some marketers are so impotent that they think some pill, like a new technology, a new measuring tool, or a new campaign idea, will get the ladies to fall in love.

Sad.

It’s much easier to get a lady’s phone number than to win her heart. But what companies are actually aiming for their customers’ hearts? How many are only aiming for the phone number — or worse? How many think it is intelligent business to build a company on one-night stands? Check out how many of the top converting retail Web sites have a strong focus at bringing back customers.

Making customers love you is hard work. You can’t fake it or manufacture it. You have to charm your customer, surprise her by giving more than she expected. Listen more than the other guys (your competitors). Make your conversations about her, not you. Before you know it, you’ll have a lot more visitors genuinely interested in your company. You won’t feel the need to get sleazy for your marketing to actually work.

Have you been guilty of spamming your way into bad relationships? Or have you found a nice formula for customer love?

1. ProFlowers 42.8
2. Vitacost.com 28.9
3. Office Depot 25.0
4. MetroStyle 24.5
5. Woman Within 23.0
6. Schwan’s 21.1
7. CDW 20.8
8. 1800Flowers 20.8
9. Landsend 18.8
10. Drs FosterSmith 18.30

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index:

Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.

There are 3 types of visitors who can come to your website:

1. Buyers – you know who they are because they converted to a sale or lead.

2. Potential Buyers – these are visitors who are in the market for what you offer, but for any number of possible reasons, don’t buy. They may be at earlier stages in the buying process, doing research to sell it internally, not adequately persuaded, driven away by bad usability, etc. The upshot is, there are countless number of changes/improvements you can test and make to bump these visitors from potential into actual buyers.

3. Disqualified Traffic – these are visitors who wouldn’t buy no matter what (maybe they arrived to your website by accident – they typed shingles and were looking for the medical condition not what you put on roofs, or maybe they don’t have the type of budget your product or service needs, etc.).

On a typical website, 3% of visitors are Buyers and the other 97% is distributed among the Potential Buyers and Disqualified traffic. You should be asking yourself these 2 key questions:

1. Of your non-buyers what percent are potential buyers? And how can you increase those?

2. What marketing efforts are bringing ample amounts of traffic, but with poor quality traffic – i.e., what’s driving a disproportionate amount of disqualified traffic?

Your web analyst should be able to tell you the answers to these questions.

The opportunity to increase sales is in:

• understanding that 97% of non-buying traffic better,
• bringing in less Disqualified traffic and more Potential Buyers, and
• More effectively turning those Potential Buyers into Buyers.

For example, if you look at the top converting retail websites, one of the key reasons they have such high conversion rates (way above 3%) is their intense focus on bringing back repeat customers. Note: You should subscribe to each of their newsletters to see some of what they are doing!

What you should do next:

1. Find your expert (if you have them) and coordinate their efforts to get it done.
2. Educate your team and then coordinate their efforts to get it done.
3. This is what we do, if you would like you can talk to us.

Cost Per Visitor (CPV) – How many advertising, marketing, SEO, etc. dollars do you need to spend to bring in each Website visitor you’re getting.   Don’t look at conversion just yet – it’s your website’s job to convert the visitors; marketing’s job is to get them there in the first place.  So Cost Per Visitor is the best starting point for measuring your return on marketing spend.

Also, feel free to break this down by channel: SEO, e-mail marketing, PPC, conventional media, etc.  Some channels are easier to track than others, but give all of them your best shot.  Now plot your CPV performance from the beginning of the year till now and see how you’re doing.

Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) – Top line revenue is usually easier to calculate and track, so we go with RPV, but if you’ve got the metrics to figure out bottom line Profit Per Visitor, all the better.  So basically you’re looking for how much money you are bringing in per Website visitor, and you’re looking to see how this metric is changing from the beginning of the year until now.

CPV should be decreasing and RPV should be increasing

What to do if these metrics aren’t moving in the right direction:

1. Take a look at your marketing spend. What’s working?  What’s not working?  Look at differing channels, keywords, time of day, etc.  Get accountability from the tactics you are using to drive traffic.
2. Focus on improving your conversion rate.  Your Website’s conversion rate can act as a lever to both CPV and RPV.  By examine keywords and marketing campaigns in terms of scent and scent trails, you can improve the performance of your campaigns and drive down CPV.  By improving micro-conversions throughout the buying process, you can increase macro-conversions, average order value, repeat customers, etc – thereby improving RPV.  For tools on how to do this, take a look through our archives, read Always Be Testing (or any of our other books), or give us a call.

Feel free to let us know how you’re doing, or to post any questions you have on these metrics and improvement tactics.  We’d love to hear from you.

About a year ago, Bryan Eisenberg gave an interview talking about Maybe The Best $100 You’ve Ever Spent, essentially raving over the ridiculously cheep rates charged by UserTesting.com.  The always-astute Patrick Sullivan, Jr. of Edit Weapon picked up on this and decided to give UserTesting.com his own personal test and blog post/review.

Now, as a usability expert himself and a usability testing veteran, Edit Weapon’s initial reaction to UserTesting.com was:

“Well this will either put me out of business, cause me to cut my rates by 90%, or make my life 900% easier!“

The reasoning behind the first two reactions is obvious, but I bet me than a few viewers wondered how ultra-cheap (and effective) competition could possibly make Patrick’s life 900% easier?

Answer: because Patrick’s job isn’t primarily to provide user testing, but to help properly task the users and to expertly interpret the results of that testing.  Turns out that actually conducting the tests was just a pre-requisite to these far more important – and less easily commoditized – skills.

So offloading the pain-in-the-butt process of sourcing the testers and running the tests to UserTesting.com has made Patrick’s life a lot easier.  [Note that, in my opinion, that insight into what business Patrick is really in is worth a series of blog posts of its own, but that'll have to wait for another time...]

As Patrick put it in his blog post:

“…anyone can watch a user use a website, but *interpreting* usability tests and making recommendations is the secret sauce to being a kick ass information architect / interaction workflow designer, which of course, I am.”

Now, during that same video post, Patrick offhandedly mentioned that there were a few golden rules and guidelines to tasking users so that their test results would be optimally useful and easy to interpret, but that he’d have to cover these in a follow-up post.

Ever since hearing that I’ve been patiently waiting for Patrick to finally produce that promised follow-up post, until about a month ago when I broke down and offered to help with the post by turning it into a quasi-interview.  So here they are, the Top 6 User Testing Tips as disclosed to me by Edit Weapon:

Top 6 Don’ts for Usability Testing

(With a special thank you to Sue Fischer – Patrick’s IA/Usability/learnability mentor and a human factors consultant who taught Patrick how to task users for usability tests and how to interpret the results.)

1)    Never ask, “What do you think about this?”

First of all, most people will simply give you a polite, rather than bluntly honest answer.  Second of all, you’re not really interested in what they think of an interface/Web design/piece of software; you’re interested in how well and how easily they can USE it.  That’s why it’s called usability testing.

So you always want to put the question in the form of a goal/task.  Tell the user what they want to do with the interface/software; give them an assigned scenario.  This transforms the process into an objective exercise (rather than a subjective opinion) and allows you to watch how the testers go about using your tool.  You can then get a much better idea of how easy or intuitive your interface is, where the friction occurs, etc.

2)    Don’t feed the tester with your question.

As people learn new things they tend to be very literal – especially when it comes to tasking.  If you ask people to accomplish a task and you use the exact words or phrases that are actually ON the interface labels, you’ll wind up with a false impression of how usable your interface is.

For example, if you ask a tester to “Compose an e-mail” and the button for writing a new e-mail is actually labeled “compose e-mail,” the tester will simply match the phrases up rather than thinking organically in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish and then figuring out the interface. This is “leading the tester” by “feeding” him/her information with your questions.

So you want to ensure that you ask question using terms that are not directly on the interface labels.  Use synonyms.  Don’t make your tasks so easy that the tester simply has to match up terms.  Going a step further, if most users won’t think of a task in terms of multiple steps, but your interface requires multiple steps, don’t break your tasking down into steps to match the interface.  Write the question or task in the way that most users would think of it within a given scenario.

3)    Don’t let users be the designers.

When you get goal-oriented tasks, each user will have different levels at which they learn the interface and pick it up, and some users will do crazy things.  So some users will offer suggestions.  Don’t take those suggestions literally or at face value.  You’re looking for what users DO more than what they say.  This is similar to the rule against not asking users what they “think” of an interface.

4)    Don’t let the statistics fool you.

If you’ve done 20 tests in a row and, let’s say, 5 out of 20 were failures, but as you’ve been working on it and creating new iterations, the last 5 tests went extremely smoothly, you’ve got a good design.  You need to think of the results in terms of being 5 for 5 rather than 15 for 20.

This also applies to individual tasks within a test.  If users find some minor tasks are more difficult to accomplish than operating the really commonly-used features, don’t let those “usability problems” count anywhere near as much as your successes with the main functions of your interface.

Basically, not everything can be a big red button in the middle of the screen.  You have to balance things out and sometimes a few items are a bit more difficult to find and there’s really no perfect solution for a multiple use interface.

5)    Don’t get discouraged.

Your expectations are usually going to be high prior to the first test.  You’ll wonder how people aren’t seeing what they are supposed to see.  So user testing can be a humbling experience.

That’s why it’s usually best to test and tweak your interface in iterations.  You can’t design perfectly from the get-go because you are too much inside the bottle as the designer.  But as you alternate insight generated from testing with new and improved interface iterations, you’ll find the magic if you’re willing to hang in there.

6.    Don’t try to test too much at once.

You’ll get easier to analyze results if you limit your tasks to just 2-3.  And at UserTesting.com’s prices, it’s not a big deal if you end up running additional tests instead of adding more tasks to the same test.

But wait, there’s more… Patrick also walked me through how these principles played out when used to evaluate Jigsaw Health’s landing page for Magnesium Supplements.  Catch the walk-through on our next follow-up post.

Any tips, tricks or traps you want to share?