Once a year, I do charitable giving. (It’s easier that way, I can really allocate money instead of just saying, this one seems worthwhile, that one seems worthwhile.) This past weekend, I made all my choices and today I sat down to make the donations online.

Two big companies, Kintera and Convio, are fighting for the e-philanthropy space, and with their help, most charities have great sites and even better shopping carts. So the process was pretty painless.

Then I pulled up a site belonging to a cause that I really care about, the Women’s Center and Shelter of Pittsburgh. Not only was their site not wonderful, but their shopping cart was awful. It was simple enough, but the name of the page was really the name of their shopping cart company, and the page itself had font that was enormous. It looked like my nephew had designed it. The worst part is, I might not have noticed the misnamed page if they hadn’t have pointed it out. The site even said that I could try to look at the checkout page through their own site but then I would get a security warning. In other words, no matter how I did it, it was going to look suspicious to me.

Getting customers (or donors) to hand over their credit card numbers requires a lot of things. It really requires that you design your site to create great trust. Here was a cause that I already know, and I just couldn’t trust their site — they practically designed it as untrustworthy!

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Why do we marketers keep asking potential customers for information that we really don’t need? And why do we yell at potential customers?

Recently, I was asked to help a website owner increase the number of people that attend her four-day continuing education class. So of course, the first thing I did was scout out her two page website.

I could rant about the lack of scent on her site, but you can read the post I did last week on scent. I would rather rant about how awful her form and form error messages were.

She started the form by saying, “All information is required,” and then asked for everything imaginable. Your title. Your company. Your areas of interest. The name of your firstborn child.

“So,” I asked in my most diplomatic voice, “Since you don’t take credit cards, isn’t the goal just to get their name, their phone number, their email address and their PayPal money or a check? And once you have that information, can’t you email a personal note requesting follow up info?” And yes, she conceded, we could do that. And we will.

I think the part that really drove me the craziest, though, was how negatively she phrased information. For example, she wrote, “We have secured the special rate of $129/night at the local hotel, but you must register with the hotel by May 20. Reservations made after that date will not get the special rate.” How about a simple “Students can stay at the local hotel for only $129/night — offer good on reservations made by May 20.” I have another customer who insists on yelling at his potential customers, too. “You did NOT fill out the email address field!” his error messages read.

Here’s the litmus test on error messages: Would you say those words out loud to a customer who is standing in front of you? If not, maybe you’d better rewrite them.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

I always wonder what the conversion rates of those e-commerce exit surveys are.

As a conversion rate raiser, I take all the surveys that are offered to me. Today, I had the opportunity to do one for PriceGrabber instead of the usual BizRate survey. I was really surprised to see how best conversion practices were ignored. In the survey, they told me to include my order number and admonished, “Invalid order numbers may cause your survey to be rejected.” (Now, who really cares about the survey, them or me?) They asked me for my email address but gave me no link to a privacy policy. And then after I hit “Submit,” they committed the ultimate forms error — they reprimanded me for not filling out a required field, but didn’t indicate which one it was. Since all information from a survey is given freely and willingly, why don’t they take what they are given? When we website owners insist on collecting information that the customer doesn’t need to complete his transaction, we only create an incentive for the customer to lie. And how does that help our data??

Robbin
LunaMetrics

I have a colleague who talks about “scent” (think bloodhounds.) When people stop smelling the trail of what they are looking for, they stop looking. They leave the site.

I saw it in a big way last night. I looked at a dozen category pages for an e-tailer and they all had lousy conversion rates. Except one. So being the curious LunaMetrician that I am, I checked it out. I was impressed to see that on this one page, the customer had changed the names of all the same old products to make them category-specific — and suddenly, they had scent.

Think of it this way. A red, 5-speed Honda Accord can be classified as a red car, a manual transmission car, or a foreign car. (OK, maybe it was assembled here, but that’s for someone else’s blog.) If I click on the “Manual Transmission” link and just see the Honda listed as “Honda EX,” I lose the scent. “This isn’t for me,” I think, “I was looking for a car with a stick shift. I’m in the wrong place.” I really want to see the Honda described as “5-speed Honda” or “Honda EX with stick shift.” When I see it that way, I know that I’m in the right place and I’m ready to click further.

Think it’s trivial? It is. But it increases conversion rates - not a trivial goal at all.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Today I did lots of really tedious work on an e-commerce site. The kind of work that I like to pay my 14-year-old $10/page to do.

I was working on parts of a site that aren’t as well-traveled as other more popular (and profitable) areas. I found all sorts of little problems — products that were accidentally duplicated but had different names. Product titles on category pages that changed when you landed on the product page. Category pages with too many choices, most of which never resulted in a sale (or so said my big expensive web analytics package.)

When was the last time you had a pair of fresh eyes look at the less popular pages of your site? Remember - if you aren’t a big name like Amazon, you need to constantly build trust with the visitor. One of the biggest ways to undercut trust is to have a site that doesn’t look trustworthy - broken links, typos, mistakes, all sorts of products thrown together helter skelter.

Maybe you can pay your 14-year-old to bring a fresh pair of eyes to your site.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

I have about four Internet books in my pile of “to be read.” Plus, this past weekend was my birthday (no, I am not telling how old) and I received a few more great Internet reads. Winning Results with Google AdWords by Andrew Goodman was the one that I looked forward to the most, and I was disappointed.

Granted, it’s a tough topic, especially now that Google keeps adding new features to AdWords (I found myself looking for the copyright date in the book more than once.) Furthermore, the Big G doesn’t tell all (or even close to all), so Goodman should probably be forgiven for not answering some of my questions. For example, he probably has no idea how Google chooses to serve up one ad versus the other if they are identical AdWords in my account but are in different campaigns.

And, in the spirit of not dissing the guy and the book altogether, I really did pick up some nuggets of information. He also does an excellent job of tailoring the book to small business.

I think I was mostly disappointed because he contradicted himself so often. For example, first he pointed out that doing Google A/B ad testing is not that smart. Then, he did many pages on how to do A/B testing. Similarly, he talked about reviving dead keywords and first said, don’t clean them out and put them in a different campaign. Later he wrote, clean them out and put them in a different campaign. Or, Google now does stemming, he writes. But be sure to include stems in your campaign, like plurals and past tenses.

I’ll bet there were no real contradictions. He probably meant, Google tries to do stemming, but if you really want the “ing”, the plurals, the past tenses, be sure to create them for yourself.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if he had just said that?

Robbin
LunaMetrics

This morning, I was giving a potential customer advice on his shopping cart (so I had to do it without the benefit of his analytics — always tough.) I gave him five ideas, and realized that just about everyone who does e-commerce could use them, so here they are:

1) Next to the email address, on the shopping cart, have a link that says, “We take your privacy seriously.” That should like to your privacy policy. People like to be reassured at just the right moment.

2) Make your final ordering button say, “Place my secure order” or “Submit my secure order.” It would be even nicer if it had a little icon of a lock on it. Again, people like to be reassured at just the right moment. I find myself looking at the HTML to be sure that it is a secure cart, but not everyone is in the web business and knows what to look for.

3) Give the customer the option of just checking a box to ship the order to the same address as the credit card.

4) If you can, reduce your shopping cart to one page. Every click is a chance to bail out.

5) Put a thumbnail picture in the shopping cart next to each product that the customer is purchasing. Studies show that product photos in the shopping cart increase checkouts.

Robbin
Lunametrics