Archive for January, 2006
Posted on January 7, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I have a customer with an e-commerce site who insists on calling one of her products ProductA while the rest of the world calls them ProductB. She claims that the experts use the phrase ProductA, and she doesn’t care that her customers aren’t the experts and are still using the everyday ProductB handle. “I can teach them,” she claims, and to that end, she has started calling them “ProductA (ProductB).”
Only one company in the world, that I can think of, has successfully taught customers to use their nomenclature — Starbucks. People walk into Starbucks and ask for a Mocha Latte Vente. Not me — I still ask for a Large, because I’m too busy to remember which one is small, medium or large. But, I digress.
Furthermore, in her efforts to teach her visitors, she has induced a level of uncertainty. Does her nomenclature mean that now I get a B with my A?
This problem is actually harder than it sounds. I have another customer who is a design firm. They have created all sorts of cool terminology and have embedded that terminology in their company culture. They feel that if they don’t use the terminology on their website, they will have ripped out the heart of their company. The first customer, the one with ProductA and ProductB, has a similar problem — she started her career as an educator, and not to educate is anathema to her. In a nutshell, both customers are saying, their sites are about more than just money and visitors and customers. It is an extension of who they are and what they stand for.
But if you really do care more about money and about turning browsers into buyers, this is a great place to use your on-site search and web analytics, an issue I blogged about earlier in the week. If you really believe that you are best served using your own phrases and terminology — look at your analytics and see if most of your visitors are actually using your phraseology or their own. And send me email (or just reply to this post) if you find out that I am wrong (after all, Starbucks succeeded — maybe you are the next Starbucks!)
Robbin
LunaMetrics
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Writing for the web
Posted on January 3, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I often compare web analytics to the scale in my bathroom. If I get on every day and weigh myself, but don’t go on a diet, what makes me think that I will lose weight? Ditto with web analytics — why would anyone measure just for the sake of measurement? We measure so that we can make decisions based on the data.
One of the often overlooked analytics areas is on-site search. On-site search appeals to the kind of individual who walks into a department store and looks around to find a salesperson. “Where do I find the Petites department?” she asks. On your site, she types in “Petites”.
So the data from on-site search provides some insights into the kind of keywords your customers would like to use before they get to you. After all, why type in “Women’s Clothing” if you can type in “Women’s petite clothing” and get a more targeted SERP? (Surfers are getting much better about typing in multi-word phrases to get focused responses.) This leaves you now with at least two Google-type opportunities: optimize pages for “Petite” and/or purchase petite-type keywords. Women’s petite clothing. Petite clothing. Petite clothes. Petite dresses. Etc.
On-site search also creates opportunities for you to increase your conversion rate. Of course, you should start with best practices:
- Make sure it handles misspellings and plurals.
- Make sure that it brings back a manageable number of hits.
- Make sure that it never says, “Sorry, we can’t find that,” but instead says, “We can’t find exactly what you want, but here are some ideas that might help.”
Once you’ve got that down, mine your analytics for the handful of terms that customers ask for month after month, and create specialized landing pages for those items — instead of a list of search items. Then put your analytics to really good use and measure those landing pages. If you have the opportunity to do A/B testing, so much the better.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Web Analytics
Posted on January 1, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Here’s the most prevalent conversion problem we see when working as a web conversion consultant: websites that don’t work in Firefox.
You may use Internet Explorer and wonder who cares about Firefox. In fact, according to Omniture, Firefox has an average market share of 11%. We started tracking Firefox usage for one large customer a year ago, when it was only 12%, and now they are up to 15% on their site.
These are the kinds of problems we see, with links to examples from the LunaMetrics blog:
- Type that is a reasonable size in Internet Explorer but becomes far too tiny to read in Firefox.
- Error codes that show up in the Firefox version but work perfectly in IE
- Pages that fold in on themselves so that the elements overwrite each other
- Pages that fold in on themselves so that part of the page is missing
- Scripts that don’t execute correctly
In fact, every time that we get ready to dis a site for problems, we now check it in IE and almost always see it working beautifully there.
So what is the financial fallout of not working in Firefox?
Let’s assume that 25% of the Firefox users are actually able to make the site work despite the problems, that 2% of your visitors convert, that you are doing e-commerce (to make this easy) and the average sale is $200, and that you have 1000 visitors/day.
1000 visitors – 25% who can make it work = 750 who can’t make your site work
750 x 2% conversion x $200/order = $3000/day, or over $750K counting just the business days (after all, most sites don’t convert as well or have the same traffic on the weekends). Just think what that would be like if you had 10,000 visitors/day (it would be over $7.8 million.) Or if you had an average order size of $2000 (it would still be $7.8 million.)
Makes it seem like downloading the browser and checking your site there is worth the time.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Uncategorized
Subscribe to this blog's feed
