I got e-consultancy’s newsletter this morning, complete with a new blog by Tom Stewart. The post was “Why asking why is never a stupid question.” I really wanted to reply to the post, but when I went to comment, it said that I had to be logged in. Well okay, I though, I have an email address and password but when I entered them, the site told me that that email address was used to register for their newsletter (true enough) and that I had to do a different kind of registration to be able to comment on Tom’s post. So I though, sure, and I clicked on the Register Now button. In order to be able to comment on Tom’s post, I had to give them my firstname, lastname, company name, phone number, country, etc. And then there were a whole other set of fields (who am I, an agency? A vendor? etc.)

I won’t be fair and say, “In fairness to eConsultancy, some of these fields were optional.” Some were optional, but I didn’t notice that until I went back to the site to write my post. I just knew that it was early in the morning, I was plowing through my email, I wanted to comment, and I didn’t want to spend 120 seconds filling out information. (And I was told that this is only page one out of two pages that you fill out to register.) I have this conversation with customers all the time. “Make it optional,” they say about extraneous info fields, not realizing that the more you ask for, the more you turn people off, even if it is optional.

If I had been allowed to comment, my question would have been, “If this is your blog, why don’t you have a feed?” In fact, Tom’s blog does have a feed (again, I learned when I went back to write this post), but you don’t see it on the permalink and it is not even in the address bar when I look at the permalink in my Firefox.

All of which proves, what you see at a glance really matters. Maybe only 5 fields were required in that form but it felt, at a glance, like 15. As far as the feed goes - I really looked for it and didn’t see it because it isn’t even there — at least not on the permalink page. (This reminds me of a post I did about not hiding conversion information. You want them to call? Put your phone number on every page. You want them to subscribe? Get your orange icon on every page….)

I hope the folks from eConsultancy comment. Maybe they will tell us that by having a long registration, they successfully weed out tirekickers from interested prospects (always an issue in lead generation.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I always feel bad when someone lands on my blog with a perfectly good conversion or WA question but doesn’t get to a perfectly good answer. So here are some searches that visitors have done, with answers:

Google good conversion rate. This one came through to my blog in a few different word combinations. I talked to a Google rep about one of my customers recently and he told me that they consider a good Click Through Rate to be 1% or higher. (Remember, he was just an ad rep, so take it for what it’s worth. I’ve seen a lot higher with no success and a lot lower with a great deal of success.) This is not really conversion, just CTR, but I think that’s what the searchers were looking for. Which takes me to the next search:

What is the difference between clickthrough rate and conversion rate? Since conversion is in the eye of the beholder, you could certainly say that in Google’s and Yahoo’s eyes, clickthrough rate is conversion. For that matter, any company that charges you by the click should see them as the same. After all, when the visitor clicks, Google/Yahoo get paid, and that’s their goal. The same thing is true for AdSense publishers — when someone clicks on an ad, the website owner who publishes the ad gets paid. But I’m betting that this searcher owns a site, sends traffic to her site using a PPC campaign, and really needs to understand the difference between the two rates. So: CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of times your ad was shown. If you have a high CTR, Google will promote your position on the page, but last time I checked Yahoo! only cared how much you paid for your ad. Then once the visitor arrives at your site, you still have to convince them to take action — to buy, to download, to sign up. What happens on your site is usually your conversion.

Great 404 messages. Although I have already done a post or two on this topic, I fall in love, over and over again, with Blogbeat.net’s 404 message: “Zoinks! We met an error and the error won!”

Cost of Omniture SiteCatalyst Suite. I’m not a rep and I don’t have inside info, but I am fairly certain that you can get a stripped down version (only two supported seats, only one seat gets the Excel Client plug-in in “write” mode, only two custom reports, only one Report Suite, no Discover, no Vista rules, etc.) for about $25K/year. I think you could spend six figures if you wanted to.

Omniture implementation guide. You don’t even have to call up LiveSupport to get it, you can find it in their knowledge base. But I recommend the Quickstart guide first.

Omniture + Microsoft. That one came through twice. Also twice, Omniture + Maximine. Hmmm…

Google Sitemaps downside. Well, the hard part is understanding what this searcher was asking , was it about having a real xml sitemap for Google or about using the functionality of Sitemaps? If the former, the downside is that you have to find a tool that will automatically update your xml sitemap or you have to do it manually. If the latter, I keep wondering about security. Google establishes ownership by letting you put on a meta tag or a new page with a name they give you, but once you have that functionality, and you leave the company, how does someone erase your abilities to access the sitemap info? It’s probably there and I just haven’t found it. (Comments? comments?)

What did you pay for your 2006 Honda Accord VP? Well, it was actually a 2002 red Honda Accord 5-speed EX, and I paid $22K. When I did a search to link to the post, I found three of them (I obviously write about my Honda all the time…it is a great tail term…) But I really want a hybrid. I wonder if they come with manual transmission.

And my favorite, What does website conversion mean? This person might have been asking for a definition: conversion is when the visitor raises his hand and says, “I’m interested!” Maybe it’s a sale but maybe it’s just an email signup. In any case, she converts from being a tire-kicker to something more — a buyer, a prospect, a suspect. Alternatively, the question might have been a bit more philosophical, “But what does conversion really mean?” I think that after taking on two important bloggers on this question once in the past week, I’m not really ready to go there tonight.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Eric Mattson sent me this link and is looking for those who have their own blogs to fill out his survey. While it is always nice to help others, this one is particularly interesting because it really forces bloggers to think about blogging issues.

And hey, it’s Sunday. I can get away with a one paragraph post. I think.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Well, the e-Metrics summit is coming and I have two interests:

1) When I saw that Tim Seward from ROI Revolution posted about attending the Summit, I thought, “Gosh, I wish he or Justin would do a session on GA.” The speakers are all chosen but if a few people are interested, I think we can pull together a table at lunch one day where Tim (and Justin? Justin is on vacation so I don’t know what he’s up to) will speak. I’d like to learn more about Regular Expressions but maybe I’m in the minority. Send me email and tell me if you are interested and what topic you’d like to hear about. Steif at LunaMetrics or just comment on this post if you are interested, and I’ll write them both.

2) Speaking of speaking, I am speaking on Marketing for IT types. To me, marketing is trivial and IT is hard. So if you’re a techie, you must know everything, right? But no one knows everything and so I am dying to find out what kinds of things that techies would like to learn about web analytics marketing. It can be technique or it can be Organizational Behavior (like, “Why are marketers so stupid? Why do people in Marketing think they are so great?”) Please send email. Any ideas, no matter how dumb they might sound to you, would be incredibly welcome. My email address is still the same as it was in the paragraph above, steif at LunaMetrics.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Personal, one-to-one email should be one of the best ways to convert an individual. You have the opportunity to customize everything about the message. Yet I am still awed at how badly people do this. Websites are hard. Mass email is hard. But individual email is easy, it just requires a little bit of attention.

In my first post on this topic, months ago, I moaned about how people don’t write personal subject lines. But even after the email is opened, if you are looking for action, you still have to write something that the recipient cares about.

For example, I recently got an email from a PR firm, asking me to take some action on some web analytic software review. It was your standard press release (item, quote, item, quote, for more info contact..), but the beginning was just personalized enough to make me really read it. It started out like this,

Hi Robbin -

I found your blog while conducting research on industry influencers in web analytics….

Just to see how personal this really was, I wrote the PR guy back and said, “Here is a copy of my recent posting on how people should write press releases now that everyone online reads them — what do you think?” And I was so impressed that the PR guy answered back personally with specific comments. (In fact, here is the link to the white paper he wanted me to review. It is about HBX vs SiteCatalyst. Since I really know SC but don’t know HBX even slightly, I will let you all review it yourselves.)

Compare that to another web analytics blogger who wants to be on my blogroll. His first email to me was something like this:

Dear LunaMetrics blog:

I was wondering if you could check out my blog and if the information sounds useful, potentially put a link up on your blog.

He could so easily have changed the dynamics of his email by writing, “It would be an honor to be included on your blogroll.” He wouldn’t even have to lie and say that he reads me….

I am just always amazed at how we work to convert an individual by email, we take the time to send them a personal note, and then we don’t create the content to make all that effort worthwhile.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Recently, Avinash addresed how we should stop obsessing about conversion rates, and today, Matt Jacobs put another nail in that coffin. And while both posts are excellent and I read the blogs religiously, I am not ready to bury conversion rate because most customers are just starting to understand them.

The concepts that Avinash and Matt put forward are wonderful. Let’s measure conversion rate by intent, Avinash says. Did they just come here because they needed customer service info, for example? If so, why are we including that customer in the denominator when we computer conversion rate? Matt points out that conversion rate is only one success metric and perhaps a poor one at that. He does a great 2×2 matrix on the cost of acquisition vs cost of retention of a customer and I think the point is, each quadrant’s conversion rate should be looked at separately. (He is dying to add a third dimension, profitability, but doesn’t understand that all of business is a 2×2 matrix. )

But the concepts are hard, the measurements are sometimes impossible to get, and most customers just aren’t there mentally and emotionally. OK, maybe Intuit is there and Lands’ End is there and Amazon is there but most website owners are saying, “Web Analytics, now, do I have those?” And when they have them and care, they say, “Now how do I use these?” And then you teach them basic concepts like conversion for all customers (”Oh gosh,” they say, “99% of people leave without buying?”) After that, you teach them less basic concepts like conversion by marketing channel, for example. (”Oh gosh, when the customer comes directly go my site, they buy 5% of the time, ditto for when they type my company name into Google, but when they come in on a Google AdWord, they only buy 1% of the time?”) And finally they might be ready to look at conversion by intent, but you still have to figure out what the intent is.

If the visitor only looks at customer service pages, like “How to fix your HP printer,” do you think their intent is to fix their HP printer? You bet it is, no matter how many web analytic seers say that pageviews are a lousy measurement. But if they read all your whitepapers and they listen to your webinars, was their goal to educate themselves about your industry or to learn about your product? I’m not sure and if you are, I’d love to hear from you.

So while it’s a great idea, taking conversion rate to a really high level and segmenting by intent, I’m not jumping up and down with excitement. That’s because customers are way behind web analysts and even when they are right by your side, intent is still hard to measure. Maybe impossible.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics