Archive for December, 2006

Conversion Analysis: PCA

Posted on December 3, 2006 by Robbin Steif

I love to critique websites for conversion, but sometimes it feels like shooting fish in a barrel.

Tomorrow I am flying to SES Chicago, so I’m pulling together everything I need for my trip. This usually includes a coupon for my favorite parking lot, Parking Corporation of America. Today, I couldn’t find a real coupon, so I got onto the Internet and typed in “coupon PCA.” I was pleasantly surprised to see that their own site was #1 in Google.

Problem #1: Is it a link or not?

Despite the great Google SEO, I almost didn’t get a coupon, because the site told me to click on my airport, but it appeared that only the airports at the bottom of the screen were live links:

The various ways of showing that a link was mousable threw me off — it was clear that the underlined text was a link, but not so clear that the other text in a different color without underlining also denoted a link. I did figure out that Pittsburgh was a link, and did get my coupon, at which point, I started to see what other benefits the site offered.

Problem #2: Forms that don’t work.

I park at PCA about once a month, for two or three days. It seems from their site that they have a frequent parking service — once you’ve parked there for 31 days, you get a free 10-day stay. This would be valuable if they let you hold onto it until you actually stay at the airport that long, but I don’t know the terms. Nevertheless, I filled out the form and hit “Submit Form.

Strangely enough, my email program came up instead of a “Thank you” page. So I went back to the Frequent Parking service page and ran my cursor over the “Submit Form” button. Sure enough, there was no URL assigned to that button but rather, a mailto address:

Problem #3: No trust.

Then I went back to the home page and looked at their GPS (Guaranteed Parking Service.) Like the free 10-day stay, I had my doubts about that one. I have never been unable to park in the Pittsburgh PCA – ever. That’s not a service or benefit: it’s like making a reservation at a restaurant that always has a couple of empty tables. (Maybe that matters for a weekend like Thanksgiving?) Then I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw that the copyright was 1998-2002 (I always wonder if sites with out-of-date copyrights are still in business.)

Still on the topic of no trust, I went to the Pittsburgh prepayment page, and saw that it had collapsed in on itself. Here’s a sample:

As usual, this was a page that rendered beautifully in IE, not in Firefox. But would you want to be leaving 16% or more of your money on the table?

In Summary

It’s true that I did convert – I did get my coupon. But I’m not a new or even semi-new customer; I’ve been there enough days to get lots of free stay cards. I would probably park there even without a coupon, using my AAA card for a smaller discount. Getting a frequent buyer card in the hands of someone like me should be PCA’s prioirty.

And then there is the issue of trust. I know that they’re a real company and that I can trust them because I have parked my car there so many times this past year alone. What if I were just checking them out for the first time?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Conversion Science

Regular Expressions Part XII: Bad Greed

Posted on December 2, 2006 by Robbin Steif

Now that I have learned and explained the Regular Expressions that Google Analytics uses:

Backslashes \
Dots .
Carats ^
Dollars signs $
Question marks ?
Pipes |
Parentheses ()
Square brackets []and dashes -
Plus signs +
Stars *
Regular Expressions for Google Analytics: Now let’s Practice
Bad Greed
RegEx and Good Greed
Intro to RegEx
{Braces}
Minimal Matching

I want to explore another area: Regular Expressions and the concept of greediness.

You might be tempted to write a Regular Expression like this:

/mypage/

expecting it to match the page on your site called /mypage/

And this Regular Expression really does match /mypage/. But it also matches /mypage/thirdpage-and-something-else . For that matter, it matches /secondpage/mypage.html and mypage.htm and mypage.asp.

Regular Expressions are greedy — they match and match as much as they can. Greed can be good, but first I want to write about the obvious problem, i.e. the RegEx (Regular Expression) will match too many strings to be useful.

We can deal with this in various ways:

1) Tell the RegEx where to start. In the above example, if we wrote the RegEx like this

^/mypage/

it will only match when /mypage/ is at the beginning of the line, so it will never match /secondpage/mypage/ etc.

2) Tell the RegEx when to stop. We can do this in various ways, but need to know how the expression ends. For example, are we only looking for mypage.htm or are we also looking for all the pages that are in the /mypage/ folder — /mypage/otherpages.htm? If only mypage.htm matters, then we can include that in the RegEx:

/mypage\.htm$

Notice that I used a backslash to make the dot into a real dot and not a special character, and a dollar sign to say, this only works at the end of the line. (That way, mypage.html won’t match.)

We can combine that with #1 above and create this RegEx:

^/mypage\.htm$

and never get any unexpected characters before the slash or after the htm.

On the other hand, if all the pages in the /mypage/ folder that have .htm suffixes are of interest, we could do this differently:

^/mypage/.*\.htm$

I really hate when people throw this kind of gobbledygook at me so let me see if I can explain in pieces:

^/mypage/ = only consider the match if /mypage/ is at the start of a line…
.* = match everything that comes next until…
\.htm$ = you get to the last real period followed by htm and it’s at the end of a line.

Clear as mud, eh?

Robbin

View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Google Analytics, Regular Expressions