Archive for September, 2009
Posted on September 17, 2009 by Robbin Steif
Do you write and design for the search engines or for people?
This is a topic I have been thinking about a lot, as we go into our own site redesign. Our user testing results showed people wanted a lot less text … but what about the Googlebot? There are ways around that one, but I wish I didn’t have to make that tradeoff. Certainly, we learned from our Google Analytics that we did great with the search engines, but with people, not so much.
Similarly, why do people blog all the time? Who has something to say every day of the week (and has time to get their work done too)? Recently, I subscribed to a bunch of blogs that I hadn’t been following, and one of them is religious about updating their blog every day. So, I am finally going to delete it. Why, you ask? They probably blog for the search engines, but it just makes me feel like there is yet one more thing that I am not achieving. If subscribing to a blog is a conversion for them, they lost this one.
And while I am on a rant about those who communicate too much/too little, what about all those people who have nothing better to do than tweet all day long? When their tweets drown out (in terms of screen real estate) what everyone else is saying, I stop following them. Ditto on the conversion loss here. One of my friends almost won the prize for Twitter abuse for telling me that he was going to his sister’s graduation, telling me that he was sitting at his sister’s graduation, and telling me that he had gone to his sister’s graduation.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Google Analytics, Usability
Posted on September 11, 2009 by Robbin Steif
I have a friend who says, “Yes Robbin, I know that testing is great, but why don’t you just start with the suckometer and make sure all those bases are covered?
In fact, most of the things on the list (if you follow that suckometer link) are really intuitive and easy to agree with. No one likes broken links, for example.
But it is amazing the number of times that I’ve looked at a site and guessed at the conversion rate and gotten it really, really wrong. Either I thought it converted famously (but in fact, it did terribly, which isn’t something that happens very often), or I thought it did terribly (and it actually performed fabulously. I feel like I see this one a lot.)
I will never forget a site that I looked at about four years ago. It was all in default font (Times Roman), way too many links, and it looked like my nephew had designed it. It was a site that sold hunting equipment, and the headquarters was in NoWheresVille, PA. I must have said something about their awful conversion rate before they told me that it was converting in the double digits. And a conversion was a sale!
I wasn’t in the target audience, and I was never going to be in the target audience. For all I know, their target audience loved the site because it was so genuine, or those visitors/customers were so comfortable with the site. It wasn’t some fancy AJAX thing and clearly, they liked it enough to spend money there.
I think that as “conversion experts,” this is a lesson we have to learn over and over again. When that website owner calls and says, “Can’t you just tell me what is wrong with my site, I really don’t want to do any testing,” the need for humility is amazing. (And humility doesn’t come easily to all of us!) Yes yes, we can tell them that their links are broken, that their site loads too slowly. But we really can’t tell them that their sites are ugly and inappropriate, because we just don’t know that.
And I guess it comes back to what a big fan I am of usertesting.com. If I am not the customer, then let’s go buy some target customers.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on September 3, 2009 by Jonathan Weber
Google Analytics campaign tracking is great, and we’ve talked about it lots before. The official story with the campaign tracking parameters is that Campaign, Source, and Medium (utm_campaign, utm_source, utm_medium) are all required. It says so in the the URL builder tool, for example.
I wondered though, what would happen if you left one or two of these off? Would campaign tracking still work?
The short answer is: As long as you include a source (utm_source), campaign parameters still work.
If the URL has the utm_source parameter, cookies get set correctly. If it has one of the other parameters but no utm_source, the cookies about where a visitor came from don’t get re-set at all (similar to using utm_nooverride=1).
What does it look like in reports? If you leave off either utm_medium or utm_campaign, you just get “(not set)” as the value for those fields (shown here in the All Traffic Sources and Campaign reports):
Although I still recommend using all three fields for campaign tracking, this does have one take-home lesson: If you have situations in which URLs might get cut off (such as a plain-text email), always put the source first. This will help ensure you’ll at least get some data even if the other parameters are lopped off.
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science
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