Archive for the ‘Conversion Science’ Category
Posted on January 31, 2012 by Michael Harrison
If you’re not familiar with the Goal Copy Firefox extension, you can read the original post here.
It seems like everyone I know is using Chrome now. It’s fast, it’s simple, it has developer tools built right in. It’s a fantastic browser and it deserves every bit of browser share that it’s taking away from the Big Two (Firefox and IE).
That being said, I do almost all of my Google Analytics debugging in Firefox. I love HttpFox and you’ll pry Firebug (and, to a lesser extent, Firecookie) from my cold, dead hands. Maybe I’m just set in my ways, but it’s the way I do things, and while I love Chrome for everyday browsing, I do all my heavy lifting with the ‘Fox.
Which is why I keep updating GoalCopy. This latest version works with Firefox 9. It still only works with the old interface, but an update for GA v5 should be ready in a few weeks.
For now, just download the latest version of GoalCopy here and get to copying! You might encounter a weird glitch where only the Find/Replace toolbar shows and the Copy/Paste options are nowhere to be found. Just re-enable it through the new Firefox menu as shown below:
What about you? Have you made the switch to Chrome, or are you sticking with Mozilla? What sort of features do you want to see in a Google Analytics add-on? Please leave a comment below and let me know!
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Firefox, Uncategorized, WA Tools
Posted on January 26, 2012 by Dorcas Alexander
After you learn about campaign tagging for Google Analytics, you may be excited that you can add all that extra information to a simple little link – so excited that you want to put campaign tags on every kind of promotional link that leads to a web page on your site. But there’s one kind of link that should never get campaign tags. You should never put GA campaign tags on internal banners or on-site promotions that lead from one page of your site to another.
Why You Shouldn’t Use GA Campaign Tags for Internal Promotions
Imagine this sample scenario: A visitor clicks an email campaign link from your latest marketing effort and lands on your site. Google Analytics records the traffic source and starts collecting data for the visit. Of course you hope that the visitor will continue to view pages on your site and maybe even convert on an important goal like registering for an upcoming conference or buying your latest e-book. When they do, you’ll be able to attribute that conversion to the campaign and evaluate that campaign’s success.
But what happens if the visitor clicks an internal banner with campaign tags before they convert? Google Analytics records a new traffic source and starts a whole new visit. So now you have at least two problems: You’ve split what was really one visit into two visits, skewing your data. And you can’t tie the original email link directly to the conversion, because the conversion happens in a separate visit.
To track internal promotions without splitting visits and losing credit for conversions, try one of these instead:
- Add your own campaign parameters (not GA campaign tags) to the links and view the data in your Content/Pages reports
- Use event tracking when a visitor clicks an internal banner or promotional link and view the data in your Content/Events reports
Alternative #1: Add Your Own Campaign Parameters
The first method involves making up your own tags, ones that GA won’t recognize and will pass right along into your Pages reports with the rest of the URL. Instead of utm_source or utm_medium, for example, you might simply add something like “from=promo” to the target link:
http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?from=promo
Or you could use a more detailed scheme if, for example, you run internal promotions with many types of links in different places. So you might have one parameter similar to campaign name, like “campname=e-book”, and another parameter that describes the links, like “camplink=home-page-banner” or “camplink=side-nav-feature”:
http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?campname=e-book&camplink=home-page-banner
http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?campname=e-book&camplink=side-nav-feature
As long as you stay away from Google Analytics utm parameters, these types of URLs will appear in your Content/Pages reports and you can tell by the number of pageviews exactly how many times a visitor clicked the tagged link to arrive there.
Alternative #2: Use Event Tracking
The second method involves adding a bit of code to the link on the page. Inside the anchor tag (a href=”…”) include an onclick event like this (a href=”…” onclick=”…”). And in the onclick event, add the event tracking code using an event category and action like “internal promo” and “home-page-banner”:
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'internal promo', 'home-page-banner', this.href]);"
After the event category and action it’s a good idea to include the optional event label. For the label you can simply write the target (href) of the link, using this.href.
View this data in your Content/Events reports by drilling into Top Events through the “internal promo” category, where you can see the how many times someone clicked each of your different internal promotional links.
Combine with Custom Variables for Goal Data
Okay, so where’s the goal data? You may have noticed that Google Analytics has Goal tabs in Traffic Sources reports, but not in Content reports. The whole point of these alternatives was to keep your original traffic source intact so you could tie it to a conversion. But you probably also want to know how well your internal promotions lead to conversions, too, right? Of course you do.
Well, there’s another set of reports that has Goal tabs, where you can combine conversion data with a set of dimensions that you define, and that’s the Audience set of reports. You can write a custom variable with the parameters or event data you created in either alternative described above. And then you can easily compare goal conversion data in a single table that lists all your internal promotions.
The thing to remember when writing custom variables is that the data needs to piggyback on a _trackPageview or _trackEvent call.
For the event tracking alternative, add _setCustomVar to the onclick event, like this:
onclick="_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'internal promo', 'home-page-banner', 2]);_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'internal promo', 'home-page-banner', this.href]);"
For the other alternative where you make up your own campaign parameters, I suggest adding _setCustomVar to the page that’s the target of the link, right before the usual call to _trackPageview. You can use a little Javascript to read the URL and write the custom variable according to the campaign parameters that appear there. For example, if the URL is:
http://www.anything.com/buy-ebook.html?campname=e-book&camplink=side-nav-feature
The resulting custom variable code (placed before the call to _trackPageview) could be something like this:
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'e-book', 'side-nav-feature', 2]);
In both cases I’ve set a session-level custom variable (indicated by the number 2 above), and I’ve set the custom variable to slot number 1 (out of 5). If you are already using that slot then you’ll need to assign it to another one. Read our post about how to keep track of custom variable slots and scopes for more guidance.
No More Split Visits
Avoid the split-visit problem. Keep visit data together by keeping internal and external promotions separate. Track your external campaigns with GA’s utm parameters and try one of the above alternatives for internal campaign tracking. And tie both external and internal promotions to conversion data to evaluate the success of each.
What methods do you use for tracking internal promotions? And how do you tie them to conversion data? Please share in the comments.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Custom Variables, Google Analytics
Posted on January 23, 2012 by Phil Anderson
This is part 3 of a multi-part series on increasing conversions from your website traffic. If you haven’t already, you should read part one, which introduces the Infinite Conversion Loop. And Part Two which gets your Analytics in order.
Now that you have high confidence in your Analytics, let’s discuss the next step of the Infinite Conversion Loop, identifying your visitors. The first thing to understand when you are trying to improve your conversion rate is that not all visitors are created equal, which is why simply looking at your overall traffic numbers is an empty metric.
On any site you are going to have a wide variety of visitors that all want and expect different things. Here’s just an example of a few of the types of people you may see if you run a website for used car shopping, but these same type of people exist for many sites.
The Cast
- Mr. Shotgun – This guy isn’t great at searching, just average. If he wants to buy a new 2012 Audi A6 with leather, his query is probably just “audi”. Then he clicks on the first search result he gets without reading, hits back, clicks the next one, hits back, until he finds something that kind of meets his expectations. These are the people that end up on page 5 of Google result and kill your bounce rate if you don’t have a clear message.
- Miss Untargeted – This is the visitor you get from Reddit, Hacker News, Drudge Report, etc… when you post a great blog. They give you that big awesome spike in traffic that never seems to result in increased conversions. They make you feel good about your traffic numbers, but really they have no intention of converting on your website. They also make your site-wide conversion numbers useless, and cause Sys Admins to pull their hair out.
- Mr. Confused – This person is running IE6, unpatched, he’s looking for exactly what your website sells, but can’t figure out how to find it on your site, and when he does he don’t trust you because you don’t have the Visa or BBB logo.
- Señor Advanced – This person found your website with a query like: used -new acura tl -reviews “low mileage”. Your website is exactly what they’d want, but your refinements don’t let him find what he’s looking for in an efficient way so he leaves.
- Mrs. Researcher – She got to you by clicking your ad, she’s looking for what your site sells, and she even finds product she wants, but wants to make sure she gets the best price, so she’ll bookmark your site for now while she looks at some other sites.
- Botman 9000 – Some percentage of your traffic will be bots, spammers, or others who have no intention of using your website like a real person, let alone buying something. While the bots won’t usually show up in your analytics, they will often submit forms and do other things that makes your “back end” numbers never quite match up with the Analytics numbers.
This cast are the reason your overall visits mean nothing. These people represent the 98% of people you get daily but are not converting. I could give you a million hits today, but if they are the people in this group, you’ll see $0 out of it. The key to improving conversions is first getting a handle on what type of visitors are likely to convert in the first place, and then optimizing your site to convert those that are not converting now for some reason (some of the above have the potential, but your website has deficiencies that prevent them from doing so).
The Numbers
So first, let’s figure out who IS converting on your site. The first thing I would look at is your landing pages report, ordered by visitors. Specifically the Bounce Rate (The percentage of people that visited that single page then left).
What do these stats mean? First, these are from a profile I use that broadly groups types of content into single URLs. This site has over one million URLs, and I find most useful to categorize everything into types of pages (you can do this with filtered profiles in GA, which is probably the topic of another post). You can see the Index page of the site is how most people are entering by far. 22% bounce immediately, meaning something about the home page felt completely wrong for whatever those people were looking for. We’ll examine how to improve that number in future posts. You’ll notice a few popular blog posts have much higher bounce rates. These are the “Miss Untargeted” that are coming to your site for one-off content, but are probably not interested in buying whatever you are selling. It is interesting to note that one blog only has a bounce rate of 50%, indicating there is something about that post that invites people to dig further into your site.
Next I would look at the Exit rate (The percentage of people that left on a given page). The Exit rate is useful for identifying common pages that people are leaving your site on. This often points to problems on the page or shows you that people are not finding what they want (for example if a search result page is a common exit point). I order this report by Exit rate, filtering out outliers first.
Next look at where your most valuable traffic is coming from. I would do this by going to Sources->All Traffic, clicking ECommerce at the top, and then sorting by Ecommerce conversion rate. In this case, once you take out a few outliers, it looks like search engines (both paid and organic) are giving us the most valuable traffic. Another case of how blogs, social networks, etc… will increase overall traffic but not necessarily contribute to the bottom line (these things may be valuable for SEO though, so I’m not saying don’t do it, just don’t focus on overall traffic numbers as a KPI)
Of course it’s very difficult to read people’s intentions just by looking at numbers. The only real way we can try to find their intent is by looking at what they searched for to get to us (hurry before the number of logged in Google users increases!). Create a report of Organic Search Traffic ordered by Ecommerce conversion rate to see what terms are the most valuable. You’ll usually see some good long tail keywords you never would have considered. I would also sort by 0% conversions to see the keywords you may be wasting your time with. Remember to normalize these results by filtering to see keywords with at least 10 visits or so.
Those are some beginner ways of segmenting users or figuring out what they are trying to do on your site, some proactive ways to segment is the use of Custom Variables. Most people use these to track “logged in users” or what affiliate someone came from, but what about tracking those people who found no search results? That’s what I did here, and there is no surprise there is $0 revenue from those users… perhaps an opportunity to use spelling correction or show similar products.
Using Custom Variables is a great way to create segments of content and visitors to determine easily what types of users, content, etc… leads to the best conversions.
Hopefully using these tips will get you started in figuring out where your traffic is coming from, the next post in the Infinite Conversion Loop series will delve deeper into actually seeing what people are doing on your website.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Web Analytics
Posted on December 12, 2011 by Phil Anderson
This is part one of a multi-part series on the fundamentals for maximizing the conversions for your business’s website.
When people hear that LunaMetrics does consulting and training for Google Analytics, I often hear “Really?? There’s that much to Google Analytics? Everyone knows how to use that!” Possibly, but if I had to guess how you use your Google Analytics, it’s probably something like this:
- If you happen to remember, you login to GA
- You look at the default date range, and see if the overall visits are up or down
- If there is a large spike up or down, you look into the referrers and organic/paid search reports to see why, otherwise you close GA and call it a day
Done. Right?
But then you wonder “Why am I only getting 5 sales a day from 1,000 visitors?”. Someone suggests you update the website to be Web 3.0. It’s not converting because people think it looks dated. So you spend the money to get a new pretty website. And then you check your graphs. Maybe they look the same, maybe they’ve gone up a little, maybe they’ve gone down a little, but you really have no idea how this new website has impacted anything. And your conversion rate is about the same. Sound familiar?
This is what many people I talk to do, and even though a select few are obsessed with some aspects of analytics, they still feel helpless with regards to conversions because they don’t complete what I call the “Infinite Conversion Loop”.
What’s the Infinite Conversion Loop?
I’m glad you asked! This is a process I’ve used over the years and it takes the guesswork out of what will and won’t improve your conversion rate. It sounds time consuming, but as I go into detail in the next couple of posts, you’ll see it really only requires a few hours a week. At the worst, you’ll understand why you only get a .5% conversion rate, but in the best case you may be able to double or triple your conversions.
- Measurement of a baseline – To do any part of this process accurately, you need to make sure you have all of your Analytics configured so that everything is being measured equally and effectively from the beginning. This is not complicated, but it does involve more then just slapping GA code on every page (although that’s a great start). Specific details of what to do here will be the subject of my next blog post, but to really visualize what’s going on here, this is a crucial first step. Do you know exactly how much money your website makes? Do you know what your shopping cart abandonment rate is? Do you know what people are searching for and not finding on your site? Do you know how your site is being shared on social networks? If the answer is no to any of these, you’re still on step one.
- Identify your visitors – Not all visitors are alike. You love seeing traffic go up, but that doesn’t always mean an increase in conversions. Now that you are measuring everything, how can you tell who is visiting your website, and more importantly why are they not converting? How much of your traffic is even likely to convert? If you have 1000 visitors and only 5 convert, surely you must be wondering what the heck those other 995 were up to.
- Passive User Testing – There’s some answers you will never be able to get by just looking at the numbers, you really have to study how people use your website to see what they are doing. There are great tools that allow you to watch recordings of what people are doing on your site (completely passively) and study their behavior. You don’t get to ask them questions, but this often helps you identify larger problems with your website, including that JavaScript error you never discovered on Firefox 3 for Mac.
- Active User Testing – I always do passive user testing before active, because active user testing is more expensive and time consuming, and you want to make sure you’ve fixed the big problems first. With Active User Testing, you’ll write a script for people to follow, often based on confusing behavior seen in the previous step, and let them narrate their thought process as they try to do it. The best user testing lets you ask people along the way, “Why did you do that?” or “Did you notice X?”. The difference between Active and Passive user testing is that with Active you hear their thought process as they are using your site “Oh, I thought the search would show me this, but instead it showed me another search”. or “Hmm, I want to checkout, but I don’t see the Visa logo”
- A/B and Multi-Variate Test – The previous four steps should have given you some ideas of changes you can make to improve conversions. The final part is something that scares most people, but some new tools make this once complicated task quite simple. Start with an A/B test to test larger theories, and then use multi-variate tests to figure out the absolute most optimal combination of elements.
By the end of this cycle, you’ll have a very good idea what percentage of visitors have the potential to convert, what’s keeping people from converting, and whether you need to do more SEO/Marketing to increase your conversions or structural/wording/HTML changes. The cycle doesn’t stop here. After you make these changes you start from the beginning. This cycle is infinite after all!
This is a very high level overview, but stay tuned for future posts describing exactly what each step involves and how you can accomplish them easily. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments if there is something you want to see covered!
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Web Analytics
Posted on September 19, 2011 by Michael Harrison
Testing a paid search ad is easy. You create two ad creatives, set your ad network to split traffic evenly between the two, and sit back and let the data collect. This isn’t tough to do because you have full control over what is displayed on the results page when a user searches. Once you’ve got enough data collected, you know what works and what doesn’t, and you can go in and change the ad creative appropriately.
The organic results pages are different, though. You can’t just tell Google to split between your two creatives. You can modify your titles and meta descriptions, but you have no idea when Google is going to crawl your site and update its index. And changes to your page titles can severely affect that page’s ranking.
Fortunately, Google freely admits that meta descriptions don’t impact your ranking on the SERPs. So you can change them to your heart’s content and they won’t cause any issues.
So theoretically, if you were to modify your page’s meta description, and then find out when Google started running with the new description, you could check your data in Google Analytics and start analyzing which version was better at getting people to your site.
You can get a pretty good idea of when the Googlebot crawls your site with Google Webmaster Tools, but determining when the SERPs are updated with your site description is something you’ll need to do manually. One easy way to find out when Google updated your page in its index is by viewing the cached version.
Just do a search that will include your page in the results, and then click the “Cached” link to the right of the URL:
You’ll see a box at the top of this page that tells you when this snapshot occurred:
This is the most recent date and time that Google cached your site, which will allow you to annotate your Google Analytics data with the start of your “Version B” site description.
Now the fun begins. After a few weeks, do some date comparisons from before the new version went live versus after. Look at traffic from Google and analyze the effect that your new SEO “creative” has had on visits. Are they higher or lower quality visitors? Check out the keywords they’re using to find your site. Are there any queries that have had big jumps in traffic? Drastic declines?
Sure, a dedicated split-testing tool built into Google Webmaster Tools would be pretty sweet. But until then, we can hack it a bit and get a lot of insight into what draws searchers to our sites. Give it a try and see what you find out!
(Update: I have been corrected. This is not actually a split test, because it is run over two different periods of time. I’ve updated the article to reflect this. Regardless, I still think there’s some insight to be gained from running experiments like this, and until Google starts letting people do actual A/B tests, it’s one way to do it.)
(Coke/Pepsi photo by kreg.steppe)
View Comments (3 Responses) | Categories: A/B and MVT, Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics
Posted on August 30, 2011 by Michael Harrison
If you’re not familiar with the Goal Copy Firefox extension, read the original post.
To stay informed of future updates to the GoalCopy Firefox extension, join this email list for a notification of when to update your extension.
Firefox’s new rapid release schedule means new versions every couple of months. Now 6 is out, and you know what that means: a new GoalCopy!
If you’ve upgraded to Firefox 6, just download the latest version here and get to copying! You might encounter a weird glitch where only the Find/Replace toolbar shows and the Copy/Paste options are nowhere to be found. Just re-enable it through the new Firefox menu as shown below:
Note: GoalCopy currently only works with the old version of the Google Analytics interface.
View Comments (6 Responses) | Categories: Firefox, WA Tools
Posted on June 14, 2011 by Brian Honigman
Here’s a list of the most effective conversions to look for when measuring social media:
1. Engagement is the most common conversion that brands see within their social media profiles and it is often the most easy to achieve in varying degrees. Engagement includes any action a user takes on your brand’s profile. For example, a Like on Facebook, a comment on a YouTube video or even a Retweet on Twitter. This conversion helps spread awareness to a user’s entire personal network about your brand. Engagement that holds more weight in social media are the higher level actions that take more efforts from a user. For example, a Like in Facebook hold less weight than a comment in Facebook does. While a Retweet holds less weight than a mention in Twitter. Any engagement is helpful, its just important to remember some is weighted more heavily than others.
2. E-Commerce as a conversion is still in its infancy in terms of social media, but is growing by leaps and bounds. Having a browser directly convert to a buyer from one of your social media accounts can be extremely powerful because that sale can be instantly shared with their entire network. Whether its through a shopping application on Facebook or through a direct buy from a link on twitter, social media ecommerce comes in a variety of forms. For instance, the ticket retailer for concerts and events Eventbrite has completed a 12 week internal study that estimated that a “share” on Facebook is worth $2.52 in increased tickets sales and a share on Twitter is worth about $0.43 for their company, which is indirect ecommerce. Now this example does not apply to everyone, but its just an example of how converting a user can help you brand earn profit in the short or long term.
3. Lead generation is another common conversion brands receive from their social media efforts. Lead generations also encompasses many different things, for instance gathering the usernames of prominent industry leaders in your Twitter account can help you learn more about your industry and connect with potential partners. While setting up a contest on Facebook that requires users to enter their names and email addresses as entry is another form of lead conversion. Even something as simply searching through current conversations and gauging whether there is interest for your product, services or cause within a specific geographic location is social media based lead generation.
4. Service conversion is best visualized as a 3 step funnel. When a user receives service from your social media profiles it’s a type of conversion that helps strengthen your overall brand awareness in both the short and long term. If that user learns something from the content you shared it will help them associate that type of information with your brand. If a user is made of aware of new services and information about your brand they will also hopefully associate you as the industry standard for that type of cause, product or service. For instance, ING Direct regularly shares True and False investment tips on Facebook that gain a lot of leverage. People begin to come back for more tips, while strengthening their association with ING Direct as the resource for investment knowledge on the web.
5. Traffic to your website is another conversion many brands receive through their social media accounts. Sending traffic to your website can lead a user to read an article on your website, learn more about your business, continue on the sales funnel or help them complete a sleuth of other actions. Many websites you their social profiles for merely news aggregation platforms, not actively monitoring the network, but focusing on letting people know when they’ve posted a new article or resource. For instance, Mashable and the New York Times merely update the majority of their Twitter profiles with new articles they’ve posted, but because they are actively choosing to use the Twitter platform in this manner.
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Social Media
Posted on January 11, 2011 by Christina Keffer
The other day, I was hunting on the internet for lunch and I stumbled onto a restaurant I hadn’t ordered from in a long time. It turns out that they had added an “order online option” which automatically gave them the edge on all the other Pizza mongers in Pittsburgh (with the exception of Dominos, who has one of the best order online setups I have EVER seen. Unfortunately, I’m not the biggest fan of Dominos pizza.)
The checkout process was like a cheap date: not pretty, but super easy. And at the very end, the best part: A tip calculator!
Now let me momentarily digress. My ability to do math in my head is probably rivaled by that of – oh I don’t know- a crack addicted chihuahua. Because of this handicap, I have a pretty odd method of tip-leaving that is based more on the type of service that I’m tipping for than the actual percentage of whatever I paid for in the first place.
Usually (always….) this really works out well for whoever I’m tipping. For instance. Bartenders get $1 and whatever change I get for every drink, even if it’s just Coke. (If I don’t have a tab. If I have a tab, the tips probably average way more per drink since by that point I’m a drunk crack addicted chihuahua.)
For dinners, it’s typically between $10 and $20 depending on how often my water glass gets filled up, regardless of whether I’m at Tom’s Diner or Bravo’s. If I’m eating at a really nice place, it’s likely that the Boy is paying, and I needn’t bother about such things at tips. For delivery drivers, it’s usually at least $3 if not $5, depending on the weather, the challenges my location poses, the length of time they have to drive etc.
Now back to the story at hand. This awesome tip calculator not only calculated my tip based on percentage of what I paid for my pasta, but also allowed me to simply click on the right number. In this case, 20% was all of $2.90. 20% is also, well, a fair tip for someone who just had to cross a bridge to get to me on a relatively nice day. So that is what I left them.
Had this nifty tip calculation feature not existed, that driver would have gotten a much higher tip. This got the hamsters in my carb-starved mind sluggishly running in their wheels. This poor low-tipped driver might only be an example of a greater issue. As website usability testers (as well as SEOs and analysts) we deal with usability every day, and the general rule is: the more usable the better. But is this really true? Might occasionally limiting a user’s possible actions actually result in MORE money? Well, probably, yes. In some cases. Like the following:
The Pros And Cons of a Really User Friendly Website
Sometimes, the very things that may make a site super-usable can also have some unforeseen and unwanted repercussions. However, it’s a thin and wavering gray line. Lots of usability experts/the books of information they publish preach that we should include easy, intuitive navigation, lots of leading information etc. and they are totally right. Except when they’re wrong. Look and PPC landing pages for instance. You (usually) don’t want a full horizontal and vertical navigation with bread crumbs and everything else included on the landing page. That would make it super usable, but it might also lead the targeted traffic to pages less suited to actual conversion. They might like what they see, but offering them more choices at that point might lose you the revenue. That is a great example of how usability best practices can lose you money. Here are a few more:
Decision Paralysis
Have you ever been faced with so many options that you decide not to pick anything? I have. Recently. I usually find myself making a midnight run to the nearest Walmart the day before any given holiday to scrape up last gems in the picked over card racks. It normally takes me 10 minutes, because there are a limited amount of cards that don’t have moving parts or sound effects left. It makes my decision easy. Two days ago, I was being completely, uncharacteristically, ridiculously forward-thinking and found myself looking at Valentine’s day cards.
Faced with an entire AISLE full of cards, I found myself completely incapable of making a decision. They were grouped together, but only by relationship (daughter to mother, husband to wife, child to parent etc.) It would have been way more useful if they had been subdivided further into genre (daughter to mother/funny or husband to wife/ risque) That would have limited the quantity of cards that I would have seen initially, but would have made the entire process more manageable, and I would have walked out of there with a girlfriend to boyfriend/funny card and no problem.
There’s a very fine line between too many easily accessible options and not enough as any medium to large sized e-commerce site webmaster will tell you.
Lower Average Conversion Value
This idea of usability adversely affecting conversion value brings us back to the thing I noticed with the tip calculator, but there are many other cases where additional choices may lead to lower conversion size. Here are some possibilities:
- Service Package Size: Many different packages of services. Lots of SAAS companies have this problem. They have the “Deluxe” package, followed by the Really Deluxe, Super Deluxe, Awesome Deluxe, Super Awesome Deluxe, Giant Enterprise Deluxe with a Cookie, and maybe some more after that. One one hand, breaking out services in this way creates more customized packages that are likely to be attractive to almost every conceivable type of client. On the other hand, offering too many graded choices will often cause clients that would potentially want the Awesome Deluxe package to choose the Super Deluxe one instead because they want to save that extra $50 a month. Users typically choose the middle of 3 packages. You can lump your services together however you want behind the scenes, but don’t sacrifice order size just to try to reach everyone at once on the conversion page of your site.
- Shipping Options: Offering a half dozen shipping and insurance options and carriers is often unnecessary and may cost you revenue, even if the process of choosing these is dead easy and intuitive on the website. Better by far to include insurance (if necessary) in a flat rate shipping cost and add one other rush option at a premium (or a similar two choice process.) If the user made it all the way to the shipment selection portion of the checkout, they’re rather invested and as long as the cost isn’t way outside of their expectations (which you can manage along the way), they will happily pay. You don’t WANT them opting out of an option that can make you money, and by providing those options you’re inviting them to do that.
- Loss leaders: A website is not a restaurant, and the happy hour model is not always effective. Faced with the choice between an inexpensive single product and a higher-priced gift basket containing that product on the same page, there is a much lower likelihood that the user will choose the more expensive gift basket. Giving them a lower cost alternative in the menu might be a reasonable alternative.
Information Overload
Everyone knows copy is really important to a website. From an SEO perspective, it gives the search engines something to index. From a usability perspective, it gives the user needed information to encourage them through the buying funnel. From a… well you get the point. You need copy. Arguably, on a truly nice and usable site, the copy will be formatted in a way that is not overwhelming (broken up by pictures, bullet points, ordered lists etc.) However, sometimes, the sheer volume of product description can actually turn users off. Make sure that you’re taking all phases of the buying funnel into consideration when designing how massive copy will appear on the site. Take care of your impulsive, ready-to-buy clients up top and then let the other information settle into tabs or at least below your strong calls to action. Otherwise, you risk overwhelming your user.
Hopefully this post was somewhat helpful. Even though the common sense, often repeated maxims are present, I thought it was interesting to look at how, even if you do everything right, you might still lose money. I think it’s helpful to occasionally remember that there are two sides to a usable site. You want to make sure that you have a site that CONVERTS.
In other news, I had a hard time finding good, general examples. Anyone know of any sites that are so usable you want to hit them with your keyboard? Thanks!
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on October 11, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Last week, I was at Big Picture Communications , a marketing and research agency here in Pittsburgh. We talked about their Google Analytics, their SEO and their website in general. And then I showed them one of my favorite tools, usertesting.com.
They *loved* it. (And who wouldn’t?) Fast, inexpensive, great results if you ask great questions. The Big Picture Communications thought process, though, was so interesting.
Thought #1: “We could do this for our own site.”
Thought #2: “We could do this for customer sites.”
Thought #3: “We could do this for our (and our customers’) competitors’ sites.”
That last thought is so powerful. SEOs are so smart about gleaning insight into their craft from competitive sites, I wonder why conversion artists don’t do the same? (OK, you do. So go ahead and comment. Would love to hear from you.) Instead of listening to real users say, “I love that widget,” or, “I’ll click, but that’s way too expensive for me,” we rely on our instincts.
Wouldn’t it be great to write a protocol for the target demographic that asks questions like,
- “What are the three things you love most about this [competitor's] site and why?”
- “What are the three aspects of this [competitor's] site that you dislike the most or that you found the most difficult to use?”
- “Would you recommend this site to your friends/colleagues, why or why not?”
Then, instead of Competitor Copy Condition, we’ll have something to test. We might even become Compassionate Contenders, as we learn that users don’t quite love the competition’s site.
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability
Posted on September 8, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Well. Today certainly has been a day. And it’s only 2:00 PM
Google rolled out Google Instant which modifies the SERPS as users type in their search terms.
My first impression was negative, and I admit it’s because I don’t like change. But it’s also because in a few minutes my brain went all haywire and I realized the ramifications for my industry. If this type of user interface catches on, there will have to be some serious changes in the way I think about keyword choice and optimization for my clients.
“But wait!” you say. “Google said the actual RANKINGS won’t change, just the way in which they’re presented.”
(http://www.google.com/instant/ :
Q: Does this change impact the ranking of search results?
A: No, this change does not impact the ranking of search results.)
While this may be totally true, it doesn’t really matter.
Say, for instance, that my client’s biggest money making keyphrase is “blue widgets from outer space.” It’s the key phrase that brings them the most targeted, conversion-oriented traffic. They were ranking number one for this term (thank you very much) and they were happy as a clam.
Now, with Google Instant, searchers may not be getting past the key phrase “blue widgets” before they are distracted by the shiny changing results parading around in front of them. The kicker is, they might end up clicking on a bunch of these less-focused pages and searching longer on those sites for what they want.
Am I whining because my long-tail, less competitive keyword might not matter as much? Sure. But I also feel like the user’s experience won’t be as enriched by constantly changing SERPS as the big G would like to think. Mostly, though, I feel bad for my client that spent a long time refining their product landing page to exactly fit what the user was looking for only to have it languish, unnoticed (potentially.)
Organic Results Below the Fold.
I’m using my super dorky big monitor right now, so the suggested search box, which used to simply overlay the search engine results but now actually pushes them down the page, allowed three of the organic results to remain above the fold. However, were I on my puny but awesome netbook, those organic results would be buried quite nicely under the paid search results. Sadness pile.
PPC? Impressions? Clickthrough Rates?
I wonder how long it will take before Adwords charges by impression? Hah. The user only has to pause for three seconds in order to trigger a new set of paid search results. Sheesh. Also, consider clickthrough rate as it pertains to quality score. If your impressions skyrocket because someone paused, then finished their search and your add appeared twice, but the quantity of clickthroughs stay the same, that is going to stink.
On the OTHER Hand
Maybe it’s not longtail but short tail keywords that are in for it. I just did a search for Distilled (the brand name of a SEO giant) and came up with a lot of distilled water pages where previously said company used to rank first. I had to search for “Distilled SEO” to get the site I wanted. I also just did a search for blue widgets from outer space. Just for funsies.
What I KNOW Will Change.
The way I include search terms in title tags will definitely change since the title tags (as i see it right now) will be increasingly important.
The way I research keywords and how I construct user behavior models will change. Maybe a little, maybe a lot.
The way I explain the SERPS to clients will change a lot, obviously. Also, I see a further decreased focus on rankings and a stronger focus on traffic metrics used as benchmarks for success.
View Comments (10 Responses) | Categories: Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Writing for the web
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