The Pre-Commerce Blog

Conversion Rates & Times

50% of users who are going to buy something from you do it within 28 minutes, according to research completed on one-million Google Adwords/Yahoo Search clicks. The other half of the conversions take some time - another 40% happen within 9 days, another 5% in days 10-12, and it takes a month before the last 5% of conversions even start to occur.

This useful information comes from Dr. Alan Rimm-Kaufman via Jacob Nielson's useit.com. 85% of the participants were consumer sites, 15% B2B. The article is worth a read, and includes some recommendations on how to use this data to make some smart changes to your site.

Website is Top Influence on Purchase in Most Categories

A new Doubleclick report is full of great stats and info on the role the web plays influencing purchases. It verifies that the web is the most influencial source on purchase decisions in home products, travel, electronics, financial, and drugs. Only for movies does TV dominate.

So take another look at your web site. Consider that quickly scanning it - nobody reads it all - is having more influence over your success than anything else (at least in terms of acquiring new customers).

Is it persuasive? It is complete? Is it compelling? Is it interesting? Does it represent the best of what your company has to say, and of what makes you products or services unique and valuable?

Or do you have some work to do?

[via Andy Lark via Capulet]

Pushing Buttons To Get Clicks

When I arrive at your web site there's a reason. I'm looking for something. There's something about your space or company that interests me, which led me to click my way to your site in the first place. Your job, from the second I arrive, is to stimulate that curiousity or satisfy that interest. To see how you're doing, make a list of the top 4 or 5 specific things you think visitors to your site might want to find. Write them down in the form of a question. Usually they wind up being some form of these (although yours should have more detail): * What do you do? * Can I get some details? * Are you good at it? * How can I buy one/some? Take a look at your home page purely from this perspective. Can you find the answer to these questions at a glance? Can your spouse or a friend who has never seen your site before? If the answer is no (and judging from 99.375% of the web site I see it probably is) think about simplifying and clarifying until the answer changes. If your homepage doesn't 'push the buttons' of the folks who visit, the BACK button is the only one they're gonna push.

Don't Write Like An Idiot

Writing with a clear and simple style is critical to the success of your website, because online visitors have to quickly understand that your site/page solves their problem, or they leave.

To help you chase the corporate-speak out of your online (and offline) vocabulary, there's new book: Why Business People Speak Like Idiots.

Judging by the web site and blog it looks like the authors lead by example and have found plenty of candidates for the gobbledy-gook hall of fame, such as this:

"By merging data from SAP and non-SAP applications with business intelligence queries, SAP Analytics eliminate disparate islands of data and seamlessly combine transactional, analytic and collaborative steps across multiple business functions, departments and even organizational boundaries."

Even better, they have developed an online application that rates your writing (or any sample you paste in) and offers an instant critique. Copy some text from your web site and go see how it rates. Here's how an earlier entry on this blog fared:

Bull Diagnosis: Diagnosis: Congratulations - you rely upon standard words to explain concepts. Most concepts will be clear and understood. Keep clean.

Flesch Diagnosis: Diagnosis: Mostly clear, with some unnecessarily long words and sentences. You get to the point, although with an occasional detour. Most educated readers will navigate the text with no difficulty. Longer words and sentences appear occasionally.

Give Your Visitors A Voice

There's a lot of talk about conversations these days. Some have even described web sites as conversations, where users speak with their clicks. Too often, what they're saying is "you don't have anything interesting here, or at least we can't find it. Goodbye."

But there is another way to talk to web site visitors. It's easy, it's cheap, and it gets results. Post a survey.

We have no affiliation or benefit for saying so, but we use SurveyMonkey.

We recently helped one of our clients add a simple survey to their home page - not contest, no bribes - just 'please take 3 minutes and answer some questions'. And out of a few hundred unique daily visitors, a dozen or two are taking the time and providing great insight and information.

It isn't scientific, and the sample is still relatively small, but with those caveats we now know how many of our visitors aren't looking to make a short term purchase. We know how many of the are having their first exposure to the brand, and how they'd force rank the seven top selling points we thought people consider when making a purchase.

It may not be gospel, but it sure is interesting and as the numbers pile up it's clear the minor effort (and the $20) is going to really help improve the site and enable us to define success metrics that make sense for the site and its visitors. It may even help us to attract a different type of visitor to the site.

But most importantly it's giving us a sense of who these people are, what they want, and how the offerings on our pages relates to what they're thinking about. We're intense believers in analytics, and there are some new numbers we're going to be watching very closely!

(Most) Web Pages Suck - And Here's (a few reasons) Why

Seth points to a great article from Mr. Web Pages That Suck. This covers all the basics and smacks a few sacred-cows (not purple ones) quite nicely.

Working Through The Holidays

If that last post wasn't enough, here's some things Jacob Nielson thinks you should do to get your site ready for the Holiday rush. (He posted it back in September, so even though I'm showing it too you too late for the Holidays, think of them as tips to improve your site for the New Year.)

(Thanks to The ConversionRater for leading me to this and the Dell article referenced below.)

Conversion Rate Improvement Tips from Dell

Sam Decker, the Senior Manager of Marketing & eBusiness at Dell (who drove 4x growth in online conversion rates and consumer online sales of over $3 billion) talks about things that can increase conversion rates at ecommerce sites. He says there there are six questions your customers will be asking themselves: # Can I Find What I'm Looking For? # Can I Find Something Interesting? # Do I want This Product? # Can I Get It For The Right Price? # Can I Get It Easily? # Do I Trust This Company? Of course, this means you should ask yourself these questions first. If everyone who is trying to sell things online did this today, there would be a whole lot of site redesign going on tomorrow!

Be Good

Jacob Nielson says some wise things, which culminate in this:

"In the virtual world, you win by being good: Automation reduces the benefits of scale, the Internet equalizes distribution, and reputation follows from quality rather than incessantly repeated slogans.

Worth reading and thinking about, as are the comments from Robin Good that led me to it.

Is The Formula For Success Changing?

Fred Wilson points out some interesting comments from Howard Morgan, and adds some of his own insight:

Howard showed us the basic economic equation for online commerce, which is:

RPC - CPC = Profit

RPC is revenue per click
CPC is cost per click

The Comscore data seems to indicate that this formula may no longer hold because two big things are happening this holiday season that portend big changes in ecommerce and search.

Trend 1 is the emergence (finally) of the multi-channel retailer (retail, catalog, online, etc) as a major player in online commerce. Walmart, Target, BestBuy, and others are having huge holiday seasons this year. They finally got the web right!

Trend 2 is the latency of online searches (the searcher often buys as long as 30-60 days after doing the search) and the fact that over 90% of searchers actually make the purchase offline.

If revenue per click is recognized in the Best Buy store in the mall three weeks later, then cost per click is going to go up and may go way past immediate online revenue per click.

This portends well for Google, Yahoo!, etc and very well for the multi-channel retailers. It's going to be a challenge for the single channel online retailers.

While I have no doubt about Fred's comments in the short run, I think there is an important 'future trend' to keep in mind: a large portion of the long sales cycles and offline buying occur because online commerce still isn't addressing the complete needs of shoppers. In other words I think a lot more of these sales will happen faster, and stay online, once some more progress is made in the quality of the online shopping experience.

There are lots of reasons why people delay purchases - and many of the won't every go away. But a huge number of purchases are delayed because the customer (consumer, prospect, humaniod, what-every) isn't fully satisfied in terms of product or comparative information, pricing or terms, shipping or delivery issues, etc.

It's been a long time since the general shopping experience at online stores improved. The technology base of most merchants, and their back-office, has received a lot of attention over the past three-four years. But at all but a few stores shoppers still see a picture, price, and paragraph - just like they did back when mail order catalogs were high tech. The result is that buyers are essentialy forced to search out 'pre-sales' information in forums, on affinity sites, in online reviews, and by emailing friends - all activities that pull them out of the sales cycle and often lead them to delaying the purchase.

As merchants increasingly learn to measure what's going on at their sites, and then start figuring out the reasons behind the still massive abandonment rates and generally abysmal conversion rates they live with, we're eventually going to see that if they really educate and sell online, they'll get the sales online.

Leads From The Front And Back

We're doing more work on the B2B side lately, and I came across two blogs tonight that take interesting looks at this area of the online world. The first is Brian Carroll's B2B Lead Generation Blog, and the secondis Mal Watlington's Online Conversion and Beyond.

Brian looks at the front of the process - how leads are generated and marketing programs executed for B2B and long-lead sales. Mal focuses on the post-lead process, discussing ways that the B2B world can track and measure conversion and satisfy customers after the sale.

Clearly there are differences between the way B2B and B2C companies need to do business online, and its great to see resources dedicated to the former.

(Thanks to Anthony Garcia at FutureNow for the original pointer.)

Do You Have Bush or Kerry Marketing Copy?

The New York Times Op-Ed page isn’t usually the source of online marketing tips, but today I found the following quote in an article comparing the speechwriting and oratory skills of Bush and Kerry:

"If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are."

This resonated with me because while visiting a number different B2B websites over the past few months I’ve noticed that it is often very difficult to figure out exactly what the heck the companies do or sell. The problem appears to be a combination of specialized jargon, incredibly vague benefit statements, a bit too much hype, and poor writing skills. I’m sure this results in huge numbers of people who visit the home page and leave just as quickly.

Entrepreneurs are frequently told that they need to have an ‘elevator pitch’ – the ability to completely and compellingly describe their business in the time it would take to ride an elevator just a few floors. The premise is that you never know when you’ll get a chance meeting with someone important and therefore potentially benefit by quickly telling them about your company. The reality is that just about everyone you meet has very little time, and the ‘elevator pitch’ is the best way to introduce anyone to your idea. If they like that, they may decide to commit more time in order to learn more.

Your web site is in the same position. Most visitors arrive with the intention of staying just long enough for a short elevator ride – unless they’re convinced to stay in those first important seconds.

So maybe your site can learn something from the communication issues of presidential politics. Ensure that your core ideas are ‘explained plainly in one or two sentences.’ By doing so, you have a much better chance that your visitors will be persuaded, they’ll know who you are, and they just might stay on the elevator long enough for you to sell them something.

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FULL TEXT - For when the Times archives the story
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In an unofficial but very formal poll taken in my freshman writing class the other day, George Bush beat John Kerry by a vote of 13 to 2 (14 to 2, if you count me). My students were not voting on the candidates' ideas. They were voting on the skill (or lack of skill) displayed in the presentation of those ideas.

The basis for their judgments was a side-by-side display in this newspaper on Sept. 8 of excerpts from speeches each man gave the previous day. Put aside whatever preferences you might have for either candidate's positions, I instructed; just tell me who does a better job of articulating his positions, and why.

The analysis was devastating. President Bush, the students pointed out, begins with a perfect topic sentence - "Our strategy is succeeding"- that nicely sets up a first paragraph describing how conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia four years ago aided terrorists. This is followed by a paragraph explaining how the administration's policies have produced a turnaround in each country "because we acted." The paragraph's conclusion is concise, brisk and earned: "We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer."

It doesn't hurt that the names of the countries he lists all have the letter "a," as do the words "America" and "safer." He and his speechwriters deserve credit for using the accident of euphony to give the argument cohesiveness and force. There is of course no logical relationship between the repetition of a sound and the soundness of an argument, but if it is skillfully employed repetition can enhance a logical point or even give the illusion of one when none is present.

The students also found repetition in the Kerry speech, about the outsourcing of jobs, but, as many pointed out, when Mr. Kerry repeats the phrase "your tax dollars" it is because he has become lost in his own sentence and has to begin again.

When he finally extracts himself from that sentence, he makes two big mistakes in the next one: "That's bad enough, but you know there's something worse, don't you?" No, Senator Kerry, we don't know - because you haven't told us. He is asking people to respond to a point he hasn't yet made and, even worse, by saying "don't you?" he is implying they should know what this point is before he makes it. As a result, the audience is made to feel stupid.

And if that wasn't "bad enough,'' consider his next two sentences. Up until now Mr. Kerry's point (insofar as you could discern one) had been that current tax policies reward companies for moving their operations overseas. But he goes on to add, "it gets worse than that in terms of choices." The audience barely has time to wonder what and whose choices he's talking about before it is entirely disoriented by the declaration that "today the tax code actually does something that's right." Excuse us, but how can getting something "right" be "worse"? It turns out that there is an answer to that question later in the speech - Mr. Kerry says that while the tax code now rewards companies that export American products, Mr. Bush wants to eliminate that good incentive - but it comes far too late for an audience discombobulated by the sudden and unannounced change in the argument's direction.

Senator Kerry, my students observed with a mix of solemnity and glee, has violated two cardinal rules of exposition: don't presume your audience has information you haven't provided, and always pay attention to the expectations of your listeners. They also felt that when he concludes by declaring that "when I'm president of the United States, it'll take me about a nanosecond to ask the Congress to close that stupid loophole," he undercuts the dignity both of his message and of the office he aspires to by calling the loophole "stupid" (instead of "unconscionable" or "unprincipled" or even "criminal"). "Stupid," one student said, is not a "presidential kind of word."

So what? What does it matter if Mr. Kerry's words stumble and halt, while Mr. Bush's flow easily from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph? Well, listen to the composite judgments my students made on the Democratic challenger: "confused," "difficult to understand," "can't seem to make his point clearly," "I'm not sure what he's saying," and my favorite, "he's kind of 'skippy,' all over the place."

Now of course it could be the case that every student who voted against Mr. Kerry's speech in my little poll will vote for him in the general election. After all, what we're talking about here is merely a matter of style, not substance, right? And - this is a common refrain among Kerry supporters - doesn't Mr. Bush's directness and simplicity of presentation reflect a simplicity of mind and an incapacity for nuance, while Mr. Kerry's ideas are just too complicated for the rhythms of publicly accessible prose?

Sorry, but that's dead wrong. If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are. Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack, and no one will follow you.

Nervous Democrats who see their candidate slipping in the polls console themselves by saying, "Just wait, the debates are coming.'' As someone who will vote for John Kerry even though I voted against him in my class, that's just what I'm worried about.

Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bad Design Is Expensive

It's easy to wish your web site had a 'better design'. Or that it was 'more user friendly'. But many marketers have trouble getting past their dissatisfaction and moving into redesign, primarily because they find it hard to cost-justify the effort.

Jared Spool, one of the true usability kings, has an excellent article on this topic over at webpronews. Among other things, he shows one clear example of how to calculate the economic loss from bad design:

As an example, let's look at Amtrak.com, the official web site for America 's passenger railroad system. The folks at Amtrak have designed their site to allow customers to make reservations online.

Imagine we've observed during usability testing that Amtrak.com makes it very difficult to complete a registration. Only one out of every four attempts to book a registration online actually succeeds.

A quick analysis of the site's logs shows that the average reservation is for $220. It also shows that there are currently 10,000 reservations successfully completed every month, producing a monthly revenue stream of $2,200,000.

Our inspection of the site's logs shows the same patterns we see in the labs: only 25% of the people who start reservations actually complete them. That means that 30,000 reservations a month aren't completed. Using our average reservation, that roughly puts the monthly failed registrations at $6,600,000 or $79,200,000 a year.

That's a lot of money for Amtrak to recapture. However, our studies show that many of those folks won't actually register, even if the site was much more usable. The current design forces a potential traveler to start the registration process just to see what a fare costs or when trains run between two cities. Many of these travelers will go for cheaper or more convenient travel and will never register.

Therefore, we should estimate our frustration cost carefully, removing these "no-go" users from our estimates. However, we may find it difficult to predict the percentage of visitors accurately without knowing their purchase intentions. In this case, we'll conservatively estimate that only 20% of people who are not currently registering today would do so with an easier-to-use interface. (By estimating conservatively, we make it easier for others to put faith in our calculations while also allowing for the happy surprise of exceeding our goals.)

20% of our 30,000 uncompleted registrations a month is 6,000 people who we think will register with an improved interface. That means that a well-designed reservation system could increase revenues by $1,320,000 a month or $15,840,000 a year.

That means that the Cost of Frustration for Amtrak.com is almost $16 million annually. That ought to get someone's attention.

Focal Points

A fascinating article today at Pointer.org reporting on a study of users eye movements when visiting news sites. The article shows how people look at pages on news sites, where there attention is drawn, what text they read and what text they skim, and much more.

Since this test was restricted to news sites, which have certain goals and generally follow certain design norms, its clear that the results do not generically apply to all web sites. But certainly many of the points made should be considered for all web sites, and more importantly this type of thinking is a good demonstration of how methodically you should think about what goes where on each page of your web site.

Users browse sites they don't completely consume them. Your web site has to be browsable and usable. This means ruthlessly prioritizing your information, carefully considering where things are positioned on pages, and most importantly testing and tracking your designs to make sure that users are able to accomplish what you (and they) want to - before they give up and just try to find it somewhere else.

Target Marketing

Is the best target marketing happening on the porches of America?
Sounds like it from this piece in the New York Times:

At a press conference on Monday, Steve Rosenthal, founder of ACT, demonstrated how his hundreds of canvassers are going door-to-door, armed with palm pilots bearing 16 second promotional videos about issues, tailored to each homeowners interests. The group determined that people had an attention span of 16 seconds for videos at the door, "no more, no less."

Secret Tip: Delete The Useless

While it may sound like marketing advice from Forrest Gump, it's actually insightful marketing advise from Forrester Research. As originally reported in Internet Retailer, and reprinted and annotated by FutureNow, the study in question sought to discover why online conversion rates are still so low.

What they found is that (drumroll please...) the content on most sites is not helpful to the people visiting the site; and it's poorly written to boot.

In other words, most web sites are terrible salespeople. They don't identify or qualify their prospects and adapt to their needs or speak their language. Instead, most sites develop a pitch (their site content) and even though it fails about 98% of the time they don't take the hint and improve it.

Forrester suggests web marketers start by looking at their log files or analytics, and deleting all the content on your site that very few visitors bother to look at. That doesn't actually accomplish anything - other than opening up a few k of space of your server - but I suppose it's a nice ceremonial process.

The more important work is in improving the content users actually do see. Of course, that requires another Secret Tip: Add The Useful.

Search Yourself

The words 'search marketing' usually bring up thoughts of Google and Yahoo. But Tower Records found it could increase conversion rates by 50% by improving it's on-site search. Wow.

Realizing its site search wasn’t producing results that would convert visitors into purchasers, Tower Records deployed a new search and navigation tool last fall from Mercado Software. Search-to-sales conversion rates rose 50% and customer satisfaction ratings “went through the roof,” Kevin Ertelll, vice president of e-commerce, tells InternetRetailer.com.

On site search is a feature that most developers and ecommerce packages either don't support, or don't support well. Most inexpensive 3rd party search add-ons aren't very good either. There's a class of higher end products that can work very well (as these Mercado results demonstrate). Hopefully this success will motivate more entrants and broader recognition that search is an important part of how people use your site, not just how they find it.

(Original info via MarketingVox)

37 Times Better

While we're commenting on the work of the Gods, it's always worth looking at what 37Signals is up to. Especially when they're redesigning a web page.

Case In Point: Offermatica

Following up on my earlier Seinfeld post, consider Offermatica. This software company, which has generated some buzz lately, makes it easy to do A/B testing on landing pages. The problem is, I cannot learn very much about the software or service from their web site. And I'm an interested potential customer. Not good. Their site, has a home page with six (count 'em 6) links that try and get you to sign up for a 'free 30-day trial'. Fair enough - that's what they want to push. But there is only one link, and subsequently one page, that tell me anything more about the service if I don't want to sign up (yet). And that one page isn't very complete or compelling. Instead the page is full of descriptive marketing text, by which I mean it does tell me something about the product and its use but it's mostly flowery hype. And the page has a nice little process-flow animation, but it only provide the most general overview of how the system works. * Where are the examples? * Where are the case studies? * Where are the screen shots of the reporting tools? * Where is the 'here's exactly what it does and how you'll benefit page? These are the things I wanted to read. They didn't offer them. So I left. The company itself should know better. Their background says that they're long time ecommerce consultants who have turned to this ASP-software business, and earned some significant venture backing. Combine these with the fact that their target market is online marketers and you might expect a compelling online sales experience. I did, and was sorely disappointed. Of course, maybe the site that I experienced was just a test, and other people are seeing the deep, rich, highly communicative site...

The Self-Service Web

A few days ago I wrote about continuously improving your web site. One argument against this type of effort is that 'our web site isn't for selling, it just generates leads which our sales people handle'. I heard a similar refrain just a few days ago from the VP of Marketing at a very successful enterprise software company.

This article over at MarketingProfs.com talks about managing a web site and refers to the self-service web. That's a great phrase because I think every web site has to at least aim for self-service. The brief history of the internet is that people are getting more and more comfortable making increasingly complex buying decisions entirely based on a web-based interaction. Several years ago, the argument went, books and CDs were the first ecommerce success stories because people knew what they were buying so the 'trust' hurdle was low. It took a few years for online clothing and financial transactions to take off. Today there is virtually nothing that isn't sold online - and in substantial quantities.

If your business isn't finding customers making purchase decisions based solely on interactions with your web site, then your web site needs more work. The first step: ask your sales people to list the most common initial questions and issues that customers bring when they first make contact. Take a look at your site and see if the answers to these questions are already there and need improvement, or (as is more likely) these issues aren't yet addressed online. Improve the site to cover this ground, and re-poll the sales people in a few weeks. Repeat this cycle until the first thing your sales people hear when they pick up the phone is "I'd like to place an order".

Then move ordering online...

Make One Up

I'm doing the 'Cholesterol Assessment' at RealAge.com, and in the process it asks for an email address. Next it asks for a password, but instead of telling me that if I don't have one yet I have to click another link and go register, it says: "If you don't have one, make one up".

What an excellent way to treat visitors. Simple. Logical. Yet effective. RealAge treats registered and unregistered people the same way, and puts the burden on their programmers instead of me. Very nice.

I don't know about you, but I always cringe when I get interrupted in some process to go register. I probably leave 50% of the time. I bet RealAge has abandonment rates that are just a fraction of most 'register first' online surveys.

BTW: I'm doing this as part of some client research, although I'm sure doing it is a good idea anyway.

Mouse Movements

Interesting report on tracking how someone moves their mouse when navigating a web site. I'm not sure you can read too much into this, but it's interesting to see someone going this deep.
Via CreativeFlow

PS: Please don't forward this to anyone at Gator/Claria, as I'd hate to see the scumsters get the idea to start popping up ads based on whatever word I'm pointing to on a web page.

Hello, I Must Be Going.

Earlier this month, analytics provider One-Stat reported that 55% of site visitors viewed only 1 or 2 pages, and only 16.5% visited a third page. So within this sample, based on samples of 2 million web visitors at different sites in 100 countries, 80% of users left after seeing 1, 2, or 3 pages.

I've always thought it was useful to think about site visitors who leave quickly in terms of a physical store. If you stood at the counter of your shop all day watched people open the door, walk in two steps, and turn around and leave - especially hundreds or thousands of them - it wouldn't take long before you got really worried. Most likely, you would quickly ask a few of them what was wrong, or just start making changes to draw them in farther. But on the web we don't see these people come and go, and even when represented as numbers in log files, there isn't much impact. So every day they come and go in droves and nobody does much about it. Big mistake.

There are many reason why users come and go. It isn't always bad news if some people leave quickly. Some are in the wrong place and so neither of you benefit from their hanging around sucking bandwidth. Other might actually find just what they need quickly because your optimization or landing page strategy caused them to go directly to the right information. To really understand what numbers are appropriate for you, do some detective work with your analytics package and log files.

If log files show visitors arriving based on keywords that you didn't intentionally or don't want to target, a little effort de-optimizing (removing these words) might be a good idea. Of course, many words and phrases have multiple uses so this isn't always practical.

The bigger issue is clarity. Does your web site make it clear what information it contains. When people first arrive at your site, can they determine, in just a few seconds, what information the site contains and how to get to any information that isn't directly on the page they're looking at. This is a design, navigation, and usability problem. The statistics above show that 70% of visitors invest one or two clicks to look beyond the page they land on - they're giving you a shot. If you fail to get them to the info, or worse if you make them click on something that is wrong or leads to them to believe they're farther away from their goal, they're gone.

Every click a user makes is a decision on their part. They can either click for you (towards conversion) or against you (away from conversion). You have to watch them every step of the way :-)

{See Morningstar Multimedia for more comments on this topic.}

Web Designers, Usability, & John Lennon

Jason Fried of 37signals thinks web designers have taken their eyes off the ball. His 'post-SxSW essay' bemoans the fact that designers seem to be way too interested in 'standards' like CSS and XHTML and not interested enough in usability and the impact of their designs on real people and the bottom line. The folks at Airbag make a similar point.

Fortunately for all of us, the invisible hand is increasingly making usability an issue. Not because anyone suddenly cares about silly things like logic or customer satisfaction, but because on web sites, better usability makes more money. The rise and recent dramtic improvement in web site analytics software, and impact of PPC advertising are dramatically increasing awareness of ROI, and as soon as you start working to improve ROI on web pages, you wind up working on usability. (BTW: It won't be called usability, it will be called conversion marketing or some similar new term.)

It will be interesting to see how the design community reacts when their work has to produce objective rather than just subjective results. John Lennon once said (or so I remember) something to the effect of 'artists are all for change until someone tries to repaint their local coffee house'. Here come the painters...

Make It Up In Volume

While SES and most of the SEM industry is primarily focused on paid and organic search placements, there is increasing visibility to 'conversion' and the steps a site can take to generate more revenue from their visitors. There were two conversion sessions at SES, including one panel style and a 'clinic' where sites from audience members were critiqued and given suggestions for improvement.

The basic idea is simple - make it obvious what you want the user to do on each page and make it easy for them to do it (and hard to do things wrong). What the sessions demonstrated was that if you look at a web page and ask the question 'what does this page encourage the user to do?' you can quickly expose the kind of poor design and conflicted goals that muck up at probably 98% of all the pages on the internet.

The dynamic Brian Eisenberg of Future Now Inc was prominent in both. The sessions were full of both obscure and common sense advice. It was great to listen to Brian, and Micheal Sack of Inceptor, point out problem after problem on page after page. All I could think during the clinic session was that I could imagine people paying $100 each and lining up around the block to get 10 or 15 minutes of such impactful advice and feedback.

Frederick Markini, CEO iProspect was also clearly on the conversion bandwagon - pointing out in another session that it should be the #1 priority of marketers rather than #5 (by his count).

My guess is that a year from now, conversion and usability related issues will take up a much larger portion of shows like this one. Organic and paid search positions are important, but when 98% of your customers leave without buying anything, the biggest problem you have isn’t attracting more visitors.

Articles today at both Marketing Profs.com and SEO roundtable also touched on the topic of conversion marketing.