WebShare Search & Conversion Marketing Blog

Search & Conversion Marketing Blog

Welcome to our blog! Here you'll find posts on the topics of web design & traffic acquisition, paid and organic search strategies, analytics & business intelligence, conversion testing, interviews, videos and more. We hope you find it useful, and invite you to read, share, subscribe, leave a comment, or just have a look at what's here.

Archive for July, 2010

How to deal with perceptual blindness – Dare to not be different

Thursday, July 29th, 2010 by Julie Ferrara-Brown

One of our most popular services at WebShare is to critique ecommerce sites, and one concept that comes up often is perceptual blindness. This is the tendency to overlook something that is right in front of you because it’s not where you expect it to be. Think of the internal site search box on a website. If you moved this to the very bottom some customers may conclude the site is missing the ability to search because they are not used to looking for the search box at the bottom of the page. This is why we say it’s often better to “Dare not to be different” in certain areas of website design.

I just recently experienced the perfect example that illustrates our point. A friend of mine in Germany found out she is pregnant, and so I just had to send her two books right away.

I logged on to Amazon.com like I always do, entered her address and was about to pay when I saw that Amazon was estimating it would take over a month for her to receive the books, plus the shipping was more than the cost of one of the books! At this point I was beginning to rethink buying these books from Amazon. On a whim I decided to check out Amazon.de (the German version of Amazon).

One thing to point out is that I don’t speak a lick of German, but with Amazon you don’t have to! I searched for the titles in English, the pictures of the covers confirmed I was ordering the right books. So now it was time to add them to my cart. While the text on the “add to cart” button was in German, the buttons and checkout process was so intuitive that I knew exactly what to do without even reading the text. Since the spelling of the months are extremely similar to English, I was easily able to see that the delivery time was much more appropriate and since I was buying on the German site and shipping to Germany I was able to get Free shipping! (which I knew because the location of the shipping charges are in the same place as on the US site—right where you would expect them).

By now you should be picking up on a consistent theme. I was able to make this purchase without knowing any German because Amazon understood the value of consistency and meeting expectations. While it is important to make your company stand out from the rest, be careful to ensure that you don’t actually make it harder for people to do business with you. People abandon shopping carts for lots of reasons—don’t let a frustrating UI be one of them.

Julie Ferrara-Brown
Julie is WebShare's chief statistician and conversion testing expert. You can find out more about Julie here.

See more posts by Julie Ferrara-Brown

Posted in Conversion Marketing, Website Design | 1 Comment »

User types and cognitive learning

Monday, July 26th, 2010 by Mark Geyer

When improving the user experience of your site or just fine tuning elements to improve conversion, it’s important to understand your user types first before you make any rash decisions. When we work with clients on designing a site, one of the first questions to ask is who will be using the site? Specifically a user’s age plays a huge role in what people like and how people think. In this post I’ll generally talk about how users cognitively look at interactive mediums (not just the web).

There are many different types of users out there, especially when you think of how they learn and digest information. So to quickly categorize them, they are: kids, teens, and adults. Many of these people use technology every day and are accustomed to make certain decisions based on their device of choice, their way of looking at the world, and most importantly what matters to them.

Kids
Kids are click o’ holics. They’re very visual and will click on virtually anything regardless of whether or not it’s a button (their favorite color, character, etc). This is why the majority of kid’s interfaces are created in Adobe Flash. It’s the visual/interaction engagement factor (animation, games, etc) that gets kids attention. Kids are sponges and generally absorb everything and learn through visuals, audio, and interaction (kinesthetic learning). Kids will spend 2 seconds on a screen with just text, but will spend a great deal of time on a page with visuals and interaction.

Without experience with different types of interfaces, kids don’t know any better. Kids are more likely to click on elements that have nothing to do with the content or that lead them to a dead end. They except what they see and generally don’t make a lot of criticisms (like we do) on how an interface could be better.

Teens
Teenagers spend a great amount of time online through a home computer, but more than likely a wireless device (cell/smart phone, iTouch, etc). Their fixated on what and how other people see them, so their online presence with friends is important, especially social networks. They’re not adults yet, but would like to be considered one.

Like I said before kids are sponges, but as kids get older the ways they learn and take in information change or tend to favor one vs. the other (visually, auditory, or kinesthetically). A teen is more likely to read more about what a peer thought of something than an adult and more so what their friends thought of it.

Adults
As we get older, we get stingier about our interface decisions. We know what we want and we want it now. At this point we know what feels wrong in an interface but maybe not able to express why or how it could be better. More than likely if an interface is hard to use, the business wasn’t thinking about their users and those users have long since went somewhere else, or struggled through the process of using that interface if they couldn’t go anywhere else.

Generally adults with interfaces or on the web are looking for information or services, selling/buying items, businesses, people (friends), basically anything you can think of. So based on the user’s needs, interfaces work out best when choices are user centric, unlike kids or teens who don’t mind being told what to do or having things already done/filled out for them. Left brain, right brain, the learning aspect continues and tends to stick. If a person learns a certain way (say, visually), it’s more than likely that the person will always learn things that way.

So what kind of learner are you? When I say “fire truck”, what comes to mind?

If you’re a visual learner like me, you would say red. If you’re an auditory learner, you might be thinking about the siren that it makes or that you actually saw one or heard one this morning.

Here’s another example, for the next time you get gas for your vehicle. At the gas pump you swipe your debit card and type in your pin, if that numeric pad didn’t beep while you were pressing the buttons then I bet you’ll look at the screen to see how many asterisks are shown. Plus if the numeric pad didn’t ‘feel’ like it was being pressed, it would have the same effect, you looking at the screen to verify.

Regardless, it’s important to understand how users think vs. what actions you’re asking them to do. That way you can apply various techniques to your interactive mediums and create a holistic experience that’s intuitive. Your users will thank you for it.

Mark Geyer

See more posts by Mark Geyer

Posted in Website Design | No Comments »

5 Helpful Custom Alerts for Google Analytics

Saturday, July 24th, 2010 by Nick Iyengar

One of Google Analytics’ under-appreciated features is Custom Alerts, which allows you to receive a notification from Google any time certain metrics fluctuate beyond the bounds you set. Custom Alerts is a great way to avoid this:

In this case, we can see that no conversions have been recorded at all for several days. This kind of thing happens frequently, in part because there are so many potential causes: changes to the website’s goal URL, the addition of a filter to a GA profile, the removal of the GA tracking code, etc. Without custom alerts, you’re only able to detect these kinds of issues as frequently as you log in, which may not be every day. By setting up custom alerts, you’ll be able to diagnose and address these issues much more quickly. Let’s take a look at a few of the most useful custom alerts.

Custom Alert #1: Goal Conversion Rate Decreases

As you can see below, Google Analytics gives you several ways to set up your alerts. In this case, I like to use the “% changes by” condition so that if my goal conversion rate decreases by more than 80%, I get an email. It’s possible that my site could just be having a bad day, but an 80% drop in conversion rate is a pretty good sign that I need to investigate what’s going on. To set up this alert, click on “Intelligence” in your reports navigation menu. Then, find the “Create a Custom Alert” link.

Next, you’ll be taken to the alert setup wizard, which is awfully similar to the advanced segmentation wizard (which you should all become familiar with!). Choose the segment of traffic to which you want to apply the alert, and then set your conditions. Here’s how to set up our first alert.

First, we need a name for the alert. Next, we choose the profiles for which the alert will be set. Then, we choose between making this a daily, weekly, or monthly alert; for this alert, daily is the most useful. Then, importantly, we need to make sure we check the box that says “Email me when this alert is triggered.”

Next, you’ll set the various conditions for your alert. For this alert, we’ll want to make sure the alert applies to all traffic. We choose “Goal Conversion” rate as our metric, “% decreases by more than” as our condition, 80% as our value, and the previous day as the comparison value.

Press “Create Alert” and you’re all set! Now that you know how to set up custom alerts, let’s run through some more alerts that are frequently useful.

Custom Alert #2: Revenue Decreases

If you’re an e-commerce site, you should have revenue tracking set up as well as “static” goals like contact forms, etc. Setting up our first goal won’t tell you when your actual revenue is fluctuating; you’ll need to set up a similar alert, but with revenue as your key metric.

Custom Alert #3: Traffic Decreases

Hopefully, if your website is down for an extended period, you won’t need Google Analytics to tell you about it. However, setting up alerts based on traffic decreases is a great way to be alerted when something has gone wrong with your Google Analytics implementation. The following scenario happens regularly: a website update is pushed out, and your GA tags are adversely affected somewhere along the way. Although your site doesn’t go down, you see your visit metrics flat-line. To minimize the time for which you’re affected by issues with your GA implementation, set up an alert based on visits decreasing by more than, say, 60%.

Custom Alert #4: SEO Metrics

If you’re like most organizations, organic search traffic is probably something you care about quite a bit. Want an easy way to keep track of how visible your site is across the various engines? Set up a weekly or monthly alert based on organic traffic only (rather than all traffic). Try one alert for decreases of more than 20%, and one for increases of more than 20%.

Custom Alert #5: Monitoring Brand Terms

Measuring response to branding efforts can be difficult, but one good approach is simply to measure how searches on your brand terms change over time. This is super easy with Custom Alerts. Set up a weekly or monthly alert that’s based only on the specific keywords you care about, and have Google send you an email if your metrics go up or down 20% week-to-week or month-to-month.

We hope these ideas for Custom Alerts will be useful for you, and that they get you thinking about what other kinds of metrics could be helpful for your organization. To get more analytics tips and tricks, subscribe to our RSS feed, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

Nick Iyengar
Nick is a senior analytics and web intelligence analyst with WebShare. You can find out more about Nick here.

See more posts by Nick Iyengar

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

First Look: Optimizely

Friday, July 23rd, 2010 by Nick Iyengar

One of the cooler things about working at WebShare is the fact that we regularly get our hands on the newest, most exciting tools in the analytics and testing industry. One tool we’re especially excited about right now is Optimizely, a brand new (it’s still in private beta) A/B testing platform designed to make testing easier than it’s ever been before.

At the core of Optimizely’s promise is its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) variation editor, which allows you to create variations of your original page with drag-and-drop simplicity. You can easily edit text, rearrange your content, re-size images and buttons, etc., all without having to do any coding whatsoever. Below is an example of a variation of our Seminars for Success microsite: I moved the “Reserve Your Seat” button, our major call-to-action, to a more central location. Then I moved our dates and locations information, which we know is among the most important information on the page, to a more prominent location. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it could be different enough to show a significant difference in performance, and it took me a grand total of about 45 seconds to do.

Original:

Variation:

This core benefit strikes at one of the biggest hurdles to efficiently testing your site: the creative process. Many small to medium-sized businesses simply don’t have creative resources in-house, which makes developing variations a major challenge. Optimizely minimizes that issue by allowing non-creative resources (such as myself) to quickly and easily generate variations that are significantly different from the original.

When you’re ready to launch a test, all you have to do is install one compact block of JavaScript into the <head> of the page you’re testing. This simple, streamlined implementation process adds even more weight to Optimizely’s claim that they provide “A/B testing you’ll actually use.” With your test running, Optimizely will measure user engagement with each variation, and report back you on the winners and losers.

As you might expect with any raw, beta-stage product, Optimizely is missing some things we hope it’ll incorporate in the future. There’s no word yet on whether Optimizely will handle multivariate testing. The WYSIWYG editor can be clunky and unpredictable. It’s difficult to save your variations while you work. There are no undo, copy, or paste buttons. But all in all, the concept behind Optimizely is clear and compelling. There’s a huge market for a simple A/B testing platform, and we think Optimizely could be well-suited to serve that need. To sign up for the beta, head over to www.optimizely.com, and to stay on top of all the latest news in the analytics world, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Nick Iyengar
Nick is a senior analytics and web intelligence analyst with WebShare. You can find out more about Nick here.

See more posts by Nick Iyengar

Tags: A/B testing, conversion testing, landing page optimization
Posted in Conversion Marketing | 2 Comments »

New Keyword Targeting Feature in AdWords: Broad Match Modifier

Thursday, July 15th, 2010 by Mike Small

Google recently announced a new keyword targeting feature on the Inside AdWords blog. Broad match modifier is a middle ground between broad and phrase match. The intent is to take phrase match and make it a little broader and broad match a little more controlled.

Implementing this feature works similarly to the standard broad, phrase and exact match keywords used today. Instead of the brackets or quotation marks you use a plus (+) sign. The plus sign modifies the word it is attached to so that it must appear in the searcher’s query exactly as is or a close variation. Close variations include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and ings (like “floor” and “flooring”).

Today you may have the broad match keyword of black hat. As a standard broad match keyword this can match multiple variations such as black caps, gray hats or black baseball hat. If you had that same word as a phrase match it may match on things like midnight black hat or black hat for baseball. With the new broad match modifier feature you can narrow down those broad matches and expand the phrase matches.

Enter your keyword as +black hat (Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words). The resulting matches in this case could be black cap, fancy black dress hat, blck hat or black ski caps. The plus sign in front of black forces black to be in the searcher’s query. If you were to enter your keyword like this, +black +hat, your matching results could be things like black hatt or black baseball hat or any variation as long as both black and hat are queried.

Note that broad match modifiers are designed for adgroups that contain mostly phrase and exact match words. If you are mostly bidding on broad match adding the modifiers could result in a significant decline in clicks and conversions.