Conversion Conference Blog

By Brian Lewis,

Director of Optimization, SiteTuners

 

Many times the name we call something greatly affects our attitudes about that something.

Take the term “home page”, for instance. In the context of the web, we all know that our home page is where most of our visitors will first meet us, experience our brand messaging, learn about our products and services, and hopefully determine if we offer solutions to their problems.

As such, many marketers treat their home pages as an electronic kitchen sink, throwing every message, offer, special, countless products and then further distracting us with endless rotating banners under the misconception that “we need to show everything … after all, it’s our home page”.

One of the reasons marketers have gotten derailed trying to construct effective home pages is because this page is referred to as “the home page”.

Think about it … “Home” commonly refers to a place you are content to stay; a place where one lives. In baseball, it’s a place a runner wants to reach to end his journey around the bases and score a run.

On the web, though, we want to get our visitors off the home page and into our site as expeditiously as possible. An effective home page:

1. Quickly communicates  what it is we do;
2. Allows the visitor to quickly decide if the company can meet their needs, and;
3. Guides the visitor to the page in the site that’s of interest to them

I like to think of the home page as more like an airport terminal. Remember your last visit to an airport? The problem you were trying to solve was to get to your destination as quickly and easily as possible. You were looking for information to get you to the right gate, and the shortest path to that gate, so you could board your plane. You didn’t care about flights to other destinations and certainly did not want to spend any more time than necessary there.

Remember that your home page should provide clear navigational information and direct the visitor to their desired destination. The challenge is to meet the various needs of all the many types of visitors who’ll arrive on your home page while not creating an electronic kitchen sink.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the development of Use Case scenarios. To learn all about Use Cases, why they’re productive and how to craft effective Use Cases, stop by my session, “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at the Conversion Conference in San Francisco, CA, March 5, 2012 11:15 am.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.  ~Marshall McLuhan

 

About the Author

Noted author and speaker, Brian Lewis brings over 20 years of both hands-on and strategic online marketing experience spanning a diverse range of industries. In addition to co-hosting the Internet radio show “Best Search Strategies” on WebMasterRadio, Brian has led panels at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, Search Marketing Expo, SMX Advanced, PPC Summit, Conversion Conference, Affiliate Conference, AdWords Advantage, Online Marketing Summit, and Online Marketing Institute. Brian’s articles have been referenced in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Target Marketing, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, Website Magazine, SEM Journal, and DM News. He continues to be in demand for speaking engagements on PPC, SEO and conversion optimization around the world.

He earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be presenting a session on “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter  to say hello and request for a discount code!

 

 

 

 

By Lance Loveday
CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

We’ve all experienced it at some point; the sneaking suspicion that those we’ve chosen to trust may not be entirely worthy.

Take web sites, for example.

We visit a web site, look around and like what it has to offer. We want to believe that the site—and the company behind it—has our best interests at heart. Perhaps we’ve even had a good experience with the site before.

But then the oddities begin to creep in, the strange little inconsistencies that make us wonder… is it me, or should I really trust this site?

Suspicion…

It doesn’t take much to plant seeds of doubt in a visitor’s mind. Small broken promises and misunderstandings can suffice, such as:

• We click on an ad, then don’t find the promised item on the landing page.
• We carefully click on a product link, only to find something different highlighted on the next page.
• We start a registration process, only to encounter many more steps than the site indicated.
• We try to complete a specific task quickly, only to find our progress slowed by questions, ads, and confusing page layouts.

What’s going on here? Don’t these companies know what their visitors want?

In many cases, the answer is yes—perhaps too well. They know exactly what we want, they just choose to use that understanding in a way we don’t expect. In a way that serves their business goals, not necessarily those of their visitors.

Let’s take a look at a couple examples I’ve run into in the past.

Example 1—GeoTrust

Once upon a time, it came time to renew the GeoTrust secure certificate I’d installed on a personal server. The email notice contained a convenient link which led to the following page (I’ve enlarged and called out the product list for clarity):

So far so good, this looked like exactly what I needed. I wanted the first item on the list, the “QuickSSL” product, so I clicked on the first dark-blue “Renew” button.

And came to this confusing page:

Here’s where the doubt crept in. The page title is what I expected, but the content on the page seems to be all about the “QuickSSL Premium” product. Did I make a mistake? I didn’t want the Premium product, I wanted the less expensive “QuickSSL” product.

At first glance (and most visitors won’t give the page much more time than that), the only available action on this page is the huge orange “Upgrade to QuickSSL Premium” button:

Yikes! How do I purchase the plain “QuickSSL?” Ah, there it is, a visually de-emphasized link in small blue text:

This is a great example of evil usability at work. Notice all the factors that contribute to this link’s obscurity:

Unclear design. Compared to the orange button, this option does not look much like an action item. It’s smaller, in a darker color, and doesn’t look like a button at all.

Unclear wording. The call to action, “Stay with QuickSSL,” isn’t what visitors to this page expect to do next. What they expect to do””what I expected to do when I came here””is to “purchase” or “renew,” not “stay with” the QuickSSL product.

Unexpected positioning. Visitors interested in purchasing the QuickSSL product don’t expect the next step in the process to be hidden down at the bottom left-hand corner of a page, outside the shaded area that contains the emphasized text, and after a bunch of unexpected content. The orange button, on the other hand, IS in the expected position on the page for a next step.

Why would GeoTrust design the page this way? Those less cynical than me might say it’s incompetence, poor audience task modeling, or a loose-cannon designer.

I think not.

It’s an example of a business goal overriding the visitor’s clearly stated intention. Now, we can debate the company’s intention. Perhaps they truly believe the basic “QuickSSL” product is inadequate for most customers and see this as a way to helpfully guide customers to a better solution.

What’s more likely is that this is a pure and simple upsell that disguises its intent by twisting well-understood usability principles such as:

Web visitors don’t generally read text. So all that verbiage that tries to make this sound like an option, instead of the only available action? Ignored by most visitors. But great cover.

Buttons get clicked. Visitors arrive on a page looking for the next step. What’s clickable? they ask. And on this page, that clickable item is the big orange button. It’s not a carefully considered thought process, it’s a trusting response to what appears to be clear guidance. “There’s a button!” Click.

Let’s look at another example.

Example 2: GoDaddy

Another task I undertook some time ago was registering a domain name through GoDaddy.com. Let me preface this by saying I’ve had a decent customer experience with this company, overall, so I came into this with a fair amount of goodwill.

I’d just found the domain name I wanted, and clicked the “Continue” button. Below is the page I saw next.

Take a look: What’s the one item that looks most clickable on this page?

If you answered, “The huge green button,” you’re right!

But if you click that button, you add two additional domain names to your order, just like magic! What if that’s not what you wanted to do? What if you want to register only the domain name you picked on the previous page?

To do this, you’d have to click the small text link under the huge green button:

This annoys me every time I go through the GoDaddy checkout process. I’m used to it now, but each encounter incrementally diminishes the store of goodwill I have for the company. I never send friends to the site without detailed caveats along the lines of:

“It’ll be very confusing and they’ll try to sell you extra stuff, but just ignore all that. Look for the tiny little text links that say “No thanks” and keep on going.”

Again, it’s remotely possible GoDaddy truly believes they’re doing customers a service here. Or that they’re incompetent or don’t understand their audience.

Again, I think not.

You’ve got to change your evil ways, baby

It’s easy to shake an accusing finger at these and other sites who deliberately lead visitors into unintended actions. But waiting for them to change their ways isn’t the answer. As long as the rewards of this approach are greater than the downside (customer complaints, blog rants, etc.), they’ll keep right on down the same path.

What can we do about it? How about starting here:

• Complain to the company, often and annoyingly.
• Warn and educate everyone you know about tactics like this.
• Avoid companies that consistently use these tactics, and spread the word about them.
• On the flip side, reward companies who treat visitors with respect. Visit them, buy from them, and spread the word about them.
• Help those who are less Internet-savvy than yourself through the minefields.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing my small part by encouraging our designers, clients and anyone else who will listen to resist the temptation to join the Dark Side and use their powers for good.

Thanks to my colleague and co-author Sandra Niehaus for providing the inspiration, research and much of the writing on this topic.

About the Author

As the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing (CLM) Lance Loveday is a recognized thought leader in the online marketing industry. He is a regular speaker at industry events-MacWorld, Search Engine Strategies, Web Design World and South by Southwest, to name a few-where his strategic, humorous and down-to-earth approach inspires designers, online marketers and business executives alike.

Since its inception in 2001, CLM has become a highly sought after agency serving a wide array of clients-from startups to big brands like Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, and Lockheed Martin. To each client, CLM brings a deep expertise in not only online advertising platforms but also the user experience-what happens “after the click.” It’s this combination of skill, experience and knowledge to which Lance attributes his company’s success.

Lance is co-author of the breakout business strategy book Web Design for ROI, which was published in 2007 by New Riders Press. His educational background includes an exploratory tour in law school, preceded by a BS in Managerial Economics from UC Davis, where he is honored to guest lecture on occasion.

Lance, his wife Courtney, and their three children reside in Northern California. And while he considers himself a cyclist and shares a first name with Lance Armstrong, he has only been mistaken for the cycling champion once. And it wasn’t on a bike.

See Lance Live!

Lance will be speaking with Larry Marine, from Intuitive Design about Usability mistakes in a session titled, “Usability & Design Mistakes that Kill Conversion” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Check out Lance’s book, Web Design for ROI and follow him on Twitter and contact him to request a discount code!

By Raquel Hirsch
President, Co-founder WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization

Ordinarily, I don’t advise paying much attention to Conversion Optimization tips because “best practices” and “tips” only have limited value — and should always be tested, in each and every particular situation.These little gems of highly priced advice from consultants are often based on intuition and esthetics but very minimal actual data. And in many cases, if there is actual test data, it is only applicable to the specific test situation for that specific site. Not (necessarily) yours.

Instead, it’s always better to test the opinions of experts or, better yet, to have a strategy for creating an ‘endless fountain’ of Conversion Optimization hypotheses.

But there is one exception to this rule of not having rules: Flash

If your homepage consists solely of Flash content, you are hurting your business results.

The rule is even stricter if your Flash content is so heavy that it requires a “loading” animation.

For example, how much time do you think I will spend in my busy day to stare at this:

Turns out, it’s less time than it takes to finish loading!

So, the next time your Web Design Agency recommends designing your home page with Flash, please ask them to show you an A/B test to prove that it will deliver results. If they’re smart, they’ll reconsider.

About the Author

Raquel Hirsch, a senior marketer, has an impressive online and traditional marketing background. In addition to Conversion Optimization, her domain expertise includes the development and strategic use of CRM, database marketing, e-commerce, web analytics, and direct mail. Before co-founding WiderFunnel Marketing Inc., Raquel held senior executive positions at a number of corporations in diverse industries where she developed and executed lead-generation, customer acquisition and customer retention strategies.

Armed with an MBA, Raquel is a sought after speaker. Her teaching experience includes various universities, plus numerous professional conferences and seminars across North America and Europe. Most recently, Raquel presented the keynote address at ‘Conversion Camp’, Europe’s first-ever conversion optimization conference (Frankfurt, September 2010). In her high-energy, interactive presentations, Raquel leverages multiple client case studies and shares insights gained after completing hundreds of successful conversion optimization experiments for clients such as eBay, Epson, SAP, Electronic Arts, Alfresco, BabyAge.com and so many others.

See Raquel Live!

Raquel will be speaking with Glenn Edelmann, from Wine Enthusiast and Joe Weller, from RealNetworks, in a session titled, “Optimizing the Purchase Process: Emails, Landing Pages, Product & Category Pages, and Order Paths” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Check out Raquel’s website and follow her on Twitter and contact him to request a discount code!