One of the huddles I attended at xChange was entitled “Getting Analysts to Produce Analysis and Getting the Business to Listen.”  I was mostly interested in the first part on how to get the analysts to produce, but I was far outnumbered by the others who wanted to know how to get the business to listen.

This seams to be a super important issue among analysts and here’s why.  Real ROI comes from action.  There really is no ROI in analytics.  Unless your analysis results in a positive change, it doesn’t really help, does it?

So how do you get the changes implemented?  Many analysts don’t have front line control over their websites — particularly in large companies.  The website is tightly controlled by the managers or executives.  In those cases, the analyst needs to become a salesperson.  They have to sell the idea of changing a website. 

One interesting perception from this huddle is that there is often some level of hostility between the analysts and the decision makers.  They don’t always respect each other. 

So how do you get a hostile manager to listen to you and do what you want them to do?  Matt Crenshaw from howstuffworks.com had a brilliant suggestion.  Matt suggested a technique called the “Upfront Contract.”  If you’ve ever bought a new car, you’re probably familiar with this technique.  This is where the salesperson will say to you, What will it take to sell you a car today.  Once you tell them your requirements, they’ll say to you.  If I am able to fulfill those requirements, will you sign the paperwork today?

It’s a very effective technique that can save everyone time.  The salesperson doesn’t want to waste time dealing with someone who won’t buy a car, and the buyer can get all his or her requirements listed up front. 

You can do the same thing with your decision makers.  The next time they ask you for an analysis, or during your next meeting, just ask them what information would they need to see in order to make a change to the website.  If they say, I would want to see an A/B test were the proposed change beats the control by 40%, then you write that down and get them to sign the paper.

Then you run off and perform the test.  Assuming you get the result they were looking for, then you present the signed contract to whoever made the decision and inform them that you’ve met their criteria.  It’s time to make the change.

That’s just one great idea.  How do you get your managers to listen?

One of the huddles I attended at xChange was titled: Integrating Customer Experience and Marketing Data with Web Analytics.  We went around the room and discussed what we do to measure the customer experience.  Here’s what we do at my company:

• We review our Product Reviews to see the problems or successes our customers experience.
• We have a suggestion box on every single page of our website where customers can tell us if any page is confusing or needs additional information.
• We monitor blogs with a tool from bloglines.
• We use Google Alerts to monitor new web pages that reference us.
• We look at new referrers to our site to see what they say about us.
• We have a self serve testimonial page where our customers can share comments.
• We monitor our e-mail to sales@ or orders@ or webmaster@ using help desk software.
• We regularly perform usability studies in our own lab.
• We regularly perform multivariate testing using Google’s website optimizer.
• We use Alertsite to monitor our website performance.  Gomez is a more expensive competitor.
• We monitor our 404 errors by studying our log files, not just our Omniture reports.
• We poll our customer service reps. to get an idea of our customer’s thoughts.
• We monitor high bounce rate pages.
• We monitor zero site search results.
• We use a newspaper clipping service from Cison (formerly Bacons).  A competitor is Burrelles Luce.
• We regularly crawl our own site looking for problems.

You may think this is excessive but I am paranoid about good customer service.  We are an e-commerce site in the Internet Retailer top 500.  We can’t afford to have unhappy customers.  Just one mistreated customer can affect thousands of future sales.

In the future, we are considering using Tealeaf to detect problems.

Any other suggestions on what we could do better?  I’m all ears.

I just got back from Xchange 2000 (the premier web analytics conference) last night and I’m inspired.  The conference was amazing.  Gary Angel and Eric Peterson were the perfect hosts for this conference. 

Unlike traditional conferences, Xchange is mostly a collection of huddles with a small group of like minded participants who really dive deeply into the issues.  I attended 5 huddles titled: 1) Getting Analysts to Produce Analysis and Getting the Business to Listen, 2) Slicing and Dicing Visitors: Segmentation Strategies, 3) Integrating Customer Experience and Marketing Data with Web Analytics, 4) Searching for Success with SEO and SEM, and finally, 5) Driving Visitors Up the Value Chain.

The nicest part about the huddles is that almost everyone participates and adds to the conversation.  There are almost 100 experts who attended the conference and everyone shared their ideas freely.  This is in direct contrast to some other conferences I’ve attended in the past.  Typically, a vendor will host a session and tease you with promises of great results if you follow their advice.  Of course, the advice is impossible to follow without help from the vendor.  Fortunately, the vendor will be happy to provide you their solution for a fee.  This conference was the opposite of that.  Ideas flowed freely from all who attended. 

The event was held at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco and went off without a hitch.  The hotel was a perfect venue.  We got special pricing on our rooms and everything was well organized from a logistics point of view.  I must make a special note of the food.  Gary Angel is a gourmet and his influence on the meals was evident throughout.  All meals were both healthy and delicious.

So next year, be sure to attend this who’s who of analytics.  You won’t regret it.

Now that we know why people don’t convert on your site, let’s look at all the factors that can affect your conversion rate.  Here they are:

Trust Elements:
- Safe Shopping Icons (hacker safe, BBB)
- Toll Free Number visible
- Address visible
- Quality of Design
- Quality Domain Name
- Money Back Guarantee
- Risk Reversal (We’ll pay the return shipping)
- Accepts all forms of payment
- Nice Logo
- Testimonials
- Contact Us prominent
- Privacy Policy
- Order / Shipping / Invoice tracking
- Privacy guarantees (e.g. truste etc.)
- We don’t spam you messaging
- Clear and unambiguous optin/out for marketing & 3rd party marketing
- Ability to get offline help at physical locations

Look and Feel:
- Site is easy to navigate
- Easy to grasp what the site does
- Great site search returns relevent results
- Checkout / Conversion process is clear
- Forms are forgiving (e.g. taking dashes, spaces for credit card)
- Forms error handling - clear, concise errors & instructions for correcting
- Does not require registration up front
- Fast Page load times.  Ads Render last.
- Pages load consistently (high availability)
- Renders in all major browsers (yahoo has a good matrix)
- Accessibility / 508
- Pictures are good quality and highly optimised
- Good quality help / FAQ system
- No Broken links or broken images

Product / Selling Proposition:
- Product / Site Exclusivity
- Compelling Product
- Brand Name awareness and reputation
- Good Product Pictures, quality and quantity
- Compelling Offer / Price / Clarity
- price elasticity of demand
- Price easy to find
- Add to cart button is inviting and prominent
- Terms and Conditions highly visible
- Path to checkout is unencumbered with no distractions
- Extra charges (shipping) are low and easy to find
- Fast Shipping
- Free Shipping
- International Shipping
- Good Comparison Matrix (including competitors)
- Independent Product Reviews
- Good Headline
- Good Tagline
- Supporting Copy
- Scarcity (limited Qty or limited time)

Off Page Factors:
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Holidays
- The weather (Snow skiis vs. swim suits)
- Event Timing (product will be regulated, taxed or discontinued)
- Item / site gets significant press (front page NY Times)
- Relevent Advertising
- Pre Qualifying your advertising (i.e. from $1,000 up)
- Type of Advertising (banner vs PPC)
- Visitor profile of site were advertising appears
- Compelling ad copy
- Ad copy matches landing page
- Click Fraud
- Quality and efforts of Affiliates
- Reputation of your Site
- Size of your Organization
- Newsletter Quality
- Offline advertising
- Presence of offline locations
- Competitor Offerings and Marketing

Can you think of any others?

This is the first in a two part post about conversion rates.  But before I get into details about what your conversion rate should be and how to improve it, I wanted to explain why people don’t convert.  Essentially, there are only 5 basic reasons folks don’t convert:

• Reason #1: They don’t need your product or service.  To overcome this problem, you can either pre-qualify your customers or do a better job convincing them that they need your product.  For example, at CableOrganizer.com, we sell products designed to eliminate clutter.  We even advertise the term clutter in our PPC campaigns.  A few years ago, we noticed a lot of people coming to our site using the keyword phrase “Clutter Family Murders.”  Obviously, those people had no need for our products.  The solution there was to use negative keywords to pre-qualify our customers.
• Reason #2: They don’t trust you.  This is another big one.  If people don’t trust you, they’ll move on to someone they do trust.  There are many things that go along with this such as making your site more professional, having testimonials, making your contact info obvious and accepting major credit cards.  I’ll provide a more complete list in my next post.
• Reason #3: They can’t afford your product or service.  This is similar to the “no need” problem.  Again, the solution is to either pre-qualify your customers or make your service affordable through some creative financing.  To pre-qualify someone in your ads, you may wish to indicate your product’s price directly in the advertising.  That way only folks who can afford it are likely to click through.  Beware, however, that Google will penalize you for this because they have no desire to reduce the click through rate on your ads.
• Reason #4: No sense of urgency.  I feel sorry for a lot of diet programs and stop smoking products.  Most people know they need to lose weight and stop smoking, however, as long as they can start tomorrow, it’s hard to get them to act today.  To combat this problem, you should consider adding urgency to your offers.  “Offer expires today”, for instance.
• Reason #5: Technical problems.  OK, so you’ve got a customer who can afford your product and needs it.  They trust you and want it now.  Then they go to click the “add to cart” button and nothing happens.  You probably lost the sale.  Poor website performance, 404 errors, JavaScript errors - these are all technical problems that will keep your buyers away.  Find those problems and fix them. 

 In my next post, I’ll list in details all the factors I’ve found that affect conversion rates.

Few things drive me more nuts than broken links.  Especially when those links are on your own site.  Here you are with a real live person browsing your site.  They are engaged and click on a link to learn more or purchase an item when, anticlimactically, they get a 404 page not found error.  Another form of this problem is almost as bad.  You have a beautiful page that’s supposed to have great images on it, but some or all of them are replaced by white boxes with x’s in the corner.  Yuck.

Nothing screams “amature” more than broken links.  404 pages are some of the most destructive pages or elements you can have on a site yet they are often one of the easiest things to find and fix.

Here’s how we attack ours:

1. First, we crawl our own site weekly.  We use a program called Web Link Validator.  In addition to crawling your site for broken links, it also looks at spelling and can create site maps for you.  There are a lot of programs just like it available on the web today.  If your site uses static html anywhere on it, I would recommend crawling your own site on a regular basis.
2. Every time a browser encounters a broken link, I get an e-mail.  That’s right.  I had our developers program our site to send me an e-mail if a 404 error is generated from a page on our site.  This has saved our bacon several times between crawls when we didn’t realize we had a problem.  Suddenly, my e-mail box was filling with error reports.  It’s a great help.
3. Finally, we analyze our logs.  Page tagging solutions such as Omniture will only tell you about broken links to pages.  If you want to see your broken links to images, you need to look at the log files.  This can get a bit tricky if you are using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), such as Akamai, but to combat this, the CDN will usually provide its own reports to help you.

Given the tools available, there is no need for you to ever suffer major problems with broken links.