The Clickthinking Blog | Scent Optimisation

In May 2011 I was asked to contribute to ClickTale’s Marketing Madness Blog series, a month-long tribute and daily guide to the world of online marketing. I highlighted some points worth repeating as we begin 2012:

After working within the digital industry for more than 8 years, 2 major points continuously stand out:

1.    Digital is still not yet recognized and appreciated in all its glory as an established and integrated marketing channel.
2.    Corporate Identity guidelines often clash with usability best practice.

What do we at Clickthinking recommend in order to achieve the best conversions from your corporate platform?  Keep it consistent, but freshen it up. Read more in the published article:

http://blog.clicktale.com/2011/05/12/corporate-identities-keep-it-consistent-know-yourself/

Until next time, Conversion matters!

Anne Scharlow
Director of Conversion

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson was the first person to use an @ sign/symbol to send an electronic message to a person rather than a computer. Since then, email marketing as a business practice has evolved in leaps and bounds, but often the perception of this highly adaptable and extremely effective one-to-one channel still lies back in the mid-1990s as “out-dated” and “ineffective”.

In reality though, we’ve gone from a mass-market static communication tactic, where a sender would deploy to as many “sourced” email addresses as possible, to today’s email marketing model which possesses the capabilities to deliver highly relevant and uniquely dynamic content to each and every opted-in subscriber. The effectiveness of the channel is easily tracked via a wide range of metrics and the return on investment (ROI) is extremely measurable. And all the while, email marketing is able to easily integrate into a myriad of other marketing channels such as Search; Analytics; and Social.

So how far have we come? Take a walk with us as we review a snapshot of the then of email marketing, and the now:

If you’d like to subscribe to our RSS Feed to be the first to receive new articles and updates, you can subscribe here.

If you’d like to learn more about our Performance Email offering, please don’t hesitate to contact us at emailmarketing@clickthinking.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Until next time, stay engaged!

Stacy Nortje
Head of Performance Email

In October Google announced that they would be encrypting searches if the user was logged into Google when searching on Google.com. What this means for your website is that in Analytics data you will see in the organic keyword list (not provided) as a keyword.  While the percentage of searchers that are signed into Google might be quite low it can affect your reporting in a number of ways.

I like to report on the split between branded keywords and non-branded keywords to show how SEO efforts are increasing traffic to the website, month on month or year on year. However the data is now skewed because of secure search and the (not-provided) keyword. In Analytics you would usually exclude keywords that contain the brand name and work out what percentage of the keywords is branded and what percentage of keywords are non-branded. As the keyword (not-provided) does not contain the brand name it will be included in non-branded keywords which means non-branded traffic will therefore be inflated. So how do we get a more accurate number?

 Method

This method is based on the assumption that signed-in searchers and other searchers behave in the same way.

Example:

Total Organic Search Traffic = 20,000 visits

Total Branded Keyword Traffic (excluding (not provided)) = 8,000 visits

Total Non-Branded Keyword Traffic (including (not-provided)) = 12,000 visits

(Not-Provided) Traffic = 2,000 visits

Step 1: Finding Total Non-Branded Traffic Excluding (not-provided) keyword.

Total Branded Keyword Traffic (including (not-provided)) – (Not-Provided) Traffic = Total Non-Branded Keyword Traffic (excluding (not-provided)).

12,000 visits – 2,000 visits = 10,000 visits

Step 2: Working out the percentage split between Branded and Non-Branded Traffic

Now you need to work out the percentage split between Branded and Non-Branded Traffic.

So Total Branded Keyword Traffic (excluding (not provided)) + Total Non-Branded Keyword Traffic (excluding (not-provided)) = Total Traffic (excluding (not-provided)

8,000 visits + 10,000 visits = 18,000 visits.

Branded Keyword Percentage  = (8,000/18000) * 100 = 44%

Non-Branded Keyword Percentage =  (10,000/18,000) *100 = 56%.

We now know that typically this website gets 44% Branded traffic and 56% Non-Branded traffic.

Step 3: Working out the Branded and Non-Branded Split of the (not-provided) Keywords

We can now take the (not-provided) keywords and split this number according to the split we have just calculated so;

(not-provided) branded traffic = 2,000 * 44% = 880 visits

(not-provided) non-branded traffic = 2,000 * 56% = 1120 visit.

Step 4: Work out actual Branded and Non-Branded Traffic Totals

Now we can work out a more accurate number of visits for branded and non-branded keywords.

Total Branded Keyword Traffic = 8,000 visits + 880 visits = 8880 visits.

Total Non-Branded Traffic = 10,000 + 1200 = 11200 visits.

We can now use these numbers to compare to last month or last year more accurately. This is obviously a quite simple solution to a small problem but as you dig deeper into your analytics data much bigger problems are bound to come up. How will we tackle these problems as natural search marketers? Will be become less keyword focussed and focus more on the keyword set as a whole?  I don’t know the answers to these questions but time will tell and because Google is the dominant search force it is up to us to adapt to the changes they make, whether this is an algorithm or keyword data change.

Have you found any challenges in reporting since Google started protecting its users’ searches? Let us know.

Adrian Jennings
Search Engineer

“Contrary to what you may read, peppering your form with nice buttons, color and typography and plenty of jQuery plugins will not make it usable. Indeed, in doing so, you would be addressing (in an unstructured way) only one third of what constitutes form usability”

This is the opening line in a very informative article about form usability – An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability (Justin Mifsud, November 2011, www.smashingmagazine.com).

In the article the author draws together research and insights from various fields – usability testing, field testing, website tracking, eye tracking, web analytics and actual complaints made to customer support personnel by unhappy users  – and leverages this to provide some clear guidelines for developers and solution architects to consider when designing forms.

He highlights the importance of usability on forms and defines the reason for the existence of the form for both the user and the business. The table below outlines that every form exists for one of three main reasons: commerce, community or productivity. The table translates each of these reasons into the user and business objectives that lie behind them.

Uses of forms, based on Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.

It is important to consider that forms can make a website usable or unusable, because they can stand in the way of the user achieving their goal or simplify the process for both the business and the user. Hence, forms need to be usable in order to help the user achieve that goal.

Justin tackles usability by addressing three aspects common in all forms. All these areas need to be planned and integrated to achieve a usable and successful form interface.

1. Relationship – Forms establish a relationship between the user and the organization.
2. Conversation - They establish a dialogue between the user and the organization.
3. Appearance – By the way they look, they establish a relationship and a conversation.

The guidelines provided in the article are a good starting point to embark on when designing forms for any website.

Justin’s research methods are similar to the process embarked on by the Conversion Services team at Clickthinking. We also use additional tools to perform detailed form analysis that is customised to specific forms on a website. These tools will indicate exactly where users drop off on forms, which fields are slowing the process down, or if users have difficulty understanding or submitting the form.  If you already have a form on your site and you are not sure if it is completely optimised to your user’s needs, then form analysis is recommended.Contact conversion@clickthinking.com for a more information about our services.

For the full article, see http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/08/extensive-guide-web-form-usability/.

It’s with great excitement that I write this, my first blog article for Scent Optimisation, to introduce Performance Email as part of our Conversion offering at Clickthinking. A dedicated focus on one of the most powerful digital marketing channels, Email Marketing, brings Clickthinking’s Global Service Offering to new heights and is sure to enable our Clients to continue the on-going digital journey with all of their valued customers.

Let’s be honest, Email Marketing isn’t new. But as we’ve seen from continued growth across all Global markets (with stable focus on Email Marketing as one of the top 3 areas of online budget investment), it certainly isn’t dead. And with the increasing shift to mobile in both first-world and emerging markets, the 81% growth in mobile email viewership published by ReturnPath earlier in 2011 shows that people are now consuming email anywhere and everywhere.

But what about those who predicted the death of email as social stole the front page digital headlines? As the dust clears and those who zealously foretold the end of [Email’s] days recant their predictions, we now see that Email and Social have emerged as two fantastic engagement channels that not only get along, but when paired together are the life of the party that keeps people talking long after the night has ended. So, it makes absolute sense that with our proven expertise in Search; Design and Optimisation; and Conversion and Analytics, that Email Marketing is included in our [and ultimately our Clients’] digital armoury.

Keeping Updated

In line with the focus on our Performance Email offering we’ll be publishing a monthly newsletter to all of our valued Clients, Partners and Followers, starting end of November. Within this publication we’ll not only provide you with Email-related insights, but we’ll also feature articles from our Search; Design and Conversion Teams. In the coming weeks and months we’ll also be adding regular posts to the latest Industry Insights, Case Studies, and relevant articles to our Scent Optimisation blog – so stay tuned and in touch.  If you’d like to subscribe to our RSS Feed to be the first to receive new articles and updates, you can also subscribe here.

If you’d like to learn more about our Performance Email offering, please don’t hesitate to contact us at emailmarketing@clickthinking.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Until next time, stay engaged!

Anne, Adrian and Rob, 3 of our “performance focussed” Clickthinkers attended the Adobe Omniture Summit in London, Europe’s biggest digital marketing conference. This year’s theme was all about social media and while most marketers focus on how to efficiently leverage social media in order to communicate with their customers, the real deal is to determine its actual value. The summit had a number of excellent guest speakers, sharing insights and value about brands, social, technical integrations and performance improvements within an extremely fast moving industry. An industry where customers are no longer only buyers of products, but are truly the centre of attention, empowered with choice through technology. And as much as customers are empowered with choice, we as marketers are empowered with access to data about our customers. We are in a powerful position to use this data to become better marketers!

Summit Mindmap

Anne Scharlow, Head of Conversion:

For me, one of the most impressive speakers was Shaun Smith (@ShaunSmith_CEM). According to him, being BOLD is the magic recipe in order to succeed in an environment where customers are increasingly marketing savvy and have the choice on where to spend their money. These consumers demand authenticity and consistency from their brands. Being BOLD means engaging and entertaining customers, rather than persuading them to buy a product, being honest and sticking to strong and sustainable brand promises.

Customer centricity is about designing products around your customers, and not to assume they will like what a commercial model will present them. When Richard Branson decided to move into the space industry and created Virgin Galactic, he was prepared to constantly fulfilling customers’ needs. The original space ship was not designed to allow weightlessness within the aircraft, but the new one will be. Because this is what they want and how you keep your clients engaged, make them part of the experience and ultimately make them participating in changing the future- with you.

We at Clickthinking design online experiences and focus on perfect customer journeys though the online environment. What I took away here, is that data becomes even more powerful. We love collecting data, review them carefully to unfold valuable insight and we are not ashamed to ask our online audience directly. Surveys, landing page optimizations, testing and solid web analytics tool implementation are key to truly understanding our clients’ clients online and pushing them in the centre of our business.

Rob Stanbridge, Head of Search

I was fascinated by Ann Lewnes, senior vice president of global marketing for Adobe gave an engaging talk that can be summarised as follows:
•Social is Everything
•Messaging is critical
•Marketing is the new finance
•It’s a great time to be in marketing!

There was also number of smaller breakout sessions. Key insights for me from these sessions relating to search marketing is the awareness that paid search and organic search campaigns should be managed together. To quote Josh Palau of razorfish “You don’t have paid goals and organic goals, you have search goals”. Furthermore, 60% of users do not know difference between paid & organic search. So it is critical to have a presence in both to ensure exposure to ensure brands receive share of voice within search results.

In terms of the conversion of paid vs. organic, there is a 4.2% average conversion rate for Organic against a 3.6% average conversion rate for Paid (Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Study).

For paid search campaign optimisation it is critical to give bounce rates of landing pages a higher focus when managing keywords. However it is still important to analyse keywords with high bounce rates within context of the buying cycle.

Another insights from the sessions is the requirement to have all changes to websites go through an iterative testing process to ensure continued improvement of conversion KPI’s.

Adrian Jennings, Organic Search Engineer

My personal highlight of the Omniture Summit was Brian Solis (@briansolis) who spoke passionately about engaging with your customers via social media. It is not about having a social media presence but rather offering your customers what they want through Social Media. 52% of people un-follow a brand on Twitter because the content becomes repetitive or boring over time. A further 41% of Twitter users un-follow a brand when they become overwhelmed by all the marketing posts.  After the summit I ordered his book called “Engage” and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

An interesting from one of the breakout sessions on search marketing is that organic search accounts for 10% of the search engine marketing spend but is responsible for 70% of the clicks.

My key take away from a search perspective was that we too often see paid and organic search as separate entities but these need to work together to achieve our search engine marketing goals.

View the Adobe Omniture Summit Highlights here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euJ0VOqSAeU

By Rob Stanbridge, Head of SEO

It is logical that a business website should reflect the growth of a company as it develops and changes over time. But major changes to certain aspects of your website can have a negative impact on others.

Client case study

Clickthinking was recently tasked with a SEO health check for a client’s website that was launched in March 2009. We found that overall traffic to the site steadily increased due to several offline campaigns and heightened brand awareness of the clients’ core products (see the graph below). Initially the website made good inroads into organic search engine listings.

After three months a decision was made to re-structure the product offering on the website and many of the content pages were changed or removed. This exercise was repeated again six months later.

The overall effect of these changes was extremely detrimental to our client’s organic search listings. The graph below shows organic traffic to the website for a sample of non brand related keywords. There are two distinct peaks followed by a drop off in traffic that coincides with the dates of the content reshuffle.

This serves as an excellent example of how critical it is to keep your website content consistent and accessible to search engines. Note that this does not refer to minor updates of certain pages, for example a News page. Adding fresh content is obviously crucial to keeping your visitors engaged and is also an important component of SEO. The example above refers to a major content swap where large sections of the site were changed or removed.

Best of both

There are smart ways to change or remove content without compromising search engine listings and potential traffic. Rather than completely substituting existing content, my recommendation would be to consult an expert and strategise how best to incorporate changes without damaging your online exposure.

The same principle applies when a website is due for a design overhaul. Two critical performance indicators in the success of design and content restructuring are how the search equity of the outgoing website pages is retained and transferred across to the new pages.

At Clickthinking we often come across website owners who acknowledge that their sites are dated in design and functionality, but are worried they will lose search engines listings with the launch of a new site. It’s important to strike a balance in your web strategy. Fresh content will do nothing to boost your online image if it doesn’t rank well with search engines, and a high search listing is no good if it takes users to an unattractive or outdated website.

The lesson to be learnt from our client’s case study is to always plan for major changes to a business website. If properly planned and executed, your website can stay ahead of the game and retain its historical search engine presence at the same time.

“We’re at the very beginning of a major shift in how we find, consume and interact with information. If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade.”

Steve Rubel – Advertising Age

Rubel in the above article uses statistics from Compete and Nielsen to motivate why he deems Facebook will become the dominant force in the next decade and how they will beef up their core features which will include email and search. No doubt, Media brokers (those with contracts to sell space on Facebook will jump on this information) and use it to excite advertisers into re-allocating their budgets.

What a load of nonsense! Google has been dominant because they match customers with relevant services and products better than anyone else via their search product. This is a service which advertisers are quite prepared to pay for and the ROI potential is very hard to beat.

Facebook on the other hand plays in a space which has proven very difficult to monetise. Once in a blue moon, I come across a campaign on Facebook that offers any value to the advertiser. This is definitely the exception rather than the rule. Until this changes, I think its preposterous to spin predictions about it being the next big commercial dominant player.

Sorry Steve, I’ve buried this article in the bucket with the ones that predicted that Geocities, AOL, Myspace…would become the next big thing

Today,  Joanne Reidy, our creative director, stumbled across the fascinating existence of a South African catalogue website that give you absolutely NO way to purchase from them. I was hoping somebody can help us find the owner of the following website so that we can point the severity of the error out to them. And, of course, the simplicity of fixing the problem.

The story in short: The website is listed in Google for “corporate gifts”:

We click through to the home page:

Evaluating it from a usability perspective …. so far so good:
-    The landing page has relevant introduction copy
-    The gifts are organised into categories that make sense (although perhaps too many of them)
-    The dates on the catalogues are recent.

Joanne opted for the “funky finds” category as she was looking for notebooks to brand as corporate gifts. She lands on a typical CATEGORY PAGE. Although it isn’t the best example of a page optimised to aid simple comparison.

Scrolling-and-scanning she quickly spots the right product and click to the DETAIL PAGE:

There are no calls to action on the detail page!

Well we didn’t want to give up there but even putting our backs into it we couldn’t locate any contact details whatsoever on the entire site. Not even the name of the person/company responsible for the site. Nothing!

Did we miss something? Do they not want people to buy from them? Or is there another mysterious reason for this? Can anybody help?

For the second installment of the Improving conversion series we use analytics data for phinda.com, another lodge from andBeyond that we launched on the same day as Kwandwe.  All the lodge sites have the same content structure and page layout, only the content differs.

FIVE SECOND TEST

Following on from our first conversion post we review the relevance of the fivesecondtest.

The top clicks from the home page for 1 Jan 2010 to 5 Feb 2010 were:

FINDING: As suspected there weren’t any relationship between the fivesecondtest results and the actual behaviour of visitors. Although the Africa and India links were immediately noticed very few people clicked on it.

PATH ANALYSIS

Most analytics tools offer numerous reports to evaluate typical visitor paths. These types of reports are problematic to interpret.  A common mistake is to look for an ideal path to conversion. There is no such thing!  Individuals with a variety of needs, personalities and levels of knowledge are visiting your site.

A better approach is to evaluate bounces and exits for each step to identify conversion opportunties. We start with our Top landing page:

1. Landing page:
•    68% of traffic enters via the home page
•    We are happy with the 33% bounce rate. It is well above category average.

2. Second page:
We selected the Path Finder report from to evaluate the performance of the second page.

Please note: we couldn’t simply pull the exit rate report for these pages it would not have given us the performance of the page as STEP 2 in a journey.

Entrance -> Landing page -> SECOND PAGE -> Exit

We found that the Safari-lodges page performs the best as a second page from the home page. Only 10% left.  Although the exit rate of the other pages is also within acceptable margins we will focus on the Map page to identify conversion improvement opportunities for the next post in the series.

A final test for the second page performance is to see which page is most often the second step in a path that led to a conversion:

The winner is Safari-lodges with 30% and then Specials with 25%. Again it looks like the Map page is best reviewed for conversion opportunity.