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

“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/.

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.

Yesterday we launched the new kwandwereserve.com website. It features the Kwandwe safari lodges owned and operated by our client &Beyond. The purpose of the site is to generate qualified leads for the business.

As a result converting visits to enquiries is of critical importance to them.

Priority placement and prominence of the various elements on a landing page plays an important role in the conversion success of a website. A good landing page helps visitors differentiate quickly what the next step to their goal is. It should guide them effectively to the required information.

We came across a free tool recently that helps you evaluate what the most prominent items on your landing page are. It is called the fivesecondtest.

The free version of the tool lets you run two types of tests on 15 people each:

1. Memory test – what are the five things people remember when they see your page for 5 seconds?

2. Click test – what do they click on if they have only 5 seconds?

Finding:

In our opinion the memory test provides a good indication of what catches the eye when a page is scanned. The results from the Kwandwereserve.com test highlighted that the top utility links to the greater &Beyond sites (Africa and India) are potentially too prominent compared to the main navigation. We also noted that the word LODGE wasn’t mentioned which is the primary focus of the site.

However for the click test we would hesitate to respond to the results in isolation. Five seconds isn’t enough time to read the navigational options and therefore the majority of clicks would be on images. Also the clicks for this test aren’t carried out with a particular task in mind which actually renders the results meaningless. The memory test provides qualitative information which works better with the small sample size.

The next step in our conversion optimisation process is to monitor the analytics for real user behaviour from the landing page. We’ll cover our findings in the next post: Improving conversion #2

Or do they?

Recently, Pringles & Bridge Worldwide won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes for a banner creative. You can view & interact with the banner here.

What was cool? The banners unique in many ways.

1. The concept did not depend on flashing graphic and rich media execution to disrupt consumers.
2. No competition or incentives to win in an attempt to fancy dress click through rates.
3. Subtle call to action to commence journey.
4. The engagement and interaction starts and ends in the banner environment.
5. Clever and whacky dialogue retaining the respondents attention.

Did it achieve it’s results?

Much will depend on the campaign objectives and how the Agency measured the interactions. Simply reporting on click-throughs could well be misleading.