The Clickthinking Blog | Scent Optimisation

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.

Today the team at Clickthinking launched the Dontbeapassenger.com campaign. Optimal Energy, South Africa’s first and only electric car manufacturer is getting ready to bring the Joule to South African roads. With this comes a fun and exciting way to get people talking about the amazing things that South Africa has achieved and the role we can play in limiting greenhouse gases.

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