How do you know if your website is working?

If you’re not using web analytics to continuously learn and improve your website’s marketing results you’re marketing with a bag over your head.

The problem with analytics in most companies is that they don’t know what to do with all the data they can pull from the plethora of robust web analytics vendors on the market.

Where should online marketers start? Page views, unique visitors, leads, top exit pages, etc. it can all be overwhelming and daunting just to stay on top of and report much less use all of that information to improve your marketing results and be the superstar of the next Monday morning meeting.

The data in and of itself is useless, unless you:

1. Establish Key Performance Indicators that are aligned with your unique business bottom line goals.
2. Have a plan to produce measurable results from your web analytics.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) allow you to see at a glance the current state of your web site as it relates to your specific business. Each business is different and requires a unique set of KPI’s that are relevant to achieving the business objectives you’re accountable for.

Your KPI’s are directly tied to a continuous improvement process. The measurement of your desired results against current conditions and changing the direction of ebbs and flows over time to increase your results is what the continuous improvement process is all about. Success in optimizing your web site is based on incremental and constant improvements. A website, unlike print collateral is never really finished. Web design is organic and flows back and forth constantly improving and learning from your unique visitors.

The combination of web analytics and persuasive web design is where measurable results are formed. Persuasive web design guides users, influences human behavior and motivates your visitors to take action that is measurable through web analytics.

Persuasive design is both visual and verbal. Visual persuasion successfully guides your visitors through your site by using persuasive principals to compel visitors to take more action more often. Some ways visual persuasion accomplishes this is by removing roadblocks, improving visual communication and enhancing the usability of your site resulting in a better user experience with your company brand and your website.

Verbal persuasion provides the right content at the right time in the right way to effectively encourage visitors to take action on your site. Content on your site designed around a persuasive path touches on a visual mental image within the imagination of your prospects. Compelling verbs, attention-grabbing nouns and spell binding adjectives will pull your readers through a persuasive pathway, at each step bringing them closer to closing the action that meets your business goals.

Are you using the most important page on your website?

What’s the most important page on any website?

Most people think the home page of their site is the most important, and therefore it has to be the most persuasive to pull visitors in towards conversion, but most people would be wrong. Although the home page is where most internal stakeholders attention is and where most of the time will be spent on any average web design project, it is actually not the most important page of your site. Unfortunately more hours and debate, not to mention opinions will be wasted around this one single page since everyone from each department wants a piece of it. If only the internal stakeholders knew all their concerns were surrounding a page that doesn’t even rank in the top five of importance. The reason for this has to do with how sales works.



Does your website have a sales formula?

Any good sales person knows the “AIDA” formula, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. First get your prospects attention, peak their interest for your product, create a desire around their needs and finally get them to take action. The online equivalent of the AIDA formula puts the home page at the interest stage. Attention would be your promotions vehicle used to generate awareness and bring visitors to your site. At the interest stage of the sales funnel your prospect has more than likely arrived at your home page and are scanning the page to see if there is anything relevant to them. Once they find that nugget of relevance they click and poof they’re gone from the home page. Generally the home page has the least amount of time spent on the page and is the least engaging. Think of it like this, a website home page is the front door to your business it’s only purpose is to get prospects to enter to engage with the real content on the inside. It is no more than a hotel lobby, it sets the tone provides an impression and the helpful clerk behind the counter tells you how to get to your suite upstairs. Once upstairs you kick off your shoes fix a drink from the in room bar and relax in chair on the balcony before you unpack. This is where you want to be not the home page.



But what about persuasion?

Continuing the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action formula you can easily see how the interior pages of your site, like your product detail pages are where you create desire in your prospect, these pages are more important than your home page but still are not the most important or most persuasive pages on your site. It is in the desire stage where your prospects are thinking about buying.

On the web your prospects need to explore, the job of your site is to provide them with the tools they need to do this with the least amount to resistance possible. Resistance in this case would be anything that gets in their way from completing their task. This can come in the form of poor usability practices, weak navigation, and pages that have not been designed around your specific prospect. Aligning your prospects needs with the needs of your business is what persuasive design is all about.

The further your prospect gets in the sales funnel the more valuable they become because they are closer to converting into a customer. Therefore the more important pages on your website are the pages that are further into your site, where the customer has chosen to be. These interior pages are where persuasive design can be fully leveraged in order to get the most bang for your buck.



The most important page on your website

The most valuable page on any website is the thank you page, the page that your customer see after completing a transaction. A transaction can include anything from completing a contact form, a registration page or an online purchase. The thank you page is also the most persuasive but often overlooked. At this point your customer is at the furthest point into the sales funnel, they have raised their hand and taken action. All to often this page says nothing more to the customer other than Thank you. A this point your website has the best opportunity to be persuasive.

Persuasive Online Forms

Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Regents’ Professor of Psychology Robert B, Cialdini, Ph.D. describes in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion the principal of human automatic action demonstrated in an experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer.

Here’s a passage from the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B, Cialdini, Ph.D.

A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine; Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The Effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: 94% of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60% of those asked complied.

This example works well in the real world where we can interact with someone directly but can this translate to the online equivalent human automatic action?

On a website the need for reassurance is even higher because of the lack of direct human interaction. The nature of the web puts the user in control and when that control is challenged users tend to bail out since there’s no guilt holding them back. They are not walking away from an actual person after all.

The cutting in line experiment is the online equivalent of when a company form page or registration page asks for information that may be beyond what the user is comfortable with providing or information that has nothing to do with the expectations of the task. For example why ask for your mailing address if you’re just signing up for a free online membership? The user has no expectation to receive anything in the mail and therefore assumes they just want to send him or her junk mail or worse yet sell his address to several other people who want to ensure the mailman has plenty to stuff in his box.

The lessons learned on persuasion in the experiment can be easily adapted to this online situation and as a result improve the conversion rate of all online forms. If in the real world conversion went up 34% we can at least expect an equivalent online.

Below is an example of how the lesson of human automatic action can be leveraged by adding a simple reason why to a contact page.





In the example rather than simply asking for information a bit of verbal persuasion is used to reassure and explain why the user should be filling in his valuable information.

This simple act of explaining, “Entering a URL allows us to review your site so that we can begin thinking about improving it before we speak to you.” Not only provides a human level of comfort but also directly relates how entering this information will be beneficial to the user filling out the form. “…so that we can begin thinking about improving it before we speak to you.”

Testing your site with the Google Website Optimizer

Posted by: Creative Thirst

Have you ever wondered which image would motivate your users to take action? Would the image of the product peek the interest of your web visitors or would more visitors buy if they saw your product in it’s natural environment and in use by people just like them? Or is the offer really he most important thing? Or maybe it’s just the price? Realistically it’s a combination of all of these things and more, which is the basis of persuasive design.

Well you can stop wondering because Google has just released a new tool called the Website Optimizer which helps you improve the effectiveness of your website in getting a return on your investment, currently the Optimizer is still in the beta stage ( as of April 2007) but sign-ups are open. What the Optimizer allows internet marketers to do is test different versions of a landing page to determine what the most effective elements are or combination of elements. This allows design to be used strategically enabling your site to motivate your web users and achieve higher conversion rates.

Essentially the Optimizer is a free A/B Testing tool where you can set up different versions of a landing page. On each version you can test different headlines, images, and text to examine which page has a higher performance for your specific visitors.

Once data on all the different versions in your test have been gathered Google presents the results in the form of a combination report and a page section report. Each report provides different insight into how responsive your visitors are to the combination of tested elements on your site. With this knowledge you can learn two things. First, what elements work and which don’t work for your customers. This newfound knowledge can be leveraged on future marketing campaigns for all areas of your brand communications. Additionally, by learning how well a particular combination of design elements performed in a real world environment you can then easily develop a more successful landingpage and maximize your marketing results by determining what will best attract your unique users and lead them to convert on your site.

The sample combination report below shows the performance results for several combinations of test pages for content as a whole in comparison of the original control page design.



The sample page section report below in contrast focuses on which variations to each page section performed best.