MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

We’re all familiar with friction as the force that tends to slow down moving objects. The amount of friction an object experiences is a factor of the medium through which it is moving. Well, we can think of the movement of visitors through the purchase process of our websites in much the same way.

As a visitor moves through the buy process of a commercial website, the experience can be characterized by anything from a smooth and seemingly effortless progression from offer to “Thank you,” to that of a frustrating, confusing and exhausting death march ending in order abandonment. The difference lies in Sales Process “Friction.”

Friction, in this sense, does not exist on the webpage, but rather in the mind of the consumer, and is defined as Psychological resistance to a given element in the sales process. Of course the greater the Friction experienced by the visitors, the lower the probability of conversion.

The good news is that, among the factors that determine conversion probability, Friction is among the easiest and cheapest to fix. And efforts to reduce Friction often pay off with a disproportionately high return in conversion rate increase.

There are two primary types or components of Friction and for each there are some simple and inexpensive methods you can use to make them as small as possible for your product and your sales process.

In the recent MarketinExperiments research brief “Landing Page Optimization Tested: Big Conversion Gains from a Little Scissors & Grease”, we explored the nature and principles of Sales Process Friction in detail, using case studies with four different companies across different industries, and revealed specific ways that you can apply those principles to increase conversion for your own web pages.

Then, to see how Friction fits into the big picture of website conversion, you can visit the MarketingExperiments Journal website and explore the full Site Conversion collection of research briefs (categories in the left navigation bar), or consider taking either of the Landing Page Optimization professional certification courses for the most structured, in-depth and comprehensive coverage available.

Site Design

By Carlos A. Espitia

Analyst, Marketing Experiments

This is a topic that I always thought of as online marketing common sense. Just like in any other marketing effort, we always (or should) want to know who our customers are, what they are buying, and how they are finding us. Much to my surprise, many online merchants do not have proper analytics in place, and those that do, often don’t understand what to make of them.

I was at a conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, speaking to about one hundred online merchants concerning ways to optimize their home pages, offer pages, and purchase paths. My presentation included Marketing Experiments’ best practices, principles of online testing and our conversion formula (C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) – 2A) . When I finished my first presentation, I quickly realized that I had wrongly presumed that everyone in the room understood the importance of understanding their site’s metrics. I had been talking about A/B split testing, sequential testing, conversion, and other rudimentary online marketing topics, not realizing that more than half my audience didn’t have a solid analytics package built into their site. In fact, for most, the only numbers that they were concerned with was how much they were spending on PPC and what their revenue was each month. While these two numbers are important, alone they do not help us squeeze more profit from our websites.

Read more…

Marketing Insights

By Bob Kemper

Director of Operations,
Marketing Experiments

Usability video testing involves video recording a user going through a specific process for a website (e.g. an order). The aim is to observe how people behave in an actual site encounter situation, so that developers can recognize design and/or usability problems with the website. Techniques popularly used to gather data during a usability video test include eye tracking and capturing user narrative as they “think aloud”.

An effective interative usability study using recorded video can reveal a wide variety of problems, such as confusing or contradictory signals, off-page links or other elements that interrupt the primary objective flow, invalid assumptions about prior familiarity with technical or product-related terms, or page elements that increase customer anxiety or friction.

There are many excellent information sources on usability testing methods and tools. One we have found especially thorough and useful is the “Testing Methods and Tools” page hosted by the University of Maryland.

You can learn more about website optimization for conversion, using usability testing and a host of other testing methods, at the MarketingExperiments Journal through the Site Conversion collection of Journal Research Briefs (categories in the left navigation bar).

Site Design

By Mike Clowe

Research Analyst,
Marketing Experiments

How important is it to provide credentials on the Web? The Web is an essentially anonymous media. Businesses claim to be whatever they want, many times without any proof at all.

In the wake of the Wikipedia scandals, where two of their top contributors were found to be grossly misrepresenting themselves, it is becoming increasingly important to provide credentials to prove what you claim to be is actually who you are. The Wikipedia incident was just an example of what is happening throughout the internet. As the online world and the off-line world come closer together, people are starting to check claims made on the internet against the facts.

Wikipedia will come out of this just fine. They will ask their authors to identify themselves, but other than that nothing will change. Now imagine if this had happened to an online retailer. They would be out of business. The biggest fear many online consumers have is getting cheated. This is why many businesses use credibility indicators and have live operators to address customers’ fears — to build trust. All of that trust can be destroyed by one false claim.

It all comes down to Transparent Marketing. As businesses we need to represent ourselves fairly and honestly to our customers. Not only that but we need to provide clear and concise proof that what we say is true. The age anonymity on the web is coming to an end.

We have written an article on Transparent Marketing with additional examples and information about how you can convey trust with your customers. Click here to read more about Transparent Marketing.

Credibility Indicators

By Bob Kemper

Director of Operations,
Marketing Experiments

When you visit many websites, contextual advertisements gaudily frame the content that you came to find. They form banner ads at the top or towers along the sides and seem to shout to you from the sidelines to abandon what you came to see and click on them instead. Based upon our own research experience, and upon anecdotal reports from others, click through rates from these ads are low… typically a fraction of one percent.

So, why are so few content seekers clicking on these ads? We don’t have a definitive answer to this question, but we do know from our tests that ads which looked “native” to the site or “blend in” received noticeably higher click through rates.

One contributing factor is the growing threat of computer viruses and adware which makes many people reluctant to click on anything that they didn’t specifically request. Others may not even “see” the ads per se. In a variation of banner blindness, elements of a page to which we came for specific purpose, such as a game score or How-to home repair article, are filtered subconsciously as “not what I came for”.

The primary goal of these contextual (a.k.a. content) ads is to garner a click, not to close a sale; this is the job of the landing page. With this in mind, ads that appear native to the site may pass through the “not what I came for” filter and better serve the central purpose of contextual advertising – sparking enough curiosity from a person interested in an offer-related topic to garner a click.

In a recent Web Clinic, Marketing Experiments shared the findings of three tests on “ad nativity” to study why ads that blended in with the content of a site consistently outperformed traditional ads that stood out from their surrounding content. An audio recording of the web clinic and the complete Journal Brief “How Matching Ad Design to Context Improved Conversion by 127%” is now available at the Marketing Experiments Journal.

Internet Marketing Strategy

MySpace has filed suit against Scott Richter, CEO of Media Breakaway, claiming he and his company were actively “spamming” millions of MySpace users in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and other federal and California state statutes. The suit seeks both monetary damages and a permanent injunction barring Richter and his companies from MySpace.

This comes as a shock to the hundreds of affiliate marketers and networks that have been using MySpace as a means of getting virtually free traffic to completely lead-based offers.

As online social networking websites have grown in popularity, many spammers have sought get in on the action and capitalize on the high volume of free traffic. But, just how far spammers are willing to go in this quest remains unknown.

Some of the common tactics spammers are using include sending ad-based bulletins, requesting thousands of friends via software robots, and even stealing members’ passwords (known as phishing) to promote their offers. Already, MySpace.com has implemented a variety of filters that attempt to slow the use of robots, and are aggresively deleting “spam accounts” when they are discovered.

And so, it seems the social networks have been forced to join the epic battle between spammers and online service providers by struggling to develop effective measures to deter spammers while avoiding obtrusive obstacles to free expression among legitimate members.

To read more about SPAM and how it affects markets and marketing professionals, visit the MarketingExperiments Journal

-Robert

Internet Marketing News