As Scott puts it:

With the prices as high as they are right now, I think we’ve reached the tipping point. The question then, for online retailers, is whether you make “buy online, free shipping, save money on gas” part of your marketing message. Is it helpful to remind people that they are spending so much money on gas?”

Commenting on the post, one pureplay retailer reported modest success with a pain-at-the-pump email campaign. Other reactions ranged from enthusiastic embraces of this tactic to concern that that such messaging could hurt the bricks-and mortar arms of multichannel retailers, or simply serve as an unintended reminder that purse strings should be tightened due to the rising cost of fuel.

I think the “reminder” piece is the crux of the biscuit. There’s already some early research suggesting that rising gas prices could be good for e-commerce. And if you’ve done any direct selling, you’ve probably learned that expressing empathy for your prospect’s misfortune can build rapport that leads to the sale.

But there’s a difference between echoing bad news as you make your pitch (”You’re broken? Bummer, dude. Can I help?”) and being the one to bring up the sore subject (”Dude, You Are Broken. Can I help?)

So are marketers wise to introduce (or re-introduce) unpleasant topics? I read the Shop.org post the same day I was thumbing through a new book co-authored by Robert Cialdini. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive is a bit lightweight when compared to Cialdini’s classic Influence, but still offers several useful nuggets.

Here’s what “Yes!” has to say about the ability of fear to persuade:

For the most part, research has demonstrated that fear-arousing communications usually stimulate the audience to take action to reduce the threat. However this general rule has one important exception: When the fear-producing message describes danger but the audience is not told of clear specific, effective means of reducing the danger, they may deal with the fear by blocking out the message or denying that it applies to them.”

If a retailer reminds a prospect about soaring gas prices and the economic crunch, will “no driving and free shipping” (plus desired product, plus other components of the retailer’s value prop) serve as sufficient means of “reducing the danger” or will the shopper simply block out the entire pitch, the prescribed remedy as well as the irritant?

As one marketer pointed out in the Shop.org thread, this is all certainly worth a test. Outcomes of such experiments will no doubt vary by product category and site, and I’d predict that dramatic results are likely to occur sooner, not later: if images of gas pumps become ubiquitous in homepage banners and email leads, shoppers may ultimately become desensitized and the fuel crunch could become just another themed promo opportunity, like “Memorial Day Savings” and “Back to School.”

Does that make me sound a bit jaded? I’m not, but I guess I am biased: beyond groceries, I already do just about all my shopping online.

Site search is a conversation, a chance to listen to your customer and respond. Tune it up, and it has the potential to be one of the most ROI-positive investments you’ll make in your site. Is your site search providing maximum return? To answer this question, let’s:

• Understand why site search is unique among your website features and why this matters.
• See if your site search is primed to help your visitor find, choose, and buy.
• Discover the metrics you need to evaluate your site search’s performance.
• Learn the most important questions to ask when shopping for a site search solution.

What makes site search different?

To understand the power of well-tuned site-search on an online retail site, consider how this feature differs from its counterpart: site navigation.

Take a look at your homepage. Now, count the navigational links on the page: top nav, left nav, and footer. Expand your dynamic menus. Count your category links, your featured product links, the links to editorial and customer service. How many do you have?

For a large-scale online retailer — — it’s not unusual for this number to approach 50. That’s 50 attempts to provide a visitor with exactly what she needs to get started on her shopping quest, 50 attempts to be helpful.

The problem is that those 50 links all represent just one point of view: yours — the site owner’s. To understand what your customer really wants and the language she uses to describe it, you need to pay attention to the empty box on the page — your site search.

As your product selection and your site become deeper and broader, your navigation becomes more detailed and more complex. And that means the alternative your site search provides becomes more crucial.

The right results can deliver the goods to the on-a-mission customer who knows exactly what she wants, or save the sale for a browsing customer who’s become overwhelmed. So while site search may not represent your point of view, it’s worthy of your attention.

When we Google search, success is easily defined: Scanning the results page, we need to see text links that seem likely to lead to relevant information. But shopping search is different. Relevance still matters, but it’s not enough.

Site search needs to help your visitor choose and buy, as well as find. Success is about more than the best possible algorithm. Presentation, merchandising, available help and refinements all make a difference.

Try a self-eval of the experience site search offers on your site.

How easy is it to find the search box? Sounds basic, but it’s critical. Successful search boxes are clearly labeled “Search.” They offer a large form field and a clearly labeled submit button. They’re found in a standard location at the top of the page, close to your primary navigation.

Avoid confusing your visitors by placing your search box too close to that other form field on the page — your e-mail sign-up box.

Site-search results pages: Type in some terms terms pulled from the list of your site’s top 50 searches and take a critical look at the pages your site returns.

• Are the results introduced by a clear scannable headline, labeled as search results and echoing the search term?
• Are the results accurate and relevant, or is your tool casting a net that’s too wide or too narrow?
• Is the ordering of the results logical, learnable and consistent? Easy to change?
• Do your guided navigation links offer useful refinements that differentiate products and help your shopper choose, or are they long lists of features pulled straight from your internal database or manufacturer’s owner’s manual?
• Is your search smart enough to avoid letting the shopper paint herself into a corner, or can choosing multiple refinements lead to a “sorry, no matching products” message?
• Do your search results page cater to more than one type of shopper? Some shoppers like guided navigation, others respond to traditional merchandising tactics such as hero product recommendations.
• Do any searches return “dead end” no results pages? Or does the site always suggest alternatives when no matching product is found?
• Do the pages provide clearly visible contact info for help from real people, or does “Search Help” consist of long blocks of “how to search” text, more likely to frustrate your shopper than actually be read?
• Do search results pages function as strong entry pages to your site? Do they showcase the reasons to buy from you — and not from your competitors?

Measuring Success

Because site search provides rich, straight-from-the-customer’s mouth (or keyboard) data, you need to include it within your ongoing site analytics work.

Here are 15 useful KPIs and metrics for tracking your progress with site search.

1. % conversions / searching visitors
2. $ /searching visitor
3. % search exits
4. Customer satisfaction with site search
5. Top phrases searched
6. Top categories searched
7. Top concepts searched
8. Top queries with no results
9. Top queries w/ no results clicked
10. Pages where searches begin…and end
11. Top queries resulting in paging
12. Top queries resulting in additional searches
13. Top (and bottom) attributes utilized (guided nav)
14. Top spelling corrections
15. Segmentation: top searches for high $ customers; top searches for best external search keywords etc.

With a tip of the hat to Avinash Kaushik, notice that the first four items on the list are outcomes — they report on what your site search ultimately makes happen — measured in conversions, dollars and exits, as well as customer satisfaction. To move each of these outcomes in the right direction requires that you consistently tune and improve your site search based on the supporting metrics that round out the list.

For example, a high percentage of site exits on a given search term could be attributed to something obvious — say, no matching results. But it could also be caused by poor relevance, indicated by pages with no results clicked.

Mining your site-search analytics will also allow you to make proactive choices about your site navigation, content and design. Review lists of popular searches to understand the language your customer uses to describe your products, and then reflect this language in your links and copy.

Shopping for a site-search solution

If you’re responsible for the customer experience or merchandising on your site, you may find yourself charged with choosing software for your company’s next generation of site search.

To prepare and shop wisely, one of the best things you can do is to understand exactly what needs to happen after the contract is signed. Speaking generally, there are several steps common to implementing any site- search system.

1. Integrate the search application with your data.
   For a retailer, that’s the product catalog and supporting content.
2. Tune the initial results.
   Net neither too narrow nor too wide.
3. Integrate with your e-commerce platform.
   So people can buy stuff.
4. Design your interface.
   Most top-tier solutions provide templates — they may or may not suit your needs.
5. Define and apply business rules.
   Decide which offers, featured products, etc are presented based on which customer actions.
6. Define metrics and integrate reporting.
   See the list above
7. Set up the people processes.
   Figure out who’s going to get things running, keep it going, and make it sing.

Now, think Groundhog Day: If you’re serious about optimizing your site search, you’re not just taking those seven steps once; you’re taking them over and over and over again. Your site search needs to keep pace with changes to your product assortment, your offers, the design of your site, and findings from your analytics.

Mike Moran, IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM’s OmniFind search and text analytics products, points out that retailers often overlook a critical factor when selecting site-search software: the ease with which the system can be continually modified to meet the site’s needs. Moran sees rapid experimentation as fundamental to online marketing success — his book Do It Wrong Quickly is a practical handbook on the subject — and he sees ongoing iteration as necessary for success with site search, too.

“Site owners need to look at a potential solution and ask, How am I going to change this on day 2? On week 7? Six months from now and a year from now? Who’s going to do that work, and what kind of operational relationships and training will be needed?” So as you shop for site search, ask each vendor, or the team building your in-house system: “How do we change it, and who’s going to do it?”

Have any tips or “a-ha-s” you’ve discovered optimizing your own site search? Please share them with our readers. May your site search sell!

If you’ve ever wondered how Google decides questions ranging from how many results to serve on a page, to the amount of whitespace with which to pad the logo and the most effective color with which to tint the sponsored link box at the top of the page, the answer, not surprisingly, is A/B split testing.

Among the points Barry found most interesting are these 3:

* The more search results per page, the less people search
The reason? Less search results mean faster returned results.
* 30 results per page would result in 20% less searches when compared to 10 results per page.
* Google cut the bloat out of Google Maps and noticed a 30% increase in usage

The implication is clear: When it comes to Website Effectiveness, your site’s speed matters, a lot.

You’ll find more nuggets Mayer shared about Google’s design process in the News.com article: We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment.

Because I really do consider that particular interface question for at least a moment nearly every time I swipe my card, I smiled when I saw that Cancel/OK Vs. OK/ Cancel is the subject of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column this week. Turns out that this is a question that nags at many developers, and that Jakob quite correctly puts in perspective:

In cases like this, it often doesn’t matter what you do. Either choice has good arguments in its favor, and no choice is likely to cause usability catastrophes.

Jakob points out that some interface choices matter a great deal more than others, and when in doubt it’s best to simply follow the norm for the platform in question. If you’re designing a desktop Windows app, follow those conventions. Designing for a Mac, follow Apple’s GUI standards:

Applying consistent design that follows user expectations saves people much more time (and many more mistakes) than doing something that might be a tiny bit more optimal for your application, but introduces an inconsistency.

Amen to that. And Jakob’s post is worth a close read for subtleties these quotes don’t capture. But I’d also venture another reason or two that cancel/ok (and other micro-usability puzzles) merit only so much attention.

Back at the supermarket, I swipe my credit card because I need the milk and I need the veggies. But most of us selling stuff online, are we lucky enough to offer something truly necessary? And for that matter, are we lucky enough to be the only site selling it?

You might sell fun stuff, cool stuff, relaxing stuff– but odds are that to one degree or another, the product you offer has been commoditized. Presenting that product in the most user-friendly, standards-compliant context is vital– but it’s often not enough to get the sale.

In our firm’s work making websites more effective, we find that embracing design and usability conventions is absolutely foundational, but is still only 1, critical dimension of success. What else matters? Giving people a reason to click that well-placed, intuitively labeled button.

How well does each page of your site convey your unique selling proposition? How effectively does your content seed the sale? Does each click forward maintain shopping scent? Do your pages persuade? Do they increase confidence and provide reassurance at the junctures that matter? Start with design and usability conventions, and then give your customer compelling reasons to click and buy. From you.

Background: I’m a voracious reader. I like playing with technology. I am not usually an early-adopter when it comes to gadgets. I’m involved in a good deal of website usability work at RKG, so I’m highly attuned to user interface design.

My review: two thumbs up.

The Kindle works simply, and it simply works. That is high praise from a UI geek.

Spolsky says, “Something is usable when it behaves exactly as expected.” A high bar, and even higher when applied to a new category of device where user conventions aren’t established. The Kindle easily beats it.

So what have I been reading? Yesterday I picked up Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres (even though I already own the hardback!) and Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar by Gary Erickson.

I read into the evening and am halfway through Raising the Bar. (Excellent book — recommended.) That’s roughly 150 conventional pages. No problems with eye strain, no problems with learning or using the UI.

Arthur C. Clarke observed that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke was right, but here’s Alan’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law: we’ve become so anesthetized by the rapid pace of technological evolution that

Clarke’s “magic” fades to commonplace in 5 minutes.

Really. The Kindle is an absolutely incredible technological feat on many levels. The display is really good. It is mind blowing to think about the breadth of its library.

I showed the device to about a dozen people yesterday. Most had never heard of the Kindle until I handed it to them. All have found the Kindle amazing, remarkable, even magical.

And after each person played with it for several minutes, by the end of that short interval, each fully accepted the whole idea — that is, an electronic reading device with sharp digital ink with wireless access and one-click shopping and 200 on-board books — to be utterly normal and commonplace. Within minutes. Wow.

Here are my impressions of the device, in no particular order.

Kindle Elements Which Work Really Well

• The screen and the digital ink — quality, resolution
• The UI makes sense — no learning curve
• Highlighting and adding notes — very elegant to set, review, search, and unset
• The ergonomics of the physical device, placement of buttons
• On-Kindle search: any phrase across all texts on device
• It holds your page in each book — when you return, you’re right where you left it
• You can “turn down” or “dog-ear” the corners of pages
• The little keyboard is decent
• The fact it connects like a cell phone, and you don’t have to mess with WiFi and USB cables
• Battery life seems strong
• Kindle Store: integration with Amazon reviews and ratings, and the ease of purchase (dangerously easy — online retailers take careful note! Seriously)
• The speed at which a purchased book arrives
• The pretty screen saver pictures
• Hyperlinks work, bringing up the web page on the Kindle browser
• The leather case
• The silver digital ink in the long right scroll bar
• The animations used in the long right scroll bar
• The packaging and out-of-the-box experience

Kindle Rough Edges

• The “black flash” on each page turn
• At the smallest font setting, the letters aren’t sharp enough
• If not using the smallest font setting, a fast reader needs to flip pages really frequently
• Pictures are fuzzy and low quality
• Not sure how to zoom in on an image
• Connecting to Kindle Store is slow
• Searching Kindle Store is slow
• Sometimes images on search results are delayed
• On pages the text rises and falls below baseline (see Raising the Bar, location 876-881, “…but as we cycled we noticed lots of small roads…”)
• If the connection to the store or web is slow, and you use the time to go back to reading, each “still trying to connect” interrupt yanks you away from your reading back to the main menu
• Only black-and-white, no color
• The “Amazon has gagged us and so we can’t answer questions about the Kindle” email responses I got from customer support at NowNow. Dumb.

This review is after having the device for less than 24 hours. I’ll try to make a note to come back and give my impressions in a few weeks — will I find the Kindle has become indispensable, or just an occasional-use gadget? Time will tell.

Categories Of All Known Animals

1. Those that belong to the Emperor;
2. Embalmed ones;
3. Those that are trained;
4. Suckling pigs;
5. Mermaids;
6. Fabulous ones;
7. Stray dogs;
8. Those that are included in this classification;
9. Those that tremble as if they were mad;
10. Innumerable ones;
11. Those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush;
12. Those that have just broken the flower vase;
13. Those that from a distance resemble flies.

from the 1668 Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, as per Jorge Luis Borges

In our web effectiveness practice, we help online retailers make their sites more usable and more likely to convert visitors into buyers.

One theme that comes up repeatedly is categorization. How to categorize and present major navbar links. How to categorize and present subnav links. How to categorize and present site search results. And so on.

Your current categories make perfect sense to you, the site owner. After all, you live and breathe your merchandise, and you know your site like the back of your hand. Your categories and taxonomy reflect your intimacy with the subject.

But your categories might be less than clear to your users. Your web analytics reports likely show that most of your visitors bounce in for just a page or two and then leave. Most of your visitors have neither the time nor the interest to give much thought your categories. Your categories must be blatantly and instantly clear to them. To them, not to you.

How can you improve your navigation, categories, and product taxonomies?

Card sorting can reveal sensible categories for products and navigation. Guerilla user testing can show where users stumble. Paper prototyping and low-fi mockups can offer cheap validation before developing more costly production UI code. And mining your site search results can reveal gaps between how visitors describe what they want and how your site describes what you have.

Your current nav and prodcat categories likely make sense to you.

It can be highly profitable to consider if a different organization might make more sense to your users.

1. What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
2. Were you able to complete your task today?
3. If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

Three simple, critical questions to help you start optimizing your site for the outcomes most important to your visitor. The answers allow you to segment your site visitors by their primary purpose, track task completion rate, and understand what your site can do better to help grease the skids instead of getting in the way.

Powerful stuff, but some site owners lack a survey tool to ask these questions. Avinash has recently collaborated with the folks over at iPerceptions to offer 4Q, a free tool to remove that obstacle. Currently in beta, 4Q can help you build and analyze a primary purpose survey for your site. Take a look at the video to see Avinash walk through set up and basic capabilities ( You’ll learn what that 4th question is when you watch).

HighRise is a simple and elegant CRM system from 37signals.

TripIt manages your travel plans.

Tripit creates an integrated itinerary from your air and hotel reservations, along with local sights, weather, and airport check in.

What both apps have in common is how cleverly they use email for input.

With TripIt, you just forward all the emails from the airlines and the hotels to plans@tripit.com. The app does all the data entry drudgery, determining who you are from the sending address, then parsing the email to extract structured travel data from the free text message.

With HiRise, you blind-carbon copy a special drop box, something like dropbox@999999997.rkg.highrisehq.com. Again the app does all the hard work, determining who you are from the dropbox subdomain, parsing the email to determine where to file it it the CRM system, and associating the message with the right people and companies and dates.

Forwarding an email is really simple. Bccing an email is really simple.

If I had to visit the sites to type in my data, I would not use them. But because using them is so easy, I’m now a fan of both.

What initiatives do you have on the table to make your e-commerce site easier to use?

Moderated by Alan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath, the panel consisted of Rebecca Kelley of SEOmoz, Ken Jurina of Epiar, Todd Friesen of Visible Technologies, and myself.

My argument was that providing the searcher what he or she really really wants often also gets the retailer what they really really want: more sales.

Here’s a pdf of my slides — Customer Centric Paid Search.

I also recorded my presentation afterwards. Here is is, in two parts.

Part one

Part two

What A Searcher Really Really Wants
From Your Paid Search Ad

• I want to type 2, 3 or 4 words into Google
• I want to use my own words, not yours
• I want you to handle my typos and misspells
• I want to find your ad on page 1, above fold
• I want ad copy which helps me choose
• I want ad copy which is honest
• I want a landing page which loads quickly
• I want a landing page which lets me do what I want to do me as quickly as possible

Great article by David Case in this month’s FastCompany on the fall of the House Of AOL.

One scary tidbit: rolling big changes to SERP design without testing, and then waiting a fiscal quarter to notice AOL users had revolted. Here’s that section:

Grant zeroed in on the multimedia character of AOL query results: If you searched for “Radiohead,” for instance, you would get not just text articles on the band but also images, video, and links to their songs. Grant saw this differentiation as a weakness — it slowed load time, and the rich results meant that users were less likely to refine their searches, thus delivering below-average page views. He ordered a change to the page, making it look and operate exactly like Google’s. Yet it turned out there were ways in which some users actually preferred the old format. It was certainly different, offering people a reason to go to AOL rather than Google. And the below-average page views could be seen as a sign that users were finding what they wanted the first time through. Also, according to former executives, the old search page actually produced more revenue per search than Google’s.

In any case, changing the page backfired, badly. Search revenue fell to $156 million, from $232 million the previous quarter. As a result, AOL missed its revenue targets. “Management was blindsided by how disruptive the change to search was,” says Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield. “It’s troubling that they didn’t know what the impact of the search change would be. This raises serious concerns about their ability to run the business and turn it around.”

Perhaps a basic split test could have save a few hundred million dollars?

It is sad to see such a great internet pioneer so reduced…

Article link: Dead Man Walking